Seattle Schools' Potential Closure and Consolidation Timeline

This post is a comment that came in on my previous post that yes, SPS is going to close/consolidate schools. It comes from Kellie LaRue, a long-time parent in the district who 1) has a fantastic memory and 2) knows how to read a spreadsheet (and the tea leaves). I concur with her thoughts here, some that are based on Washington State law and others are conjecture from her past experience. (I will put some key items in bold.) 

I do want to include the legally required Board policy on closures as well as the Washington State RCW on school closures.  One key part of the Board policy states:

In the event exigent circumstances make adherence to the above policy infeasible,
the Board of Directors may so declare and make a school closure(s) decision
following a process consistent only with the minimum requirements of RCW
28A.335.020.

What are the minimum requirements?

The policy adopted shall provide for reasonable notice to the residents affected by the proposed school closure. At a minimum, the notice of any hearing pertaining to a proposed school closure shall contain the date, time, place, and purpose of the hearing. Notice of each hearing shall be published once each week for two consecutive weeks in a newspaper of general circulation in the area where the school, subject to closure, is located. The last notice of hearing shall be published not later than seven days immediately before the final hearing.

Kellie's Thoughts

Hello and welcome to all the new people facing their first round of school closures.

Here is a few more details to add to the timeline that Mel started. The timeline announced by SPS makes it sound like there is a lot of space and process and opportunity for community feedback. However, once you break down the logistics, this is a very tight timeline and a lot of moving parts to juggle.

There are State of Washington regulations that lay out a variety of minimum requirements for school closures. For new people, the most important detail is that the legally required vote by the school board has to be scheduled for November 2023, about 9 months from now.

Why this date? This is an election year and four board members will be elected in early November and installed by the end of November. Depending on how the election goes, this means that a potential majority of the board could be brand new. (Editor's note; new board members would be sworn in right after Thanksgiving and it's usually early December. No one on the current Board pushed back on the idea of closures at the Work Session on the Budget a couple of weeks ago so new Board members might present a problem for the Superintendent and staff's plan.)

School closures are polarizing to communities. This means there is a significant risk where 4 new board members, who are opposed to closures could be installed and stop everything. Therefore, for this plan to work, all legal requirements must be COMPLETED with the current board or the process essentially restarts afresh.

In the 2000's there were three rounds of school closures and the election cycle drove much of that timeline. Election years were essentially an "off-year" where the process rebooted.

The current financial issues are significant and the enrollment declines are substantial enough that I suspect that this process will be very different from the 2000's closures round. In that process, faulty enrollment projections, projected that the district enrollment would decline for a least another decade and that therefore school closures were a financially prudent decision. (Editor's note: I was on that committee and I have always said we were not given all the information we needed and yes, some of it was flawed.)

These faulty enrollment projections were then compared to a significantly more flawed facilities analysis that grossly over estimated the amount of space for students by almost 10,000 seats. When you put those two numbers together, it appeared that SPS was drowning in extra space and that closures would be a fiscally responsible move to improve students outcomes and resources.

This round is going to be very different. If the presented budget data is correct (always an open question. SPS is terrible with some basic math). This one may be fiscally necessary to address a current problem, rather than a projected-potential-future-problem.

Based on history and the legal constraints, the most likely timeline is:


Spring 2023 - some community meetings with vague information and a lot of buzzwords. Lots of emphasis on how this is really, really important and to "trust the process" and we are "gathering feedback."

Summer 2023
- lots of quiet and stealthy planning

September 2023 - A few community meetings to present, the plan, from which there will be minimal deviations. There will be minimal deviations because there is a legal requirement for public meetings with various notifications to be held at each impacted building. By this point, any "new solutions" will not be considered due to the timeline and constraints.

October 2023 - The final plan will be presented to the board for their review. There will be some opportunities for the board directors to make some amendments but cue the dramatic music of "schools must be closed or a great doom will happen" followed by the dramatic silence.

November 2023
- early November, the local school board election. Followed by the "lame duck" board meeting with outgoing board members and the vote to approve the plan. End of November, new board is installed.


Obviously, this is all speculation on my part, I haven't seen any plans. That said, the constraints of the election cycle, state legal notification requirements and board voting timelines are all public information and unlikely to change in any meaningful manner.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Years of being fed BS by the SPS central administration has made me very reluctant to put up with any suggested school closure, let alone mine, without a fight. I do not doubt there is a budget shortfall. I do not doubt there is declining enrollment. I am, however, completely unwilling to take one for the team until I see central offices doing the same. And vague mutterings of "Yes, yes, we cut back too" will be met with a very high degree of skepticism. I want to see them tightening their belts, or you can bet I will be a part of that angry audience at those public hearings.

-schools not beurocrats
Stuart J said…
I think a difference from 20 years ago is the growth of Running Start enrollment. When high schools are planning capacity, usually they use Headcount. However, FTE also needs to be considered because it can end up being very different for 11/12. And it is not just the FTE number, but the makeup of that number. If a student is taking full time Running Start, and then one class at the high school, they will count as a .16FTE. But if that one class is band, choir or orchestra, then the space needed for that student is "not much." If they are taking a regular class, then the space need is more important.

I don't know if planning will get that granular. But, I think the biggest exit of students has been to Running Start, not to charters or private schools. It may also depend on the neighborhood. Some schools are much closer to a community college than others. A while ago, someone mentioned how easy it will be to get to North Seattle CC by light rail, as it already is easy to get to Seattle Central. Some kids and some schools will be more impacted by this than others.

As to private or charter schools, note that Seattle Lutheran closed, and most private high schools don't have space or want to add capacity. I heard Holy Names is now running buses to areas they had not done so previously, namely Renton. The Downtown School, run by Lakeside, seems to have a very limited curriculum and my sense was they were still accepting applications after their official deadline, even though their price is about half of Lakeside, U Prep, SAAS, the Northwest School and Bush, and comparable to the parochial high schools.

All in all, this situation is pretty sad. I live out of district. A few years ago, I did check out some options in Seattle for high school. I liked a lot of what I saw. But West Seattle, Garfield, Chief Sealth, Cleveland and Franklin at the time would not accept any out of district students. I do know one family who rented an apartment in West Seattle so the child could go to West Seattle HS. I absolutely think most of the opportunities at Seattle high schools are better than the opportunities currently in most of the Highline schools. Renton has trimesters, and that's not going too well from what I hear. If Seattle wanted to open up and pull in high school students from out of district I bet they could do so for kids coming from the south part of King County.
Zella917 said…
I’ve never been so glad that my last kid in SPS is a senior. And I feel sorry for those with younger kids who have to go through this painful process yet again :(
Anonymous said…
Thanks for this. Absolutely the Board needs to eliminate the the PR puffery FTE in Central Admin, but that’s not going to close a budget gap this big. But it is madness to keep 100 schools open for 48,000 students (and shrinking). The Board is elected to make hard decisions like this and it’s past time they did their job.

Essential Duty
Anonymous said…
Being naive and new to school closures, can someone explain why they’re so awful? Why is it so upsetting?

Newbie
Anonymous said…
Many people at the central office are now working from home since the pandemic. Why not get rid of that behemoth first?

Also, does SPS ever have real accountants scour the budget down to the details? There is so, so much waste. People on medical leave for 8+ months due to an injury at school, programs with 3 students, IAs who have days when they do not work with students (why are IAs working the week of Thanksgiving in elementary schools, when there are no students to work with?). So much waste.

Anonymous said…
Newbie

People complain about schools at a systems level, but dang if they aren’t attached to their neighborhood schools which are intact little communities. People have made big life choices - bought/rented a house - to go to those schools. It’s also some big upheaval to change commuting patterns. There was a proposed district redraw in 2014 when we had the opposite problem, crowding, and that went down like a lead balloon. It’s a no-win situation for someone looking to get re-elected.

Oldie
Anonymous said…
Since it seems the closures will all be elementary schools, I was relieved because my kids will be on to middle and high schools by the time closures happen. But of course there will be boundary line changes, plenty of them, and those could impact middle and high schools too. Does anyone have insight about the likelihood of that happening?

northender
Newbie, I'm going to assume you have children. So first, kids get very attached to routine and consistency. When you tell them that their school is dissolving and they will go to another building with a different principal, custodians, lunch workers, etc., it can be very jarring for them.

Most schools are a part of any given neighborhood. It's where you can rent space for a meeting if you are an adult. It's where your kids go to school if you have school-aged kids. To close that building can cast a shadow over a neighborhood.

And, if past issues are any indicated, the district does not watch over the closed buildings. When Viewlands was closed, thieves came in and stripped out all the valuable copper wiring.
Northender, I will say what I always do when asked "will this affect XYZ? Most of the time, if you have a district-wide plan, it will ripple out to all corners. It's hard to say what it will be but that generally happens.

Keep in mind, Superintendent Jones is claiming that staff know "80% of outcomes" so that's pretty large. His point was that there are always "unknown unknowns."

What might be good is if a document was generated and posted that NAMED that 80% of possible issues.

Write to the Board and ask that THEY ask for this (and no one did at the Work Session that I am aware of).

spsdirectors@seattleschools.org
kellie said…
@ Newbie,

There are so many reasons why school closures are awful. This is a partial and incomplete list.

Every school has someone that loves it. Schools are not just buildings, they are teaching and learning communities.

Administrators forget that fact very quickly and tend to treat the process like a sterile academic exercise.

Even under the best of circumstance with well managed and thoughtful processes, it is incredibly painful. Even when it is necessary and appropriate to close schools, those students need to go "somewhere." Likewise with teachers, administrators and all the other building staff. - The adults need to find new jobs and the students need to find a new school. The displacement is painful and chaotic at a minimum.

The ensuing game of musical chairs often means that teaching and building staff don't find a new job or leave the district. Likewise, with families. It is an unfortunate irony, that school closures are often triggered by enrollment drops, but the process of the closure causes even more enrollment drops.

During the closures of the 2000's this process was blunted by the simple fact that Seattle was one of the top 10 fastest growing cities in the US during all the closure rounds. Community members routinely presented compelling evidence that talking about closures was causing enrollment drops, to no avail.

Finally on my short list here is SPS's long history of pitting school communities against each other. During a closure process the figure pointing is inevitable. How do you decide which school to close? Building condition? Test scores? Enrollment? There are multiple valid criteria and once a school is targeted, it is only natural for that community to point to a different criteria.
kellie said…
@ northender,

It is not safe to assume that closures will be elementary focused for a bunch of reasons. It is also not safe to assume there are any safe pockets during a closure process.

Because of basic logistical constraints, closures tend to focus on "small" or "smaller" schools. This is because the currently enrolled students in a closed school need to be placed somewhere, after they have been displaced. The lower the enrollment, the simpler this process. Because of this elementary schools get a lot more attention than larger schools. It is just less work for downtown.

This same logic applies to non-geographic schools, (aka option schools, advanced learning, etc.) If you close a non-geographic school, you have multiple attendance area schools across which you can assign these displaced students. During the last round, advance learning schools and alternative schools were heavily targeted for these logistical reason. This time, those schools may be targeted for both logistical and political reasons.

As for middle schools, there is a lot of middle school capacity between the various K8 schools and the comprehensive middle schools. It is anyone's guess what downtown's plans will be. But shrinking middle school capacity will have a lot of ripple effects.

There is the middle school feeder zone problem. At the moment, at least SPS is committed to batching elementary school to feed to a single middle school. That plan has already created some bizarre assignment patterns. Once your start closing a few elementary schools, then the entire middle school process is anyone's guess. I can easily see a few scenarios in which an elementary school is considered for closure, not because of building condition or enrollment but simply because of the feeder pattern. That will get ugly quickly.

And finally high school. Closing a comprehensive high school is a logistical nightmare and one SPS is likely to shy away from (especially as there is not a lot of excess high capacity at this time). SPS could easily just decide to end the HCC pathways to Lincoln and Garfield which would trigger an entire citywide boundary redraw.

This is gonna get messy fast. This is a very short timeline for all these moving parts.

kellie said…
"schools not beurocrats" makes a great point regarding the "take one for the team" philosophy.

The currency of school closures is trust. For a school district like Bellevue, there is an overall high degree of trust in a well run and thoughtful district. It is not perfect, nothing is. The Bellevue closure process is still going to be painful, for all the reasons already noted, but there is trust in the bank for that district.

There is none of that in SPS. Even if you stick to the single topic of capacity management, there is not enough trust in the system for any reasonable person to believe that SPS needs to close schools, while BEX V is rolling out fresh capacity.

And before this has all started, SPS has already broken trust with the community. News of closures started from a slide at a budget meeting. Bellevue had the decency to make a press release.

Even the timeline I posted here is all conjecture. This is not a great start.
Historian said…
It is great to hear Kelly's voice! She can be counted on to provide critical analysis of district numbers etc.
Anonymous said…
It is important for people to read this article in today's Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/to-save-money-seattle-may-need-to-close-some-schools/

The headline is misleading. The article makes it very clear the push to close schools is not happening due to a need to save money, and it's not even happening because of declining enrollment. Fred Podesta says that the district should do this even if it didn't save money, and he further said the schools that would close would not necessarily be the ones with the lowest enrollment.

When it comes to the numbers, the article states the following:

SPS deficit for 2023-24: $131M
SPS deficit for 2024-25 $92M (this is when the closures would happen)
Estimated savings from closing schools: $28M

So closing schools will not by itself solve the district's financial woes. It could even make them worse by driving more families to leave SPS due to the effects of the closures.

Finally, Brent Jones admits they would not sell off closed buildings but would "repurpose them." That, to me, gives a lot of credence to Melissa's long-held theory that SPS want to become a charter school authorizer and give them space in SPS-owned buildings.

I firmly believe we should oppose this entire process, insist on no school closures, elect a board in November that will stop closures from happening, and push the legislature now to fully fund public schools here and across the state.

Robert Cruickshank
Anonymous said…
Robert, we HAVE been pushing the legislature. They don’t care. So closures solve 20% of the problem, maybe cuts to central admin another 20%, transportation efficiencies can shore up a bit more, etc etc. You know very well that public agencies cannot pass a budget in deficit, and a state takeover is a possibility. Would we rather the state assume control of a district in total chaos, or SPS take a cue from Bellevue and other districts to scale their operations to reality? Schools are closing whether the district does it or the state, might as well have some control over the process.

SMDH
Anonymous said…
They use the racial equity tool and strategic focus on Black boys and teens for resource allocation. That’s the lens that’s going to choose which schools close.

The End
Anonymous said…
This couldn't happen to a more deserving city.

blabla
Anonymous said…
SMDH, I do not want to spend my time managing decline. I do not want my kids to have to scale back their ambitions because the legislature doesn't care about their education. I would rather push the legislature to act now than stand aside and enable SPS to gut the school district. We all know that closing a bunch of schools will just accelerate flight from the district, particularly since closing schools will still leave a $60M deficit that will be made up by further staffing cuts.

The end result of a process of school closures will be larger class sizes in larger school buildings with fewer services and programs. Nothing good is going to come from this process. So let's push the legislature to act, and one can do so easily and quickly at this link: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/pass-a-wealth-tax-and-scrap-the-cap/

Robert Cruickshank
Anonymous said…
Robert says> "So let's push the legislature to act, and one can do so easily and quickly at this link"

No Robert, let's not. (insert eyeroll emoji) The legislature has already fully funded education, increased spending, and provided ample provisions for education. And what has been done with the money, the unprecedented increase? It has triple or quadrupled its administration. It has reduced the scope of the focus to African American males only, that is, around 3% of the constituents in Seattle and around 7% of the district students in SPS. There's no amount of funding increase that would satisfy their noble ambitions - which is free from any scrutiny or question. Stoke the flames of the culture wars. Predictably SPS has lost a huge number of students who are disenfranchised from mission. Since it hasn't lost its "focus" population, SPS has not a care in the world about the source of the student loss. It musta been a demographic shift or those darn northend racists. Until SPS can claim that it favors and actually truly values broad public participation, we can't just throw money at this issue indefinitely. Until SPS will willingly dedicate itself to support in the classroom above justice warrioring in the central office, and fund its efforts accordingly - they can in no way be trusted with a broad "wealth tax" that would just be another boondoggle feeding the self serving central office which has thus far produced no observable results. When will

It End




Anonymous said…
Melissa,

Great statement in the Stranger comment section. Hope is not a strategy. Manage the decline, or someone else will do it for you. Voting out unpaid volunteer board members who are likely also experiencing harassment in this political environment is a hollow threat. Nobody wants the job to do the hard things.

Adulting
Adulting, at this point I think it's easier to be a school board member than a city council member. Of course, we haven't really gotten into the C&C process yet so let's see.

I recall when I was on the C&C committee, there were parents shouting for the district to "bring out the committee members" and we were standing right there. Plus a couple of them who followed me to my car uttering vague threats.

No, it isn't easy being an unpaid volunteer but it always seems some people put their hands up. What would be sad is if there aren't challengers to those incumbents who run because a couple of them need to go.
Anonymous said…
Remember that under the McCleary formula Seattle only gets to keep something like 75% of the property taxes generated in our city. The rest is spread throughout the state in lower tax dense areas. I agree that there is a great deal of inefficiency and waste and a real lack of excellence and the resulting innovation that could come from that focus. However, Seattle taxpayers are getting fleeced by this continual reliance on property taxation.

Theo M.
Anonymous said…
Theo M. As I recall, Seattle got a little hosed on the COL assigned vs say Bellevue. It was a long time ago, but I think it had something to do with the % of FRL kids in the district, which is artificially low due to the number of kids we have in private schools. But limiting the level was 100% intentional and was to help balance equity across the state where many places can't raise money via levies. There's never enough money, but in a district where people are so up in arms about wealthier schools raising more money vs lower income schools, it's always funny to watch all of the advocacy about doing the same thing vs lower income districts across the state.

NE Parent
@NE Parent said…


"There's never enough money, but in a district where people are so up in arms about wealthier schools raising more money vs lower income schools, it's always funny to watch all of the advocacy about doing the same thing vs lower income districts across the state."

I couldn't agree with you more.

Anonymous said…
@NE Parent, I’ve always chuckled at the cognitive dissonance of SPS when it came to statewide equity.

I’ve seen how little some high schools offer in poor areas outside King - veritable academic deserts.

I bet those small rural districts used the money much wiser than Seattle’s billion plus behemoth.

Eastsider

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