More on Seattle Schools' History of Enrollment

 Kellie LaRue wrote a post about Seattle Schools and Option Schools. In this post, she examines the SPS history of enrollment. It is a long read but it may help parents better understand what is happening today.

"How Many Students Go Into A School?

This is more of a question for philosophy majors than educators. The simple answer is “it depends.”  However, “it depends” is not actionable. So SPS routinely find themselves in a quandary where they make recommendations but never daylight the dependencies.

TL/DR version
The actual answer is long, pedantic and quite bureaucratic. The short answer is over -implified and lacks nuance. Here is the shortest answer that I can give.

The majority of school districts have a handful of elementary schools, 1-2 middle schools and 1-2 high schools and maybe 1-2 unique programs. That’s it. It is a straightforward process to assign students.

Seattle Public Schools is a NETWORK of schools, with more than 100 school buildings and programs and to understand anything about SPS enrollment, you must consider the network effects of any decision.

Most parents have an intuitive sense of the network effect. However, SPS behaves as they are just a jumbo-sized school district and routinely disregard the impact of the network effects.

Onto the longer history, more details and an explanation of why the “staffing capacity” policy causes enrollment decline.


The Pedantic Mechanics

 How many students fit into a school is a function of:

• The physical facilities 
• Program placement
• Enrollment policies 
• Student-Teacher ratios aka class sizes

The class size is rather obvious. The State of Washington could suddenly decided that a 16:1 funding ratio is a great idea. It would be impossible to put students into buildings without adding hundreds of new facilities. Likewise, if the funding ratio was suddenly 50:1 there would be hundreds of empty buildings.

Likewise, buildings are fairly fixed. They have a certain number of rooms. You can add portables and remodel spaces.  That last process takes time and is fairly transparent as it requires capital dollars to change the facility.


The Old Assignment Plan    

Once upon a time, most families knew exactly what a school building’s “official” capacity was.  

The old assignment plan was a 100% choice plan. This mean that all families needed to fill out an application to be placed at a school. Once the school was full, students were placed on a waitlist and assigned to another school. If none of the schools on your list had “space,” you would be assigned to a school that had space. 
Families were painfully aware of the magic enrollment number. This was long ago so I don’t remember all of the magic numbers, but they were incredibly transparent.

For example, Eckstein Middle School was always the school with the longest waitlist. This was both because it was a “good school” and because it was the closest geographic school for almost 1300 students.

Under the choice plan, general enrollment was set at 1050, so that there were 350 students in each grade level, for a total of 1050.  And student 1051 went on the waitlist.  That made for a very optimal and stable learning environment.

These numbers were so stable that if you are able to find enrollment reports from the early 00’s you will see incredible year-over-year consistency across enrollment for any school with a waitlist. 

The number was the number was the number and downtown would not enroll one student above that number.


The Pesky Network Effect

 The “network of schools” effect is very poorly understood in both Seattle and Washington State. Many large urban schools will routinely use the word network when describing enrollment and schools.

In a 100% choice system with capped enrollment at “full” schools, it is challenging to grow total enrollment.  If you didn’t get into your nearby school because of the enrollment cap, you got assigned another school in the network.  For example, in the last few years of the choice assignment plan, only Rainier Beach High School technically had “space” and any family who moved to Seattle over the summer, would be assigned to Rainier Beach, even if that family lived at the northern most point in Seattle. (There were multiple Seattle Times articles about this in the ‘00s.)

There was a lot frustration when families were unable to access either a nearby school or a choice school. This frustration will generally cause families that are unable to access either a nearby school or their desired school, to “make other choices.” Hence the challenge with growing total enrollment.

This frustration is what led Queen Anne/Magnolia families to sue the district and caused the pressure to adopt the current attendance area-based assignment plan with a guaranteed nearby school and the option of an alternative school within your region.

You could see the beginnings of capacity-related strain in the early 2000’s as overall growth in Seattle exploded.  By the year 2000, there were already a handful of school deserts for elementary schools and every year the board would vote on “exceptions” to the Student Assignment Plan.

For example, families who lived in Portage Bay were “guaranteed” an assignment at Bryant Elementary as there was no closer school.  TOPS was the first option school that set aside seats for families in Lake Union as there was no other nearby schools with space. There were dozens of these small exceptions for areas that covered very small micro-neighborhoods and a handful of families.

The Board abandoned making these exceptions in the process of trying to close schools. By the ’06-07 round of closures, the underlying pressure on enrollment was extreme. This is why closing schools was so much harder in reality, than it was on paper. 
The simple truth is that by the ’06-07 closure rounds, portables were being placed at the multiple elementary schools to handle growth. And yet, downtown administration was still myopically focused on closing schools. By the 08-09 closure round, there were even more portable classrooms and the historic enrollment caps were removed.  

But again, since nobody in administration understood the network effect, school closures were the name of the game and evidence of growth was casually dismissed by staff and the board in favor of “declining enrollment projections.”

(That was exhausting to write and even more exhausting to live through.)


Enter the New Student Assignment Plan (2010)

 If you have slogged through this so far, here is a quick recap:

During a decade of closing schools, Seattle has explosive growth.
Deflected enrollment due to capacity limits.
A decade of enrollment projection that predict nothing by declining enrollment.

So in walks the New Student Assignment Plan. And bam! Explosive growth in schools.

SPS needed to open 5 new schools just to draw boundaries for the NSAP and in year one, dozens of schools are dramatically over-enrolled.

For those following closely, I bet you can easily guess the new approximate enrollment. The new enrollment looked almost exactly like the old enrollment plus the wait list.

For example, Eckstein Middle School had that lovely historic number of 1050, plus a 200-300 student waitlist. The school swiftly had over 1200 students.

Why? Because the waitlist was the real world indicator of the demand for a school. And once there was a “guaranteed” for enrollment and the artificial caps were removed, enrollment exploded. 

Enrollment grew so much that just 4 years later, we had “Growth Boundaries” and multiple brand-new schools opening.


Quick Summary

 Artificial enrollment caps cause enrollment to decline. Removing those caps, causes enrollment to grow. And nobody in enrollment understands the network effect, so the reality that is obvious to the majority of families is lost on those at JSCEE.

Back to the point.


The Mysterious Staffing Capacity Origins

By about 2016, we see multiple years of record growth. Almost everyone downtown who understood the old plan has retired or moved on. Larry Nyland is the new superintendent.

All the enrollment growth has brought a lot of new money with it and downtown headcount and special projects has grown with it. Traci Libros, the long-time head of enrollment, has departed and there are a lot of new people.



The best way I can describe it is that all these folks looked at all the weird and anomalous compromise in the NSAP and said “What???”  These were folks with backgrounds in small districts that really thought Seattle was a just a larger version of what they knew and all these “options” were confusing.

As is the way of things, every time “something” didn’t work, it was blamed on choices and options, rather than inability of anyone on the payroll to project enrollment accurately. So we get this new policy called “staffing capacity”.

Street Level Bureaucracy

It is important to note that all of the big changes I have described were voted on by the Board. The changes were vetted with multiple community meetings. Every one of those changes was made with a lot of daylight. But the change to staffing capacity was done in the dark.

Policies are generally made in a glass house somewhere and those policies need to be enacted by the folks who “do the work”. This term is generally used to describe how nurses will implement hospital policies or how police officers will implement police policies. In education, it generally means how teachers will enact a policy in their classroom.

Street-level bureaucracy can also describe the process where the budget folks implement board policies.

Nobody ever voted on “Staffing Capacity”. This was a decision made entirely by staff.


What is Staffing Capacity?
Staffing Capacity is a word invented by staff to describe the process by which those at JSCEE refuse to assign students to their chosen school, even when there is more than enough physical space for that student to attend. This is implemented by refusing to assign staff to a building and then claiming there is no “capacity” for the student because there is no teacher.

Cleveland High School was the first school to really feel this effect.

When Cleveland High School was converted to an option high school, the intention was to hopefully get the FRL percentage to shift from 90% to 60%. Rainier Beach was 90% FRL and Franklin was 60% FRL. The south end of town is an incredibly diverse community. Many students were going out of district to Mercer Island and Bellevue and the hope was that the STEM-focused option school would encourage more middle class families to give it a try. It was working for quite a while and Cleveland’s enrollment grew.

Someone decided this was not fair and Cleveland was siphoning students from Rainier Beach. So capacity was limited at Cleveland to support Rainier Beach. This was next applied to The Center School. It was decided that The Center School was also siphoning students from Rainier Beach and the waitlist at Center School stopped moving as soon as a student from the Rainier Beach area would have been admitted.

I testified about this practice multiple times in 2018 and staff vigorously asserted that it was necessary to limit enrollment at option schools to protect Rainier Beach. This policy was eventually expanded to cover all option schools.



History Repeats Itself

 
There isn’t anyone on district staff who understand that artificial enrollment caps cause families to make other choices that will eventually see all enrollment to decline.

This problem might have been daylighted years ago, but the pandemic happened, and this policy gained strength.  

So here we are. 

We have a district that artificially caps enrollment at schools that would otherwise be full, by simply refusing to assign either staff or students to that building. This has been going on for a few years. 

So now those option schools have had their enrollment “strangled” and are on the chopping block.