Seattle Schools to Spend Nearly $14M for New Warehouse
Update 2:
It appears from Mr. Cooley's LinkedIn page that he is a current sub in SPS. When he was last in a school is unknown.
It's interesting because Mr. Cooley's company, Solstice, must have own at least a couple of warehouses, not just the one that the district is buying. The one that SPS is buying sounds decrepit while Cooley and his partner created a "state of the art" growing warehouse in SODO from a 1926 warehouse. The one the district is buying was built in 1960.
end of update
Update: it appears the Board okayed this. But some other interesting info has come to light.
Namely, that until recently, D3 City Council candidate Alex Cooley was listed as the "co-founders" of Solistice, the cannabis company as well as one of the business "governors" of it. He was removed as a governor sometime between early January 2023 and mid-February 2023. It also appears that Mr. Cooley may have also a sub for SPS.
Hmmmm.
end of update
This information finally got posted to the Board agenda for tonight's regularly scheduled board meeting. It is the first Action Item.
The warehouse is at 640 S. Spokane. The district will need to spend $10.6M for the purchase AND $3.5M in costs for hazardous material abatement, moisture treatment, electrical improvements, etc.
The BAR says, "$10.6M" and yet the actual agreement says, "$11.5M." There is one amendment in the agreement that strikes the $11.5M and gets it down to $10.6M. The property is in a liqufaction prone area and has "abandon landfill." Its previous use was "indoor urban agriculture and cannabis processing."
They say it's more cost-effective than leasing and "this purchase will avoid general fund expenses." Well, yes, that's true if you are taking the money out of both BTA IV and BEX V. How much this impacts the actual budget for the renovation of Memorial Stadium isn't clear.
For some weird reason the BAR includes "Equity Analysis" which has near zero to do with this project and its purpose.
Per the agreement, there are several places where "tenants" are mentioned but it's unclear to me if there are actual tenants. But the agreement says, "Purchaser shall be responsible for the payment of (a) all Tenant Inducement Costs (as defined below)...."
And do keep this phrase in mind:
Also, this purchase would reduce future lease payments from the general and capital funds, which will allow the district to allocate the savings to other projects to improve our schools.
The district loves to make these grand statements about how they save money and promise to use the savings for other school projects. But you never see that stated on paper.
Comments
Pardon my reaction, but seriously, they can’t manage to store whatever it is they need to store on the grounds of their gigantic glass palace (JSCEE) (or else where amongst their 99 other properties) that we are all still paying for?
Incompetence.
The glass palace allowed Schmitz Park elementary in West Seattle to grow to 17 portables, and when that school moved to a new different building, I always wanted the glass palace workers to relocate over to Schmitz
Park portable shanty town (let them have to do their work days in a place that they deemed good enough for young children) and sell the glass palace. Think about it, why not?!?
If you’ve ever been to the inner sanctum of the glass palace, you know there is gigantic amounts of space in that building, the internal middle ‘dead space’ on the upper floors, etc.
No, they really don’t need to buy a warehouse. And no, they really don’t need to redo memorial stadium. And yes, they are spending money like drunken sailors, or what I like to say, like drunk, teenage trust fund babies. And none of the spending is going to help a kid in any of their 100 buildings grow intellectually and become a productive citizen, living a great life.
And they’re doing all of this while kids going into grade 6 are denied the opportunity to study algebra even though it doesn’t cost any more to provide it to them, and even though they have tested in by being able to Perform math at the level of a 11th grade student with a B (that was the MAP test cut-off score for entrance).
I guess what I’m saying is I’m really not interested in new ways for these ‘managers’ to spend big chunks of money when they can’t even deliver decent education because they’re too busy sabotaging education and dumbing it down, creating tremendous inequity and wasting minds of talented young people.
As just one expletive, to be in engineering at UW, you must do their first year series of calculus, real calculus, not group work and group quizzes and endless test do-overs; and there’s no way a young person who’s finished SPS pre-calculus is going to be able to cope with UW calculus without a massive amount of backfill and support. Similarly, they would have to take physics and chemistry, and again, there’s simply NO WAY what they’re getting in SPS high schools is going to be able to enable them to succeed. The only way it could happen is if they basically take their first year university as preparatory courses, so that their second year of university essentially becomes their first year of university. That’s my focus, EDUCATION, I want our SPS public schools to be able to provide every child with whatever they need to get to wherever they want to go, and currently SPS are AGGRESSIVELY not doing it. It’s disgusting. Instead, they’re off buying a warehouse.
Pre-Covid, when I still went to board Director meetings, I remember being there with some high school teachers passionately, pleading not to bring in the new biology curriculum, similarly passionately, pleading to ditch, whatever kindergarten cop curriculum was being manhandled into high schools for chemistry. That all fell on deaf ears, and several master teachers just took early retirement, rather than try and feed water down gruel to the students they loved and cherished.
But yeah, buy a new warehouse?
I think not.
Does anyone remotely believe the costs that they put into this bar as being truthful and all encompassing? Of course they’re going be proven to be totally wrong in the time to come. So predictable.
Just look at how the math for the Glass Palace acquisition and reno went deep into a hole.
I’m simply never going to believe that there isn’t anywhere else in their empire that they can store whatever heavy equipment or inventory they need to store in a much more economically efficient way.
VOTE NO
PS
Truthfully, if SPS provided (or at least EARNESTLY tried to provide) the public - all comers - with a great education, I would not be furious with their profligate spending.
What power do we as parents have to say no and stop this type of expenditure? What actions can we take to stop the land swap of memorial stadium that you mention in another writeup? I want to do more than write angry comments here. I agree with everything the to first poster wrote.
Anonymous, unfortunately we now have a hands-off Board. What you could do (and maybe I will) is to get file a lawsuit over the land swap. If it has already been done, it would not work.
What I don't get is how this wouldn't have been public as it is a swap of valuable property and the Board should have signed off. That is, unless this is not considering "spending." If that is true, then I think it is terrible.
The entire majority of the Board needs to go in November.
Just anecdotal of course, but it's clear that a lot of kids are getting what they need.
I"d like for the district and board to have a public conversation acknowledging that they will be putting student materials in a previous owned drug warehouse. I"d like to know about efforts to mitigate contamination.
I wouldn't be comfortable with my kid handling science materials, curriculum and/ or furniture stored in a facility that needs decontamination.
There was an interesting discussion that the Strategic Plan has not decreased academic rigor because standards have not changed. Here is what was lost: A single teacher - especially high school teachers- don't have the bandwidth to effectively differentiate.
This year’s current freshman, depending on their path in high school, they were the last class to get a full year chemistry before Sps scrambled the science pathway and curriculum, and gave a half year chemistry with a half your physics, then biology, then the second half of chemistry and the second half of physics. (some current seniors who were in HCC and middle school will be truly the last class to have the last year of full chemistry before the scramble took root). Then SPS also changed the curriculum as well as the sequence. (Sequence used to be a year of physical science, and then a year of biology, and then a year of chemistry). Concurrent With this scrambling they brought in amplify, which some schools piloted early, my youngest got stuck in that trap because of a principal who was trying to score political brownie points with the glass palace, so I know full well the difference between the previous science curriculum and amplify, and also the difference between the previous ‘intact’ science pathway versus the half-and-half scramble. On top of that, they also changed both chemistry and biology textual materials*, which are truly unbelievably bad. So, kids who are now juniors is the first crop subject to the scramble and the bad materials - so it is how these kids will fare that will prove how bad the SPS science is letting down our kids.
time will tell how many engineering direct admits will be coming from the schools that already have pretty poor average test scores the year after next.
It’s true that Garfield, Ballard, Roosevelt graduates landed in engineering this year, but what about Cleveland, Sealth, Rainier Beach? What is the number say? And more poignantly, how will these two groups of high schools yield to STEM direct admits look like in 2 years, when the ‘new’ chemistry and the ‘new’ biology with the ‘Amplify’ cohort of students will be in their freshman year? How will they fare? I truly can’t imagine.
The difference between curriculum and textual material is often not languished precisely, curriculum is what you’re supposed to be teaching, textual material are the textbooks that you use to teach what you’re supposed to be teaching. So, for example, when amplify was brought in, the curriculum of those science years didn’t change, but the textual material did.
Also, completely buried in the memory hole that the glass palace relies on, the scramble of science was done because of a test. The state was going to bring in, and chemistry really can’t be taught without a full year of algebra, but algebra doesn’t happen until 9th grade, which means Chemistry needed to wait till 10th grade, and that would be too late for students in order to perform on this test, so their solution was to give kids a taste of chemistry, and then circle back to it in a couple years once they had had algebra under their belts, and they maintained the Scrabble, even though the test that drove this reorg ended up being shelved. In other words, they short changed our students because they were either too lazy or too machiavellian.
What does this have to do with the warehouse? Absolutely nothing, but how many people have the institutional memory to know why things are the way they are, or to know how bad they are compared to how they used to be just a few years ago? So I put this out there, so that current parents can understand they’re getting bamboozled big time, even if they don’t have, the reference point to cross compare in the way that I had with our kids.
VOTE NO
NE Parent