Closing schools, Seattle? Don’t forget what happened last time

I see they’re talking about closing Seattle schools again. This time they’re targeting a doom-sounding figure of 20 buildings to shutter, more than a quarter of all the elementary schools in the city.

All I can say at this stage is: Remember what happened last time?

We went down this exact road in Seattle about 15 years ago. It turned out to be an own goal policy snafu that had to be reversed almost immediately.

From 2007 to 2009, Seattle closed 11 schools. The theory then — as today — was that enrollment was shrinking and there were too many classroom seats for too few kids. It was presented as tough medicine to the city, as well as to roomfuls of shouting parents so angry that at times they were restrained by security. It was a way, we were told, to show we were serious adults who could run government with the efficiency of a business.

“We don’t need 70 elementary schools anymore, and it’s (the board’s) responsibility to face that fact,” the Seattle School Board president said back then.

It’s exactly what they’re saying again today.

I regret that I was persuaded, by a slew of state legislators, that Seattle had to close schools back then to prove to lawmakers it had its budget act together. The district had been through some accounting scandals and cost overruns, so the message was: Show us you can cut some fat.

The trouble is, the “fat” you’re cutting, when it comes to schools, is often the heart of a neighborhood.

The other trouble was: It turned out to be wrong.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a big policy decision proved to be misguided so quickly. Unmoved by protesters or warnings that rapid growth was coming, the school district polished off the last of the contentious school closings in the summer of 2009.

And then, 1,200 more students than expected showed up just a few months later. That’s like three or four schools’ worth of kids. It was the bow wave of a boom decade of growth the likes of which the city hadn’t seen since the gold rush.

That fall, the same year they’d closed schools, the School Board was forced to do an expensive about-face, with a $50 million plan to instead open five schools. Three of those were the same schools they’d just closed.

“We have now wasted money closing five schools, moving students, equipment and materials around, just to re-open five school buildings,” Dora Taylor, a teacher and district critic, wrote at the time on her watchdog blog, Seattle Education 2010.

Take it away, Seattle Times, from a story in 2013 about the district now scrambling to “ease overcrowding” due to a “crush of students.”

“That [enrollment] prediction turned out to be dramatically wrong. Enrollment surged about 7 percent from 2008 through 2011, forcing some schools to hold classes in gyms, auditoriums and portables parked on school grounds.”

I felt entitled to add the emphasis in that sentence above, because my kids were in those suddenly jampacked schools. Each time I went to a parent night being held in a portable, I would mutter to myself that “this is what you get for believing the school district about closing schools.”

Consider the tortured tale of Viewlands Elementary, a small 220-student school adjacent to Carkeek Park north of Greenwood. The board voted to close it in 2007, but then whipsawed and voted to reopen it just two years later.

Fine, except while it was closed it had been ransacked, with thieves stripping much of its copper wiring. The cost to reopen totaled $10 million — many times more than had been saved by closing it.

Ironically Viewlands turned out to be so needed that the district has since spent another $90 million to remodel it into a much larger facility for 650 students — triple what it was when they voted to close it.

Of the 11 schools closed back then, all but four reopened, either as the same school or a different one using the building. The district argued it couldn’t have foreseen the enrollment surge, which added some 8,000 students in 10 years, or 20 schools’ worth. Still, the entire episode almost certainly cost more than it saved.

The district did study the immediate effects on students from the first round of school closures. Twenty percent of the students left the district entirely, rather than transfer to another district school.

One can only imagine what might happen if the district closes 20 schools at once. Even announcing that they’re thinking about such an extreme move could further depress enrollment. Who buys a ticket to get on a sinking ship?

“The danger here is that closing this many elementaries will kill the district,” said Dick Lilly, who was on the board in the early 2000s and later predicted those school closures would backfire. “For sure, some families will leave, some will never move to Seattle, choosing the suburbs, so pretty soon the rising classes will be smaller and smaller … And then what do you have?”

I’m not saying no school should ever be closed. But I am saying: Be cautious. It’s not clear anyone has any idea yet what’s really happening with post-pandemic school enrollments.

Take this year. Since school started in September, Seattle schools have surprisingly added 527 students (going from 48,960 in September to 49,487 today). If you include preschool and Running Start high schoolers, the district has grown by a thousand kids just during the school year (it’s still down from last school year, but only by 300 kids instead of the severe 1,300 it was down at the start of the year).

So are Seattle schools on a big downswing, or not? It seems like they’re still in post-pandemic flux.

Last month, the district got a state grant to study what’s happening with these unusual enrollment patterns. That study hasn’t started yet. Why move to close 20 schools before at least seeing the results?

I would also like to see the district for once try some positive marketing. Yes, the families of 4,000 kids left Seattle schools during the pandemic, which in part has touched off the current budget crisis. So why not first ask them to come back?

Hold a news conference and say: “We want you back.” Make that the new district motto. Offer people reasons to come back, like guaranteed access to tutoring. Or — as two Seattle PTAs are now formally asking for — a continuation of advanced learning programs.

Or create some excitement by proposing a new magnet school … maybe an artificial intelligence academy? Or more of the language immersion schools that have proved so popular. If we can’t afford this, try soliciting private funding, or community donations.

Everyone might be stunned — as they were 15 years ago — at the bottled-up support and enthusiasm there is for public schools in this town.

But we’ve got to be given some good news, some sizzle, some hope. Closing the most schools at once in the city’s history is the opposite of all that.

Mistakes can always be undone — see the history recounted above. And Seattle school parents are nothing if not resilient. But coming at this fraught stage of digging out from the pandemic, this move has the stink of giving in, if not giving up.