This and That, May 5, 2025
Update: I will have a Saturday update on who has filed for Seattle School Board but candidates are filing for two particular seats fast and furious. I'll also provide backgrounds then as well.
There are now four people running for Joe Mizrahi's seat #4. Besides Mizrahi, they are:
- Gloria Suella Menchaca
- Laura Marie Rivera
- Nadia F. Goforth
There are now SIX people running for Michelle Saju's seat. Besides Sarju (and it's a mystery if she is really running again after she said she wouldn't), they are:
- Allycea Weil
- Julissa Sanchez
- Landon Labosky
- Vivian Song
- Vivian Van Gelder
Man, that's a tough thing to have the same name as another candidate except that Song has been a director before.
There are still just two people in District 2; Sarah Clark, the incumbent, and Eric C. Feeny.
And still just one person in District 7 to fill the seat of the departing Brandon Hersey; Jennifer LaVallee.
end of update
First, I want to wish every student attempting an AP exam this week and next all the luck in the world. You can do it!
This is the week that Board candidates have to file with the PDC in Washington. I see there is finally one candidate for Director Brandon Hersey's seat in District 7. That would be Jennifer LeVallee. She appears to a tech person and she is part of the All Together for Seattle Schools group.
Director Michelle Sarju is still listed at the PDC but that may just be from the last time she ran. She has said - several times in public - that she is not running to retain her seat.
Candidates have until 5 pm on Friday, the 9th to file. I'll put up a full list on Friday.
Speaking of the running, The Seattle Times Editorial Board is urging folks to run. And they have something to say about why.
The state’s largest school district has serious problems to tackle in every area — academic, financial and philosophical.
There’s a real chance to change direction through the School Board election this fall, when four of seven seats will be open.
Admittedly, the job is daunting. It demands long hours of puzzling over policy, reading reports and scouring budgets while being available to any community member who has a complaint or idea for improving local schools.
Or that’s what it should entail. Current board leaders have jettisoned many of those duties, abdicating financial stewardship of a $1.2 billion budget to staff, shutting out many community voices and losing public trust in the process.
The results have been catastrophic. Seattle Public Schools has posted $100 million deficits three years in a row, as enrollment sags and gaps in academic performance between different student groups remain among the widest in the nation.
But crises sometimes prompt reform. The best thing to emerge from last fall’s upheaval around the proposed closure of 21 schools was a reinvigoration of families demanding a greater say in the direction of their public schools. It was heartening to see.
Good for the Times.
The Times also said this:
Parents also realized, collectively, that many of them possess expertise on budgeting, data analysis and leadership that could be leveraged, rather than pushed to the sidelines. The Seattle School Board is in dire need of their skills.
Speaking of, there's an SPS parent, Albert Wong, who loves data. His latest work, The 31% No One Talks About, is worthy reading.
I do want to toot my own horn to say that I have pointed out for years and years that the district had broken "central administration" into two. That way the central administration part could stay at 6% which is about what most districts spend AND then have office administration where they spend more. This is kind of what Wong is talking about.
This is the first in a series of posts. By the end, we’ll zoom in on this 31%, draw a circle around odd growth areas, and (yes) share a list of staff names, transition paths into the positions, and salaries with the staff and board. Early findings are already with the Board and SPS staff.
The SPS Finance and HR departments could and should do this analysis more precisely. But we can help them by taking the first pass — using publicly available OSPI S275, F196, and F196 data.
He gets the good stuff right out there:
- This post focuses primarily on the budget, but keep in mind: SPS often underspends.
In 2023–24, for example, compensation was underspent by $63M — over 5% of the entire budget. We will crack open this difference and how it matters in follow up posts.
- There are 2600 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) staff allocated to the District Office. It has grown from 27% to 36% of total staffing since 2013.
But this is the real crux of the matter:
- Leadership failed to highlight the staffing shift.
The new governance structure (Student Outcomes Focused Governance) has further prevented board members from recognizing, let alone investigating, this shift.
Correcting governance to require deep finance understanding from the board is the first structural problem to fix.
- The next Superintendent must restructure culture and staff.
Dig in and enjoy!
The Board is having their last community engagement meeting at Daniel Bailey Elementary this Wednesday from 5:30-7:00 pm.
Yet again, the Board is having another "special meeting" this one on Tuesday the 13th from 5-6:30 pm. No agenda yet. Hmmm
Comments
It would be nice to break up the Rankin, Sarju, Hersey and Briggs cabal.
He makes much of an increase of 1050 FTE attributed to the district office from 2014 to 2025, and wants to understand what that is, but it's fairly clear from the breakouts by state "duty codes." (Note that many employees who work at school sites are still considered central office FTEs because they aren't assigned to particular schools the same way teachers are.)
1) About 340 FTE are "service workers" and I wonder if that is just cafeteria staff. I have a vague memory, possibly hallucination, that SPS brought its food service operation in house in the teens, which would transfer a chunk of budget from non-compensation to compensation, and add a bunch of FTEs to the central office. In 2014, Nutrition Services had a budget of $11 million and 11 FTEs, which sounds like most of the work was contracted out.
2) SPS has also added about 700 Aide positions since 2014. Most of those are probably for special education. Aides can be classified as either school site FTE or central office FTE, with the breakdown no longer being given, so it's hard to tell how many of those contributed to the observed increase in central office FTE, but probably it's a lot.
3) The 2025 numbers included general funded and capital funded staff, whereas the 2014 numbers are general fund only. That by itself adds about 170 FTE, probably all central office.
Stripping away all of that, it does seem that SPS added about 90 central office bureaucrats to the general fund budget between 2014 and 2025. That's not a small thing -- probably costs $25 million -- but easily lost in the confusion.
On the 1050 FTE increase, I might not have emphasized it enough, but it I aruge it does matter regardless of allocations because it is untracked -- not that it's misspent. We very much are NOT wasting $383M a year with 1050 FTE of administrators.
While the budget is missing breakdowns, the actuals do have incomplete breakdowns for the "District Office" in the f196 general leader summary (so just $, not FTE) and the s275 personnel file. I had some of this in the original draft of the post (~50 revisions ago :-/) but folks helping review found it far too complicated so we punted it down a few more posts. The reason it's complex is all three of the Budget, the F196, and the S275 do not necessarily agree on what "District Office" means. Nor are they always consistent in the "activites" each thing is assigned to. The s275 in particular is full of errors that have to be sifted through so precision is not great.
However, I did look at those all to double check before posting... am currently revalidating but to your specific points
The ~340 FTE of service workers doesn't quite match my numbers. I have 511 service workers in 2023-2024 compared to 430 in 2013-2014. Operations - Food Service is 88 compared to 99 back then. Operations of Buildings is 326 now vs 253 back then. There's also 30 grounds mainenance now vs 23 then. The policy shift I think was moving "maintenance" (crafts/trades) into "Service Worker" since our # of buildings didn't change a much. Note these are s275 list of employees, not budgeted amounts. We could narrow it slightly more since the f196 does, confusingly, allocate the opertaions-buildings to the schools. Not sure why...
Regarding aides some are in both I agree but many are not. Currently 784 FTE are school-assigned per the S275 out of a total of 971FTE meaning only 187 actual FTE are not in the schools (hard to interpret cause we don't know opened positions). In 2013-2014 there were 598 FTE of "Aides" district-wide making an increase of 374.
IIRC the school allocated actuals largely matches the "School Budgets" section of the budget book (I remember doing that check cause I was worried about the same thing you were but cannot find it spreadsheet offhand) and represents a 291 FTE increase from 2013-2014... which is balanced by a couple hundred decrease in elementary homeroom teacher + elementary specialist teacher. This is another deep dive later...but we have effectively done a shift of teachers into aides. They may be SpecEd allocated...however I wonder strongly if we've made a bad overarching choice here to have larger classrooms which -- at least anecdoally from this year -- can exacerbate issues more than an additional aide can help. That's last bit is a stretch and beyond my data + knowledge...but I wonder. So
As for capital funded positions vs non, yes that is an issue that was elided from the first post (sooo much was elided omg...sorry). But I think this doesn't actually matter. The Captial Funded positions end up showing as a balance transfer into the revenues section of the budget and the expenditure allocation in the budget book, the f195, and the f196 all just rack up these to OSPI activities + programs. So the program might change, but the activity doesn't?
In all cases though, when folks discuss the budget, the discss the $1.2B General fund and everything in my posts is talking about expenditures out of the general fund -- regardless of whether or not they are somehow transfered in via the capital fund. The s275 matches too (I double check the total compensation sum vs the f196 to see if they are within some reasonable range of match before moving forward). So it's quite likely that "eliminating" such a position wouldn't somehow close a deficit but elimination a position is the last step. The first step is actually even understanding where the money is going. The second step is then to think about the barriers to correct funding in probably a 5-year timeframe which will include things like going "oh, so we have to spend $XXM on Floogle Flarfy due to state policy or Union Contract and it's really should go to students. Board, SI, Unions, Rank-and-file, Parent Advocacy... let's all go as if we really wanted to do that and make it changed so in 5 years, we can actualkyl put that money where it should be."
... that's my braindump.
If you wanna dig through this together, drop me an email at sps.by.the.numbers [at] gmail.com! Definitely need more eyes. This stuff is messy to join...
Every yearly "budget book" has a list of staff FTE broken out by state "duty codes." The sums of these lists match the total staffing numbers you were quoting. It was a simple exercise to compare the lists from 2013-14 and 2024-25 (except that the latter contains capital budget staff also, whereas the former has only general fund staff.)
In 2013-14, there were 356.6 FTE of code 970, "Service Worker," and 891.8 FTE of code 910, Aide. In the 2024-25 recommended budget, those numbers were 697.6 and 1,610.6, respectively.
So the number comparison you found is misleading.
If you look at the actuals in the s275, which you can cross-check against spend, you will find that there is growth over a decade.
The staffing budget is inflated -- especially in the district office. Then it is underspent. But in the roll-up this ends up obfuscating lots of overspend in differnet activities and object cateogires like purchased services.
Per Albert: “The trick is the budgeted numbers actually don't matter that much because there is HUGE annual underspend -- a lot of the budgeted roles do not match.”
and “… this ends up obfuscating lots of overspend in differnet activities and object cateogires like purchased services.”
I used to think that it must take highly disciplined professionals to run any public institution’s finance operations. But what Albert has revealed proves that it never does, at least for Seattle Public Schools (SPS) somehow, if SPS Finance Reports can just put out inaccurate numbers with arbitrary organization. I somehow believed that the government was a system where flawed financial reports wouldn’t cut it. (shocked emoji)
Darn It