The Seattle Times Actually Does Some Investigating
Vaguely written in the recent Times' story on the rescue of the Washington Middle School Jazz Band program was the notation that a foundation, the Nesholm Foundation, was really, overall, the savior of this program. (Props of course to Quincy Jones for his generosity.)
Either the Times Editorial Board read this blog or read their own story and thought, "That doesn't sound exactly clear" but they wrote this editorial, It Shouldn't Take a Celebrity to Save Jazz in Seattle Schools."
Though Seattle Public Schools has not yet named the total price, the Nesholm Family Foundation committed to funding the entire salary and benefits for one of two jazz teachers at Washington Middle School, saving the program this year. The family will also kick in two-thirds of that cost in 2024-25, and another third in 2025-26, to help keep jazz going.
So this explains a lot of how the money situation will be handled to save WMS jazz. So if the Nesholm Foundation is paying for the first year, you could suppose that the Quincy Jones donation could be used to backfill for years two and three.
But once again, The Seattle Times Editorial Board lets the Seattle School Board have it (which doesn't bode well for Lisa Rivera Smith and a possible endorsement from the Times):
But this game of chicken is no way to run a school district.
One wonders if this kind of 11th-hour rescue was what school board members had in mind when they approved a hefty labor contract last fall, knowing it would create the $131 million budget hole where Seattle’s 50,000 students now teeter: Whip families into such a panic at the prospect of losing a treasured program that some generous soul (or souls) will be compelled to step forward — because that’s exactly what happened.
At bottom, these problems are structural. They stem from a school-funding system tied to student enrollment figures, but bound by salary contracts that operate separately. It is the unenviable job of administrators and board members to design spending plans that align these factors — not to cry wolf and place families in a perennial panic hoping that a guardian angel steps forward.
Rankin even admits the Board knew the teachers contract would help trip the district into debt.
Crying wolf is EXACTLY what SPS excels at. It's interesting that the Board and the district decry PTAs for supporting schools (even as they love those dollars because it helps their bottom line) and yet here comes a foundation doing the same thing and again, the Board and the district love it.
In the same edition of the Times, columnist Danny Westneat speaks about the divide in the city between well-off and poor growing larger. He mentions public schools (bold mine):
In the study, Seattle remained more behaviorally separated post-pandemic than the other cities except for Los Angeles. (Boston and Dallas were also studied.)
I’ve noticed this siloing rising in my own life — especially since my family’s run through Seattle public schools ended during the pandemic. For all their faults, the public schools remain, for my money, the last best mixing mechanism for society (with Garfield High School being tops of all, in my humble opinion). Redoubling support for Seattle’s public schools, and actually attending them, is probably our city’s best hope for not turning into a series of gated communities.
Not all schools in SPS are especially diverse but since the district is majority minority, there are many of them that are. Having diverse populations (and I include not only race but income level) is a good way for kids from all backgrounds to meet and mix.
One of the ironies in this thinking from Westneat is that the SPS jazz bands had become heavily white but parents at Washington Middle School made HUGE outreach efforts for more kinds of kids AND new instruments and it paid off. That means the pipeline to Garfield High School's jazz band would likely also create a more diverse GHS jazz band.
What if Seattle’s rich and poor not only aren’t mixing, but stop seeing one another altogether?
Forget red vs. blue. Just trying to keep Seattle a vestige of “one Seattle,” as the mayor likes to say, is going to be our city’s great challenge of the coming years.
That last sentence? Expand it to "one nation" and Houston, we have a problem.
Comments
Lol lol lol
How’s the Nesholm Foundation and Mr. Jones going to feel when it is announced Washington Middle School is closing?
It is such a joke. It’s the elephant braying LOUDLY in the living room, and nobody thought to mention this?
WMS is half empty. As is next-door over Meany Middle School. So one of them is closing. Although I would think they would preserve Washington since it’s more centrally located, Meany is a shiny new building, so that will probably be the one that stays. Who knows.
Anyway, happy Jazz gets to live another year at WMS, it will enrich students’ experiences, but again, look at the big picture. Since HCC got screwed with, families saw the writing on the wall. Music got messed with, world languages got messed with, and yes, despite TAF, science got messed with. The principal parade there since Halfaker left has been awful. No kidding enrollment at WMS halved from its peak. So, yup, closure is coming. Politics might save it. When really, policy could save it by restoring “learning”. But SPS won’t do that.
Maybe the Nesholm Foundation ought to talk with TAF about effectiveness of their charitable dollars (there’s a reason TAF quit and abandoned the school) or perhaps they can even talk to Stuart Sloan, and his $1 million per year for eight years to TT Minor… district closed that too.
And it is not cool to blame the budget deficit on paying teachers: the problem is that the students are fleeing and have fled, lower enrollment means fewer dollars from Basic Education Allotments from the State, that is what is directly shrinking our budget! So there’s less money to splash around on indirects and overhead. Afterall, teacher FTE directly varies with enrollment: paying teachers well, it’s truly not what is driving this budget catastrophe. It’s such a cheap shot going after the only people in the system who actually are the ones who stand before students, and deliver care, and engage with them daily to support their learning and growth. The problem is non-evidence based teaching and learning shenanigans, or clearly disproven things like discovery math still enmeshed in highschool, etc.
A few years ago, I showed some of the board members that the Cohort survival number between elementary school and middle school, which is always been a very quiet and stable number of about 95%, nose dived significantly, and that was a harbinger of big problems to come. They did nothing. They were hell-bent on tearing education out of the buildings, they failed to realize by doing so, kids would also be leaving the buildings too. Injecting savior dollars into one school for one type of instrumental music is nice, but it is far from a holistic solution. It is neither scalable nor sustainable, and dare I say it, it is absolutely not fair and not equitable (why this building, and these kids, why not a different building, why not a different music type like choir?) and the injection absolutely does nothing to address the systemic problem of why we got to this point of a once mighty middle school sliding into a shadow of its former self.
The point is if we keep talking around the problem and never daylight it, the real problem that slayed enrollment will never be identified and so we will never progress and will never make anything better for any kid in any building. Knee capping well-performing students does nothing for students struggling. Making PTA funding out to be the bogeyman does absolutely nothing for schools that have no PTAs. And blaming District woes on the fact that teachers are getting paid a living wage or better does not solve the problem of a district whose enrollment is falling, because families are making other choices. (in fact, I would argue the opposite, paying teachers exceedingly well might mean we attract the best people which might mean we have the strongest classroom instruction, which might mean we become attractive to families.)
Vote No
WMS lessons
Sad
None the less, Kudos to the Nesholf family. They have been great supporters of SPS.
Lastly, have you seen The Stranger's endorsement of Rankin?! Here is what they had to say:
"As for dealing with the deficit, Rankin wants to start with cuts to administration, but, if need be, she said she’s open to cutting educational programs that do not improve the educational outcomes for Black boys. Cuts suck, but Rankin’s elimination rubric aligns with securing the best basic outcomes for students, even if it means losing out on mock trials and beloved jazz bands. "
Clearly, The Stranger doesn't even know that WMS has/had a focus on black students and Franklin is a very very diverse school. Vote Carlsen.
Meany was recently refurbished and reopened for 850 students. Nearby Mercer is being rebuilt for 1200 students. Washington's building condition is terrible. And those two schools should provide more than enough space for the central area.
The plan to reopen Meany was approved in 2013. In 2017, both Meany and Eaglestaff opened.
Before Meany even opened, it was clear that there was no need to open two middle schools. So this closure round, at least one middle school will be closed. An argument could be made that two middle schools could be closed.
If anyone thinks this donation might save Washington, I would ask you to take a look at TT Minor. TT Minor also had significant outside funding from the Sloan Foundation, but yet it was closed, in a political move to split HCC.
History repeats itself.
- north seattle mom
If so, that's a big story that SPS would not want to tell. Explains the vague SPS messaging so far.
Suspicious
Do it