Seattle Schools News Round-Up

Update:

On the Ad Hoc Budget Committee meeting:

- The members want to tie enrollment numbers to the budget (which goes without saying but it is very important).

- Warth talked about asking other districts about their public engagement on budgeting. 

- It appears that they will only meet once a month.

- The biggest news - which I apologize for not putting in the original post - is this from Director Clark:

I'm under doctor's orders to work remotely until I get an approval for in-person work. I am hoping to be cleared after that.

Finally. She can keep her health issues private but she should have said this publicly earlier. 

end of update

Hey Kids, I'm back...from Seattle. Hilariously, I went to the first meeting of  the newly-formed Ad Hoc Committee on Budget. I was the only one there in person (save the Board administrator and doer of ALL that work, Julia Warth). I had thought maybe a couple of the Board directors would be there.  Director Sarah Clark is chair with members Liza Rankin and Joe Mizrahi. President Gina Topp looked in but said very little. 

Honestly, it was a lot of logistics and I felt like even that didn't all get done. Part of this work is a new committee of parents and others to help with the budgeting. It's not clear to me how it all fits.

Which brings me to yesterday's op-ed in The Seattle Times by Albert "why isn't HE running" Wong, Seattle Public Schools needs leader with will to rebuild, restructure. 

I was also a founding member of the United States Digital Service in the Obama White House (the USDS has since been renamed and restructured under President Donald Trump). A large part of our work was helping federal agencies identify and fix organizational issues that blocked effective policy implementation. 

Over the past six months, I’ve been working with a group of parents on a deep dive into SPS’s finances. We’ve analyzed multiple decades of data, going all the way back to Joseph Olchefske, who succeeded John Stanford as superintendent in 1998. 

The message I want to share is this: Seattle must choose a superintendent who will actively redesign an organization that has, for decades, struggled to ensure spending matches the budget developed by the School Board and the senior staff.

I love that he then states that it's not about "right values." 

The new superintendent must restructure staff at multiple levels, while also rebuilding talent, trust and cohesion within the bureaucracy.

Absolutely! 

What I also love is that he and others have gone back to look at Joe Olchefske's reign as superintendent. We parents were supposed to accept this guy because he was CFO and financial knowledge is important. He got the district into a financial scandal that has never been openly aired. Money disappeared without real explanation (he didn't take it, someone else appears to have done so).

After that scandal, the local firm, Moss Adams, did a deep dive into ALL the departments at JSCEE. It was a thing of beauty that talked about highest need to do, highest cost to do, etc. 

My favorite line - which echoes what Wong is saying - I'm going to paraphrase, "If you don't change the culture of a building, you will change nothing." And that is so true for JSCEE. There's a sickness there that has to stop.

Each successive superintendent has removed more information from what is presented to the board. Today, 31% of the district’s operating budget — about $383 million annually — is spent on staffing that isn’t described in the budget documents the board is asked to approve. 

In 2002, the board and the public could see how many FTEs and how much funding was assigned to each department. Now, we only see school staffing through “Weighted Staffing Standards.” Details for other departments are gone. 

And what happens when something isn’t visible? It avoids cuts.

Here's an example of the problem:

From 2012-2024, the “HR activity” category overspent its budget by an average of $2 million annually. Worse, since 2019, the HR activity budget was reduced by $1.3 million but actual spending in this category increased by $2.6 million. By 2023-2024, HR activity overspending reached $4.1 million — nearly the amount of projected savings from the four-school closure proposal. 

Although the district has determined that much of the recent HR overspend resulted from a spending classification mismatch between budgeting and spending, it still means that for years, our budget reductions had no discernible impact. Did we cut staff or not? By how much and where?

I again make note that for years and years and years Seattle Schools has NOT hired an HR professional for HR. It defies logic and it certainly speaks to how little respect superintendents have for that work.

You think closing schools is a hard choice? 

Restoring this chain will require difficult decisions — including restructuring departments and, likely, terminations. Without it, we risk continuing painful cuts to classrooms without knowing if there are multimillion-dollar inefficiencies in non-student-facing departments.

And Wong puts forth an intriguing idea (bold mine):

The skill set needed to fix this is different from the skill set needed to build a new vision. In some organizations, during executive turnover, a fixed-term interim leader is hired with a clear mandate: Get the house in order so that a long-term leader can succeed without being burdened by the politics of internal reshuffling. 

Is that an option for SPS? Could we hire a restructuring-focused interim superintendent for one year with two clear goals. Ensure that: 

● Actual spending matches the approved budget.
● The number of full-time equivalents and dollars allocated to every department are fully known and transparent in budgeting. 

Imagine that! Spending matching the budget.

Then, and only then, resume the search for a long-term, visionary leader.

Thoughts?