Seattle Schools’ Levies

As I previously reported, the district is embarking this month on a series of community meetings about the upcoming levies in February. One is the Operations levy, the other is the BEX/BTA levy for buildings. 

FOX 13 had a story about a meeting this week. I found some of the comments, well, interesting.

While the year's operation's levy hasn't had much pushback, critics say the capital levy is causing controversy, including concerns it will lead to school closures.

While there has been notice in previous levies about scattered disagreement, this sounds bigger than usual.

"Seattle Public Schools has 106 schools. We have facility needs we are going to place before the voters," said Richard Best, Executive Director of Capital Projects, Planning and Facilities of Seattle Public Schools. 

"That would be, I won’t say catastrophic, but there will be declining systems that could have consequential implications in that, when we do implement that system repair, it costs more," said Best. 

Two things.

While SPS does have many schools, I don't believe they truly want to keep all those buildings open so I think Mr. Best is being a bit misleading.

Next, the BEX/BTA levy has a HUGE chunk in it just to run the Technology Department. The article notes this and it's nearly one-fourth of the levy. 

A parent who didn't want to share his name for privacy reasons told us he was concerned about the school closure plan that was scrapped last year, and wondered if the situation was "sustainable."

Best says school closures aren't on the table right now, but may be revisited at some point. 

"We are going to engage in the conversation about schools, school capacity, looking at elementary schools, our focus right now is getting these two levies passed," he said. 

Yes, I think the district wants the stink of closure talk as far away as possible from the levies. But I don't think parents are fooled and know what is likely coming. I hear it in discussions by different parent groups on Facebook all the time. 

Chris Jackins, an SPS critic said this:

"On the capital levy, they have two projects which will create two more mega-sized schools, they are both scheduled at 650 students. They both cost more each, more than $148 million," he said. "They are continuing their construction to add even more elementary school capacity when they say they have too much. It doesn’t make sense."

"The two schools they are talking about, one they didn’t name, so nobody knows, and one is Lowell, which is an existing school, but they are planning to destroy most of it and make it much larger," Jackins said. 

To which Best said:

"I have worked designing schools since 1991 and since that period, I have never designed a school smaller than 500 students," said Best. "We use a model for 500 students, which is three classrooms per grade level."

That may be true but Jackins is right - some of these schools are being built to a much larger size. 

Best explained further.

"The term is not ‘mega schools.’ We design schools to be schools within schools. You have a first-grade cohort, maybe 75 or 100 students. They stay together. Middle schools are 1,000 students. Those are very common throughout the state of Washington."

I'm not sure what he means. A first grade is not a school unto a school. 

I recently saw a cheery comment on Facebook at a parent group page that said, “I was told a long time ago to always vote for school levies no matter what.” 

That’s the kind of simplistic thinking that gets us exactly where SPS is right now. 

I did try to go to the virtual levy meeting on Thursday night. There were only about 16 people when I was there and they divided us into two groups. Somehow I was the only one that didn’t get sorted. The Board staffer tried valiently to get me in and I tried everything she said but we finally had to give up.

Did anyone go to any of these meetings?