Four Seattle Schools Named for Closure
From KUOW:
In his latest school closure plan, Superintendent Brent Jones announced Thursday he will recommend North Beach, Sacajawea, Sanislo, and Stevens elementary schools for closure.
As I noted in my post on BEX VI, the district had already spent $500K from BEX V on pre-planning for a Sacajwea renovation.
Sympathies to all those schools named. I note that there are no SE or QueenAnne/Magnolia schools named. So the schools are in the NE, NW, Central and SW.
Jones acknowledged the changes are difficult. He said the district used factors like building conditions and space to choose which schools to close, and prioritized minimizing disruption to students and families.
As part of that goal, students at each respective school will stay together and consolidate into other nearby schools. Under the plan:
- North Beach students would move to Viewlands Elementary;
- Sacajawea students would move to John Rogers Elementary;
- Sanislo students would move to Highland Park Elementary;
- And Stevens students would move to Montlake Elementary.
Going forward
Each impacted school will get its own transition team “to ensure a smooth and supportive process for everyone involved,” Jones said.
He also pledged a “thoughtful and transparent process” going forward. Starting next week, the district will hold engagement sessions at each impacted school through Nov. 21.
There will also be a districtwide engagement session at 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 14.
Still Not There
Since scaling back the number of school closures, Jones has said the district will need other belt-tightening measures to address the budget deficit, including about $30 million of internal cuts. Jones said that will include staff reductions and adding a third bell time to reduce transportation costs.
Jones has also said he’ll seek an additional $40 million from the state to fund things like special education, transportation, and operational costs. He also said he’ll ask for “greater flexibility” to repay a loan the district took against itself last year.
The district borrowed $30 million from its capital fund, normally used for building construction and maintenance, to fill last year’s $105 million shortfall. The district was supposed to start repaying it, with interest, as part of next year’s budget.
Comments
I was on the BEX V planning committee and the plan at that time was that the extra space was needed for pre-school and before and after care and that boundaries would need to be redrawn to best utilize that space.
This plan skips the hard work of updating boundaries and places the burden on filling that new buildings on families and teachers.
Viewlands, John Rogers and Montlake need more students to fill the pretty new buildings. This could be done with magnet programs or new boundaries. A language immersion program would fill very swiftly.
This plan does not address Alki in West Seattle that will also need to be filled.
While consolidations are better than closures, consolidations need to planned in advance, not as a reaction after the fact, to a plan that was enacted SIX years ago. The boundaries for the new Viewlands are absurd. Had there been a plan, there could have been a more sustainable outcome.
First, the SY23-24 enrollment figures per OSPI reporting, then # of teachers, then student/teacher ratio:
- North Beach = 367 / 23 / 16.0
- Sacajawea = 229 / 20 / 11.5
- Sanislo = 171 / 15 / 11.4
- Stevens = 152 / 13 / 11.7
- Bryant Elementary = 482 / 26 / 18.5 (A non-closure and high demand neighborhood school for comparison)
If we assume all the students are retained and then adjust the number of teachers to equal the same student:teacher ratio as at Bryant (18), then the district will only need 54 instructors of the 71 currently employed. Going to the salary data available, sorting by years of experience and then removing the 17 least experienced teachers yields a total cost savings (salary + insurance + benefits) of ~$1.79M.
Next, we move on to the non-teaching staffing at these 4 schools. Presumably the principals will be redundant along with essentially all the other office, clerical and other support personnel. The one category I believe will be retained almost entirely is that of “Aide”. In part this is due what I have read about the special ed student percentages at one of the schools (Sacajawea) and the aides likely being a necessity for those IEPs. But also because the aides are comparatively cheaper. At any rate, assuming the district will find all the non-instructional personnel “redundant” yields a further total cost savings of ~$2.57M.
Bottom line: potential total cost savings on personnel of ~$4.37M by closing these four schools, declaring essentially all non-instructional staff redundant and bringing the student:teacher ratio in line with a standard like Bryant. This obviously ignores a lot of operational things like needing security to keep buildings from being stripped of wiring, not needing to pay for things like trash removal, also potentially having higher transportation costs, etc. It will be interesting to see what kind of savings SPS projects and then how much SEA fights to keep all those teachers.
- Just Some Commenter Everyman
Since the district staffs schools by WSS, the number of teachers is purely ratio driven, resulting in split classes and ratios that may look different, but are only different by special ed or mix of grades. The only savings come from eliminating the extra principal/admin staff.
NE Parent
At the core, all of this chaos is being driven by poor district planning decisions. Not only have elementary schools have been overbuilt in the past 5 years, but the capacity has often been placed in difficult to access spaces while many buildings have been woefully poorly maintained. Now we're at a point where they're making decisions based on building need (Sacajawea is falling apart) and not logical population distribution (Cedar Park makes far more sense geographically to fold into Rogers, the boundaries around Viewlands are ridiculous). At the same time, they are stubbornly moving forward on nonsensical rebuilds like Alki and Rainier Beach (expect to see consolidations there in the next year or two) and BEX VI planning looks to be adding to the mess.
NE Parent
I'm in no way claiming that the $4.37M represents the actual savings that will be realized by the district. I realistically consider that value to be more of a maximum value for the reasons you and I both mentioned (transportation, mothballing, etc.) That said, I think there will almost certainly be teachers let go somewhere as a result of this just because the majority of students are not special ed and will get rolled into classes at the new schools. How many of course, is TBD.
Also, that maximum savings value expects SPS to retain all the "aides" which is something of a vague category in the salary data but I'm assuming impact the staffing requirements for special ed populations. I didn't include it in my original comment but in SY23-24 North Beach had/has 11 aides, Sacajawea has 13, Sanislo has 7 and Stevens has 5. All told, these 36 aides had a total cost of $2.84M. But again, I assume that SPS will retain ALL of these personnel. Given that Sacajawea has that higher special ed population, its high ratio of aides per student makes that a reasonable guess.
- Just Some Commenter Everyman
Thank you for doing back-of-the-envelope math on school closures. I don't think JSCEE and the board are interested in the actual savings.
Did your closure math bake in the added cost of an assistant principal at the enlarged schools?
I wish your closure math also included a variable for lost dollars from families that will send their children to private school instead of to the relocated public school. The board and JSCEE will consider the defection of (privileged!) families to be addition by subtraction, even as the lost state dollars further the downward spiral.
Should the closure math also include the $150 million expense for a new elementary school that Melissa recently reported is baked into BEX VI?
It’s a genuine question. If they intend to close Laurelhurst (on both of the original closure lists) and put a new building on the larger Sand Point Elementary property merely so they can reach their 500 student target, then that $150 million should be added as an optional expense. (But if they don’t build a new school, then some of that $150 million should go toward deferred maintenance at LH.) The same holds for North Beach and Sacajawea, and probably others – I simply happen to be most familiar with LH.
Speaking of deferred maintenance, I love how the district allows certain schools to rot like pumpkins on the porch months after Halloween, and then uses building condition as justification for closure, while erecting huge, costly buildings so they can offer preschool *which isn't even their mandate and for which they receive no state dollars.*
JSCEE and the school board don’t sincerely care about the math of closures. Public schools face financial problems that are unsolvable without structural change from Olympia. This crisis provides an opportunity for them to pursue goals unrelated to cost savings. Anyone who dares to examine the cost of the emperor’s clothing will be tarred as “privileged.” Later JSCEE and the board alumni will shrug and insincerely bleat, "hey, we tried."
-Back Of The Envelope