Seattle Public Schools create chaos instead of community

Every few years, Seattle Public Schools puts parents through an emotional meat grinder. Either it threatens school closures, or program cuts or a teachers strike. And every time, these crises are presented as if they came out of the ether as an unavoidable, unpredictable shock. If only.

All school districts submit budget forecasts to the state, outlining their spending plans for the coming three years. Seattle’s currently shows the district spending about $100 million more than it receives each year through 2025-‘26.

The district’s habit has been to reach into its reserves to close those gaps. But that won’t work forever. Three years from now — assuming no new money materializes — Washington’s largest school district has informed the state that it expects to be $277 million in the red.

Yet the education department raises only minimal objections to those red flags because, by law, the Office of Public Instruction can take action only if the current school year’s budget is out of whack. It doesn’t take a political genius to see how dire forecasts can then be leveraged to pressure voters and legislators. Meanwhile, families become pawns in this game, utterly powerless.

Marguerite Roza, a school finance expert who directs the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University and happens to be a Seattle parent, sees this longstanding pattern as both unconscionable and self-defeating. “To fill out a form that shows such egregious gaps and not have a heart to heart with your community doesn’t make any sense,” she says.

It certainly isn’t helping Seattle’s relationship with families. The school district is down about 4,700 students from the 56,200 who were enrolled just as the pandemic hit — a decline of about 8.4% — which is larger than the state average.

But the main engine driving Seattle’s budgetary chasm is its recent $228 million teachers contract, approved at a time when district leaders could see as well as anyone that enrollments, which drive budget revenues, would not support that kind of money. No coincidence that the first public rumblings about possible school closures came just four months later.

Worse, the district won’t even level with its community about the solution. Instead, Superintendent Brent Jones uses doublespeak, promising to “repurpose” buildings so they aren’t sitting dark and empty. “We’re thinking about this more of a school consolidation than school closures because our intent won’t be to get rid of our buildings — it would be to maybe repurpose them,” he told a Seattle Times reporter.

Dance around terminology all you want. To kids being uprooted and families who feel jerked around, the impact is the same.

No doubt, Jones has a clear memory of the not-too-distant past, when Seattle shuttered 11 schools between 2007 and 2009, then turned around and reopened five of them a few years later. That kind of upheaval also carries costs — beyond the loss of community goodwill — so it’s unclear how much money such a move would save in the end. The initial estimate is about $28 million, not nearly enough to close the budget gaps Seattle is facing.

There are districts that manage to avoid this perennial whiplash. Shoreline actually projects a budget surplus for each of the next three years. The same goes for Everett and Tacoma.

But Seattle wrings its hands over declining enrollments, as if the numbers were a shock. Perhaps, in one respect, they are: Seattle Public Schools doesn’t know exactly why its rolls have fallen so far because it never surveys families to ask why they’ve left. As the saying goes, you can’t fix what you don’t measure.

With customer service like that, Seattle Public Schools should probably prepare for more enrollment declines to come.