Seattle School Board: Listen to your community, it has lots to say

Item No. 6a on the Seattle School Board agenda for Wednesday looks pretty benign: approval of the calendar for regular meetings in the 2024-25 school year. There will be one each month, at which the community can make public comments.

All well and good — except that this calendar represents a 50% cut in official opportunities for people to air their concerns about school business, since there are traditionally two regular meetings per month. And it happens to be coming just as the state’s biggest school district is proposing to shutter 20 elementary schools.

A charitable interpretation might ascribe the timing of this decision — up for a vote on Wednesday — to cluelessness on the part of the seven-member school board. But parents are in no mood for charity.

After years of feeling ignored by Seattle Public Schools’ governing body, many see this move as a cynical effort to narrow the primary channel for public response at a crucial moment of community concern.

School Board President Liza Rankin offers a different view. Standing up at a meeting and yelling at the board is not engagement, she says, it’s performance. Instead, the board intends to hold a second meeting each month at yet-to-be-determined locations that will rotate. These “special meetings” will be looser, with more room for “authentic dialogue” between the board and community, Rankin said.

But since there is no legal requirement that special meetings allow public comment, and since none have actually been scheduled, some skepticism is warranted — especially when 27% of Seattle’s elementary schools are facing possible closure.

It’s worth considering how community engagement looks in other districts wrestling with similar problems, as the Seattle Hall Pass podcast did in a recent episode. Its hosts pointedly note that when San Francisco proposed school closures, it heard from perhaps a dozen of its 17 advisory committees representing different groups: the Arts Equity Committee, the African American Parent Advisory Council, the English Learners Advisory Committee, School Site Council, High School Task Force, etc.

“I often think it’s really sad, we have one of the most educated cities — probably in the world — lots of really smart people, and we’re not making use of their knowledge,” said Christie Robertson, one of the podcast’s two hosts. “Why aren’t we taking advantage of our city’s great minds?”

Seattle is often derided for talking problems to death, the habit of “seeking consensus through exhaustion,” as Seattle Weekly put it in 1983. But on the matter of education — nothing less than cultivating our collective future — it’s worth making time to honestly consider other points of view.

So prove the skeptics wrong, Seattle School Board. Explicitly articulate the plan for special meetings with language that guarantees a real conversation.