I'm Nominating SPS Parent Albert J. Wong for a Nobel Prize for Economics

Well, if there WAS one for the economics of Seattle Public Schools, he would win hands down.

In his latest analysis of the SPS budget, it is again quite weedy and detailed. This is a very good thing and I hope senior management give it a good look. It's called:

Cracking the Budget #2: The Central Office Grew. 

Cutting It Helps But It Won’t Save Us

His topline finding:

SPS added 269 district-office FTE since 2014 — but strip out the recodes and restricted funding and only about 48 FTE are worth examining, worth $7.8M–$13.4M against a $23.7M deficit. 

A recurring question in every budget conversation is whether the central office grew, by how much, and whether cutting it back would fix the deficit. This article digs into the state’s S-275 personnel data to answer that question with actual numbers. This is the second post in the Cracking the Budget series. (First was Chronic Underspend).

Summary

In 2014, SPS served almost exactly the same number of students as it does today — about 48,500 K-12 FTE in both years — in roughly the same number of school buildings. However, when comparing staffing with 2025, the current “District Office / Centrally Managed” staffing is 269 FTE higher than in 2014. The increases have a concentration of unexplained growth in a few activities such as Supervision — Instruction (this does NOT include Principals), Instructional Professional Development, and Operations of Buildings (a part of the Operations org).

This does not mean we can actually remove 269 people, or that removing 269 people would result in 269 people’s compensation worth of reduction in the deficit. Not every position should be removed, and once you sift out the recodes, the restricted funding, and the services we want anyway, only about 48 FTE obviously look like they could be examined — which would only shrink the deficit by about $7.8M to $13.4M. Far less than the 2024–25 deficit of $23.7M, and definitely far less than future deficits, since insurance alone just jumped by a few million this year. 

We cannot achieve solvency by reducing staffing in the District Office alone. We definitely cannot get to the point of adding more funding to any other buckets via cuts here. The math, so far, does not work out. 

Before continuing, I want to call out that this post is specifically going to highlight potential for cuts and that any such cut means a person’s job or career. There are real humans behind the numbers that we will now discuss in abstract. Please be respectful of that, always.

Highlights (there are many but I'm going from what I saw as "a ha" moment.) There are charts for many of his findings.

Next, not all “growth” contributes to the deficit. Some growth in the top-level chart is just recoding positions to different buckets and not real changes. Others use restricted funds or grants that cannot be repurposed to other activities or positions. Focusing such changes won’t have a deficit impact for the Operating Budget. 

 

Examples of this would be the Information Systems “growth” (mostly recoding) and the grant-funded positions such as the 400k a year sub-grant from Alliance for Education funding the Office of African American Male Achievement. 

 

I'll interject here to ask why the Board isn't asking for regular updates on how the work at the Office of African American Male Achievement is going. I don't mean by activity because I know they have a number of events in support of these students. I mean actual academic outcomes.

• Overall though, we should examine the growth in Supervision — Instruction as well as Instructional Professional Development staffing. Then we should understand how the impacts of these structural staffing changes from the last decade line up with the future expenditure — especially if the funding for the program is not guaranteed — leading them to draw from the same shared money pool as every other service in the district that isn’t fully funded.
  Which orgs saw the most growth since 2014? This is a hard question to answer, because the OSPI S-275 staffing data does not give enough information to reliably work our way back to a department. This is really a major failure in the budget book and district transparency.

• I’d even be okay with just the department summary numbers that existed in the budget book until 2014–15, before they were removed under Superintendent Larry Nyland (see “How did we miss this” from the original The 31% No One Talks About article). 

Pairing the fact that Nyland allowed a change that caused over a decade with no transparency about District Office / Centrally Managed growth with the fact that he was one of the originators of Student Outcomes Focused Governance, makes him involved in two of the things that most damaged fiscal governance for SPS.

To which I say, yup. The guy who looks like Opie from The Andy Griffith Show and who graduated from Roosevelt High School sure did do a lot of damage to the district. I was very excited when he became interim because he seemed on paper the right kind of person. I was very sad when he was made the permanent superintendent. 

• Parent Esther Stifano spent over a month manually combing through a PRR’ed 2023 Central Office staff list (a large subset of the “District Office / Centrally Managed” set) and tabulating about 1,750 reporting and department relations — a 1,021-row roster covering roughly 930 named central-office staff. From that, I was able to fuzzily match the names of most of the employees (about 84%) to corresponding S-275 records, which then lets us map orgs back to sets of (Program, Activity, Duty-title) combos. Using this mapping we can infer the following with — with medium confidence:

- The growth concentrates almost entirely under the Chief Academics Office with much under the Academics department. 

- A big chunk of Instructional Professional Development (IPD) can’t be attributed at all. 

Cuts since 2022

As you can see, almost all reductions have happened in Building Operations, Capital Projects, Teaching, and Maintenance. The Capital Projects line is not really a reduction, though: most of those staff were recoded into Information Systems in 2025 rather than cut, as covered in the next section.

Capital Projects into Information Systems, 2025

The largest one in the series. 72 people moved directly from the capital projects fund into Information Systems between 2024 and 2025 (“moved directly” here means the person’s largest District Office assignment changed from capital projects to Information Systems), and counting everyone, 96 of the 105 people in Information Systems in 2025 had been in capital projects the year before. Capital projects staffing fell 74 FTE and Information Systems rose 75 FTE in the same year. Essentially nobody was hired.

To note, nearly all of Technology is now funded out of the Capital Projects Fund (BEX and BTA levies). So these moves don't surprise me. 

Superintendent’s Office into Board of Directors, 2025

Board of Directors goes from 1 FTE in 2014 to 13 in 2025, and almost all of that +12 FTE is those people.

I totally missed this change. I find that weird because I believe the funding for those two offices should not mingle.

Supervision — Instruction

This activity went up +48 FTE, from 76 FTE in 2014 to 124 in 2025. Two things stand out.

Most of the growth is in Basic Education, which went from 31 FTE to 64. That is unrestricted money, and it is about 33 of the 48 FTE added.

The growth skews senior: Director or Supervisor went from 7 FTE to 20 and Professional from 14 to 39, while Office or Clerical added only 5. It’s unclear what “Professional” means, but this is worth investigating.

 

Instructional Professional Development

This activity — Instructional Professional Development, or IPD from here on — went up +46 FTE, from 29 FTE in 2014 to 75 in 2025. While the total delta is similar to Supervision — Instruction, it breaks down completely differently.

Wait a minute, I pulled the s275, redid the numbers, and they really don’t match the budget book. What gives!

To note, an s275 is:

In public school budgeting, an S-275 is an electronic personnel reporting system used by school districts and educational service districts in Washington state to record detailed data on staff employment, duty assignments, and salary information. Managed by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), it acts as the primary data source linking district payroll budgets to state funding allocations.

The S-275 is a very error-ridden file that represents a snapshot of the HIRED staff on October 1st of any given year. If staff are fired later, they are still there. If they are hired later, they are not added for the year.

That the budget book lacks breakdowns for the staffing in the area that needs the most oversight — along with other issues, like Program, Activity, and Object being presented only as independent roll-ups instead of the intersecting data-cube they were designed to be — points at a strong need to redesign the budget book. (bold mine)

He then talks about "office restructuring:

However, all these things are 1 to 2 year time frames. Folks all seem to really want to see results in the order of months. 

 

This is horridly unrealistic for a 7000 person (roughly 6,100 FTE) organization that has been through demoralizing leadership churn for a decade plus. 

 

The first step has to be reestablishing a direction to align on. Then you have to reestablish a layer of lieutenants that can investigate downwards. Then those people have to actually integrate into their role correctly to assess the needs of the staff and constraints of the org. 

 

And THEN they can report changes.

And even after all that, cuts to the District Office alone will not bridge the deficit, let alone free up bunches of money to use in any other area (more APs, more art teachers, more principles, higher teacher salaries, better ratios, etc). 

 

So how much money will be saved? Don’t know. Will the restructure probably break up ossification and have lots of effects in the budget and beyond? Absolutely. When will we see it? Later that we all wish cause humans aren’t machines — we don’t just change.

 

What's next?

The next post will either break down Purchased Services or be about the current issues in spending, particularly on Transportation. I’m pretty convinced that the state making youth transit free is what blew the biggest hole in SPS’s finances. Does that not make sense? Good. You are sane. Our state’s transportation funding formula is not.

He adds in a helpful FAQ. One question stuck out to me:

But what about Cost of living Adjustments for staff, raises above COLA, better ratios, more librarian, more art teachers, more music teachers, more IAs, better curriculum, [insert thing you care about]?

At the end of last year, the first back-of-the-envelope calculation made me think that we could pull close to even if not slightly ahead by handling this bucket of growth. But after doing it more thoroughly now (understanding the breakdowns of Supervision — Instruction + IPD), I find that we can’t bridge much more than half the deficit at best.

And that’s before including the, sudden, multi-million dollar growth in uncontrollable permanent cost increases such as insurance.

Right there, I said to myself, what?! Only because I don't know if Wong is talking about all insurance the district has to buy. Because the insurance pool they are in with other regional districts to buy insurance IS something they could do better on. That fund is for payouts stemming from court cases. If the district did a better job policing staff and nipping serious situations in the bud, those insurance costs could not be climbing at the rate they are.

I don’t think we as a community have fully internalized what that means which is: the district cannot solve this insolvency by reallocating funds. Something must change somewhere else, or we will end up in binding conditions and then, afer a few years, receivership with loss of local control.

(Editor's note: that is Wong's boldface in the above paragraph.)