Missed Opportunities for Seattle Schools to Save Money
I'm going to offer my suggestions for the 2025-2026 Seattle Schools' budget.
1) Too late for this one, but the district refuses (and the Board does nothing) to do any kind of anything to shore up enrollment.
- Announce a clear and comprehensive plan for Advanced Learning.
- Do any kind of other marketing except for "school fairs."
- Ask Seattle parents with pre-K children what would make them consider SPS for their child?
2) Last year's budget had $5M budgeted for the Board office and $6M for the Superintendent. At that time, I stated that I had NEVER seen the Board office with more than $1M. My suspicion is that it's for Student Outcome Focused Governance work and more travel.
Shave off $1M from the Superintendent's office if everyone is to suffer.
3) I realize the City has its own fiscal woes but charge them a modest amount for renting SPS classrooms.
What else?
Comments
See the first comment, by “Voter”: “The district and board poured $26M into the Strategic Plan. Where are the results?”
This reminds me that the combined cost of the Strategic Plan and the Board budget has gone through $50 millions between 2020 and 2025.
Is the “Education” by SPS a front business for illicit cartels?
Milking the Citizens
Cry
Xsps
One of the notable achievements was that it made SPS adapt Student Outcomes Focused Governance, which successfully guided SPS into losing whatever little accountability it still had prior to adapting it.
https://www.statesman.com/story/opinion/columns/your-voice/2025/06/02/texas-education-agency-lone-star-governance-training-isnt-helping-school-districts-opinion/83924471007/
"... several districts across the United States have also adopted Crabill’s governance training — nationally known as Student Outcomes Focused Governance. The effectiveness of this training in these districts is now under scrutiny, too. For example, Seattle Public Schools has spent approximately $300,000 on Student Outcomes Focused Governance and has seen little academic progress."
Wait a minute, SOFG cost $300K? That's obscene, but then, where did the rest, $4.7 Million has gone? What kind of "outcomes" did the Board Directors and the district admin staff really mean to achieve and for whom? I don't think no one has disclosed the answers to any of these questions.
Have the State Auditors been checking SPS' accounting at all? Are they going to share the information about where the funding for this and other items ended up? Or Auditors are not supposed to require SPS to show what happened with the public funds?
Club Crab of WA
With the State Auditor, you have to have evidence of problems. But now that you mention it, if I don't find what all that money went to, I could file a report with them.
"With the State Auditor, you have to have evidence of problems. But now that you mention it, if I don't find what all that money went to, I could file a report with them."
If you filed a report with the State Auditor, that'd be a better service than what anyone would have done for the students farthest from educational justice in the SPS history over the last half a dozen Boards! Quite frankly, neither the Strategic Plan nor the SOFG has worked out for the best benefit of the students, especially for what each of them has cost!
The dysfunctional state of SPS academics, finance and HR has put SPS in the national spot light. The mention of SPS by the reporters covering education in Texas is just one example, as in the report on my previous comment.
So, what have the State Auditors been doing or seeing? In midst of the significant financial dysfunctions of this district with worsening lack of information to the public about where exactly all the money has been going, how could all the financial mysteries go unnoticed by the WA State Auditors but most other people?
Is it wrong to expect State Auditors to make sure that the millions of dollars we paid in taxes have been accounted properly and accurately? Or are their jobs meant as a screen for what they could say they see, whether or not they were really even looking, almost to a point of making our State look as dysfunctional and unworthy of anybody's trust or respect as the current SPS leadership. How much longer should we give the State Auditors to "have evidence of problems" about the same things the national audience has been seeing problems with?
So, when can we see the evidence that WA State Auditors were indeed doing real jobs, not the fake jobs.
Club Crab of WA