Why is Seattle Schools Seemingly Dragging Its Feet On School Closures?
There are several stories I do want to get to but I have two questions for my readers and I am truly interested in your viewpoint. I'm going to do a separate post for each.
One, why do you think the Superintendent and staff are dragging their feet until the end of October to announce the five schools they believe should close?
And, secondarily, why is the Board okay with this?
My take is that the Superintendent and staff are continuing to run out the clock. So rather than announcing them sooner, they want to push it as much as possible to the end of the year.
Keep in mind that the Superintendent promised the Board, before the end of school year 2023-2024, that sure, they could have some meetings over the summer. Didn't happen. Then, after the preliminary list was announced, the Board again asked about public input and Jones said something about "workshops." Didn't happen.
Of course, that means any kind of community pushback for the five schools selected will be limited, probably to the single hearing legally mandated for each.
As I said previously, I'm not sure the district can legally get a final vote out of the Board before the end of the year but even if it's legal, how fair is it?
I saw elsewhere that parents are saying if your school was on the original list but now won't be on the five-school list, that NO ONE should give up on advocating for other schools. Because again, it will NOT be just five.
But maybe if the Superintendent and staff are being extra careful and taking extra time, learning from other districts' mistakes, and having a well-fleshed out transition for schools to be closed, maybe it will be less painful overall.
I also want to let you see what is happening in Chicago Public Schools which is the nation's largest school district. Their enrollment has been steadily dropping and here's how their ideas for closure have unfolded.
A former middle school social studies teacher, Johnson helped lead CTU’s 2012 strike and campaigned against former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s decision to close 50 schools in 2013, the largest school closure in the nation.
The promise from Mayor Emanuel was that student would go to better schools plus the district would save money by closing buildings.
More than a decade later, the closures did nothing to steady the district’s financial position and left deep wounds in communities where schools were closed.
September 26, 2024 via WTTW News:
The Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously Thursday evening to prohibit the closure of any public school until after the 2026-27 academic year, acting after reports that as many as 100 schools could be on the chopping block created a firestorm of controversy.
The 6-0 vote by the board overseeing the Chicago Public Schools came two days after CEO Pedro Martinez announced he had refused Mayor Brandon Johnson’s request to resign, an unprecedented show of public
October 4, 2024
It’s been more than a year since Mayor Brandon Johnson, fresh off his runoff election victory, hand-selected the new members of Chicago’s Board of Education — a diverse group he described at the time as district parents and “education champions” who were dedicated to “creating learning environments that support our children in the classroom and beyond.”
Now, 14 months after those appointments, all seven members of the board will step down amid ongoing strife between Johnson and Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez following squabbles over finances, possible school closures and the district’s ongoing contract negotiations with Johnson’s former employer, the Chicago Teachers Union.
The move comes just weeks before the first set of board elections, in which the board will expand from seven to 21 members, 10 of whom will be chosen by the public. That hybrid board will serve for two years before the board becomes fully elected in 2027.
Comments
Churn is expensive in terms of time, energy and money. In the case of schools, this also includes student outcomes.
School closures just plain hurt and the only thing they cause is churn.
Historically, successful strategies are bottom up, not top down. Closures are simply top down and just don't improve student outcomes.
Remember when neighborhood communities sponsored Montessori in under-enrolled school. Those schools were swiftly filled to the point where the district ended those programs.
Underperformer
Conspiratorial, backroom dealing me wants to see this as a years-long project cooked up by Chandra, Hersey and friends to eliminate all the non-standard schools and finally create the aspiring-to-be-mediocre district of their dreams! Where every student is literally the average because there is no variation in scores whatsoever. They finally saw a crisis (budget crunch) that they seized on as an opportunity to push their plan through. And since they don't really care a whit about the rabble's opinions on anything, they figured they would just slow-walk it, run out the clock, hold the legal minimum number of meetings and bing, bang, boom. Schools closed, equity achieved, Amen. (Just ignore the still yawning deficit please... thanks)
In truth, I think it's somewhere in the middle. They seized on a crisis of their own making (budget deficit significantly due to the teachers' contract) and turned it into an opportunity to: 1) kill off all the non-standard schools and 2) show OSPI they are trying to meet those school enrollment targets. But, because they are all clowns, the implementation has been cartoonishly bad. No communication with orgs like SCPTSA which, whatever their manifold failings, at least could get a decent constituency on board if they were consulted in partnership. No ability to even come up with a winning message that sounded vaguely plausible. Basically no meat.
Jones seems to be a prisoner of his own ideology and therefore constitutionally incapable of pursuing solutions that might run afoul of the equity police of his mind. As a result, he can't bring forward ideas to bring enrollments at neighborhood schools UP because that would require actions (like supporting HCC, dual language schools) that his mind too firmly believes would help wealthy families. And so he was left to rummage around in the empty attic of his head for some other plan. Thus, he and his staff kicked around for awhile, came up with a closure list based on some metrics that fit their goals and put up some window dressing about "well resourced schools", "improving outcomes", "saving money" and so on. None of it means anything in a real way. And because they are arrogant people that seem to not believe their own farts stink, they actually assumed that the good comrades of Seattle would just go along with whatever plan they put out. When it turned out that people want more for their kids than buzz phrases, newspeak and baloney, their brains just sort of fried. Could not compute. At which point the the backup plan just became "run out the clock because we still know what's best."
- Just Some Commenter Everyman