Oh Boy! Get Out Your Best Chamber of Commerce Pitch

 The Seattle Times is running a survey. 


If you had to convince someone to take the job running Seattle Public Schools, what would you say?

How would you persuade them to uproot their lives in, say, Vermont, California or Florida, and move here to become the superintendent of the nearly 50,000-student school system, with its annual multimillion-dollar budget deficits, leadership churn and urgent need to improve academics?

How would you sell the district and the city to prospective candidates?


What say you, readers? I can think of one thing right off the bat that is an encouraging sign for any candidate. 

Seattle has the second smallest children population of an urban city in the U.S. And yet, for decades, the people of Seattle vote to tax themselves, for both SPS operations and capital needs, over and over. 

That is NOT the case for most urban school districts. That means that 1) there's money in Seattle and 2) the adults of Seattle support public education. 

Comments

Anonymous said…
I won’t answer the survey but I will share my attemp to get my dear brother to work for SPS. Years ago he was an IA and he experienced first hand the debauchery at school buildings. He then got a job in enrollment as a bilingual enrollment specialist. That was even worse. He described how the people that had been there for years could not get themselves to do better because they had “always done it this way”. Basically a rotten system from the core for year and years.
Twenty years later he got his PhD at the UW. Older and wiser, he promised himself he would never work for SPS ever again. I tried to convince him to apply. He said no.
He is now a dad and his child will soon enter the system. He and his wife are working hard to save up their money and either move to a different district or send their kid to private school.
I think my bro is traumatized. Thanks SPS. You break people. One soul at the time.

Nope
8/26/25, 11:07 AM
Stuart J said…
As a result of passing capital levies (only needing 50%), the school buildings have in many cases been replaced and are quite new. (I don't know the exact number though).

The Seattle area has many amazing companies and organizations. Any adult age children coming with you and your spouse could have a lot of great opportunities.

There are a lot of supportive groups and organizations that want to help and have the means to do so. SPS already gets a lot of support from the city and from organizations such as Alliance for Education.


Tongue in Cheek:

If you have school age kids, there are ample private opportunities where you can send your children if you don't like the opportunities where you live. (because good luck trying to get an out of service area assignment.)
8/26/25, 12:27 PM
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