Any way you slice it, Seattle Public Schools’ woes are self-inflicted

Seattle Schools Superintendent Brent Jones has been frank about one of the main challenges facing the state’s largest school district: Parents who have the means are pulling their kids out.

Declining enrollment is due partly to a nationwide demographic shift. There are simply fewer school-age children. But Seattle has comparatively high rates of private school attendance, a fact not lost on Jones, who says the city’s public schools need to get better at telling their story.

Currently, that tale begins with a looming $131 million budget hole and decisions being made in its shadows that could lock the district into a downward spiral for years.

Consider accelerated learning. Rightly concerned about racial segregation between kids in so-called “highly capable” classrooms and everyone else, Seattle has been working to abolish these divisions. It found a creative solution — at least, at one site — by bringing the highly touted Technology Access Foundation to Washington Middle School, where most of the students are low-income children of color.

TAF worked with all of them. There were digital literacy classes, web- and game-development and STEM-focused field trips. Math scores rose by double-digits for 7^th and 8^th graders. Results in English were, in general, similarly impressive — even during the pandemic’s unprecedented toll on learning.

Yet now, just three years into their partnership, Seattle is showing TAF the door. “We have to operate within our means,” Associate Superintendent Concie Pedroza said at a February budget meeting.

Founded by former Microsoft executive Trish Dziko, TAF had been contributing almost $800,000 annually to pay for its own team of 10 at Washington Middle School. Those educators worked alongside Seattle teachers, seven of whom were added to the middle school to enable smaller class sizes. But next year, the extra Seattle teachers — as well as half of the school’s award-winning music program — will be pulled to cut costs.

The issue here is not cuts per se; schools across the district are weathering fiscal problems. Rather, it’s vision.

True, Seattle faces a massive deficit. Also true: A good chunk of that gap comes from labor contracts eating up “significantly more” money than the district is taking in, as Jones acknowledged during the same February budget meeting.

But whose fault is that? Jones and his team signed off on a three-year, $228 million contract with the teachers union last fall. It offered more generous raises than the previous agreement, even though everyone knew that declining enrollments would mean less money for schools. Six months later, Seattle began talking about cuts to TAF and music, two of the district’s standout attractions.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to recognize the equation at work: Fewer students means less state money, which leads to cutting the very programs that draw families. Which leads to fewer students, and so on.

Meanwhile, Seattle is barreling ahead with renovation plans for Alki Elementary School. No question, the rickety old building needs an upgrade. It currently holds fewer than 300 kids. The district wants to enlarge its capacity to 500, even though Seattle is seeing its worst enrollment declines in elementary grades.

If there’s a logic to these decisions, and their timing, it’s difficult to decipher. Seattle Public Schools declined to make officials available to answer questions for this editorial.

At a public meeting, Jones said the district needs to “go on the offense” and make its case to parents that they should choose Seattle schools.

That’s what many people want, a reason to stay with public education. But when bureaucrats make spending decisions, seemingly without an ear for the long-term reverberations, they push families in the opposite direction.