Fight Back Parents!

An excellent op-ed on the closure issue over at The Urbanist by Robert Cruickshank, a political wonk.  

Based on the experience of other cities with mass school closures, SPS’s plan would also worsen the district’s budget woes, worsen student learning outcomes, cause further enrollment decline, and exacerbate inequities. It could also dissuade families from moving to or staying in Seattle, undermining efforts to add missing middle housing and grow Seattle’s population.

SPS has not shared any financial details showing the costs of closing 20 or more schools, the savings that closures could generate, or when those savings would materialize. As a result, the public is unable to determine whether the closure plan is financially sound.

Nor has SPS properly analyzed why its enrollment has declined. The state legislature ordered the district to conduct a study on why families have left the district, and appropriated $100,000 to fund it. SPS is proceeding with its plans without having received the results of that study.

The district simply assumes enrollment will continue to trend downward, despite the likelihood of significant new housing supply being added to Seattle in the near future. If the district closes 20 schools, they may quickly find themselves in the same situation they did 15 years ago when they had to reopen schools they had just closed, at great cost to their budget and to student well-being. 

As has been pointed out, closing schools doesn't exactly align with the City's new Comp Plan update.  

 

Among his points:

- It’s not just Seattle. Public school districts across Washington State face ongoing deficits, regardless of whether their student populations are rising or falling.

- Jones said in 2023 that closing schools wouldn't be an immediate savings. Ditto for Board President Liza Rankin. Since the majority of SPS’s spending is on staff, savings would only come through mass teacher layoffs. I'll just add there will a modest savings on operation costs for buildings but those buildings will need upkeep and safety.

-  As a result, we do not know precisely why district leaders want to close 20 or more schools. But they are determined to proceed. Nor have they shared any analysis that would show how Seattle could avoid the poor outcomes school closures have caused in other cities.

- At no point has SPS asked the public whether it wants to close schools. In fact, district leaders appear to be deliberately avoiding it.

Closing schools, especially without the consent of the public, will show a lack of trust and faith in the public on the part of the district. It will indicate to families that they should look elsewhere to get their kids educated – and that will cause them to move to the suburbs, which will also be building missing middle housing to welcome these families. This suburban exodus has happened before in Seattle, and is a common feature of life in other metropolitan areas in the U.S.

Closing neighborhood schools that are walkable for families and making students go to a school that is further away ensures more kids will be driven to school, especially if the state legislature continues to refuse to fully fund school bus service. (Editor's note: so the district seems hellbent on going back to three tiers to save money but closing that many schools means busing many more kids to further away schools. There is some irony to the current story on the SPS homepage about biking and walking to school month.)

 

He also does a good job in sussing out the role of the Legislature in all this. 

The underlying problem is that the state legislature has limited the ability of local government to raise the revenues needed to provide basic services, and inflation is exacerbating the crisis. In 2007 the state legislature, with Democratic supermajorities, enacted a 1% property tax cap that had previously been approved by voters in a low turnout election in 2001 but was later on thrown out by the courts.

Then, in response to the McCleary decision that required the state to amply fund its public schools as the state constitution requires, the legislature adopted a new education funding plan in 2017 that many school districts, including Seattle, predicted would actually leave them with less money than before. These predictions have come true, particularly as the legislature added an additional property tax limitation, capping the amount of money school districts can raise for their operations through a local levy. The state legislature has since exacerbated this problem by failing to maintain its funding levels to keep pace with inflation. When adjusted for inflation, state funding for public schools in Washington has actually fallen by about $1 billion in recent years.

 

In the end:

Without those changes at the state level, and without new leadership at the school district that is committed to public education as a universal good that is available to everyone, Seattle may well become a two-tier city. It would be a city in which public education is simply a safety net program for those who are the worst off, and where everyone else is expected to educate their kids by paying out of their own pockets.

The first step to avoiding this outcome is for the public to tell the school board that they do not accept their mass closure plan. Instead, the district must collaborate with the public to develop a range of alternative plans to address the deficit, just as Sound Transit presents alternatives for analyzing a light rail alignment, just as the City of Seattle presented alternatives for the comprehensive plan.