Seattle’s school closure plan slashes what works, not what doesn’t

Fifty years ago, when the ‘60s hippies started having kids, a bunch of them came together in Seattle to form what they called a “free school.”

It was for “the dropout, who is turned off and cannot make it in the structured classroom,” said a 1971 Seattle Times article. (Really, they described the kids like this back then.) “And for the child — usually of well-educated middle-class families — whose parents reject the ‘lockstep’ regular education.”

The instruction would come on field trips and from “volunteers who want to share their experiences with children,” from architects, mathematicians, artisans and “college students and ‘freaks,’ ” the article said.

“We’re doing an experiment,” one parent told The Times. “Whether or not an alternative school, per se, that can be run by parents or community can survive within the bureaucracy.”

Eventually, the bureaucracy comes for all.

That school, which was called “Alternative Elementary,” was so successful they started another, “Alternative Elementary II.” Both are still rejecting the lockstep today, under the names Licton Springs K-8 and Thornton Creek Elementary.

It could all cease under proposals announced this past week to close up to 21 Seattle schools, and to be decided on this fall.

“It would be the end of an era of experimenting in this city,” said Erin MacDougall, a Thornton Creek parent. “They’re trying to make all the schools cookie-cutter, effectively the same.”

Thornton Creek would become a regular neighborhood school under one of the closure proposals. Licton Springs K-8 school would close.

That proposal seeks to shut or repurpose more than a dozen of Seattle’s “option schools” — programs with specialized curricula that families choose to attend, rather than getting assigned to.

Thornton Creek, in northeast Seattle, today features a type of instruction called “expeditionary learning” that is so popular, among a certain set, that the school had 74 kids on the waiting list in August.

In one of its proposals released Wednesday, the district incredibly moved to close or repurpose all of the top 10 most sought-after schools and programs in the city, as ranked by the number of families on waitlists.

This includes Seattle’s most popular school, TOPS K-8, in the Eastlake area, which is slated for closure. It had 140 students on its waiting list in August.

No. 2 most popular is Hazel Wolf K-8, a tech school in northeast Seattle themed around environmental science. It had 124 on its waiting list. A proposal would convert it to a regular neighborhood K-5.

Slated for closure is another tech-oriented school, Boren STEM K-8 in West Seattle. It’s the No. 7 most popular school, as 61 were waiting to get in.

The two most sought-after language immersion schools would also be converted to regular neighborhood schools. It isn’t clear what would then happen to the language instruction at McDonald International near Green Lake (No. 3, 79 on waiting list) or John Stanford International in Wallingford (No. 6, with 68 waiting to get in).

Catherine Blaine K-8 in Magnolia ranks as the No. 5 most popular school, with 73 on its waiting lists. The district is proposing to close it.

It’s as if officials drew up a list of what their customers are clamoring for the most. And then, instead of doing more of that, they said “let’s ax it all.”

“Why is SPS destroying schools with high enrollment that work for kids?” said one frustrated parent, Stephanie Rood. “This is a surefire way to offer less choice to students and families and to wreck what works.”

The explanation offered by the district is that so-called option and alternative schools “draw enrollment and resources from neighborhood schools.” Which is another way of saying: People really, really like them.

The district also says: “Option schools disproportionately serve students who have traditionally had additional access to additional educational resources.”

This is the rub. Because you have to choose to go to an option school, and then apply, many families don’t. Rather than help them navigate this system, or open up additional intriguing options, the district appears to be heading instead toward uniformity.

“The district has not been that supportive of our option schools, of any alternative programming,” said Sue Peters, a School Board member from 2013-2017, speaking on the Seattle Hall Pass podcast. “The Montessori schools, the gifted program, alternative schools, advanced learning, Walk to Math, all those sorts of things, one by one, the district has been targeting and getting rid of.”

The premise would be to try to do everything at every remaining school — regular programs but also language immersion, gifted instruction, special education, STEM, and so on. How this would be accomplished is less clear.

“You can’t have differences in schools or unique instruction programs, because then that’s inequitable — that’s what they’re saying,” said MacDougall, the Thornton alternative school parent.

Making everything equally great is a utopian goal. But the 50 years of experimentation suggests it isn’t human nature for everyone to even want to walk the same path.

“Alternative education is a recognition that kids are not widgets — that they have different learning styles,” said Leslie Harris, a School Board member from 2015 to 2023, also speaking on Seattle Hall Pass.

“Are they [the option schools] too white? Some of them absolutely are,” she said. “But what’s your problem statement? If they’re too white, what are we doing to increase that diversity as opposed to killing them?”

Even if there are good intentions all around here, I don’t feel that this is going to end well.

For starters, it may make sense to close some school buildings to save money. But it isn’t clear how shutting down the popular academic programs helps the budget. It will only exacerbate the district’s enrollment problems.

School officials are asking vital questions about why what they do doesn’t work well for all students. But it’s a mystery how closing a STEM program, say, or an advanced learning program, helps anybody who isn’t in those programs. They’re still not in them after they’re ended. Wouldn’t it be better to offer more choices, not fewer?

If the district’s response is to go bland, by sanding off all the quirky, interesting edges, there’s little doubt that risk-taking parents with the same adventurous spirit of the hippies 50 years ago will split off and form their own schools. Only now it’ll be charter schools, maybe, or private co-ops.

Public schools already are under siege financially, culturally, politically.

“We talk about being a world-class city, a city of the future,” said Erin Combs, who has a second grader at the Thornton Creek alternative school. “So how did we get to where we’re about to roll back 50 years of educational experimentation and innovation?”

It’s a great question. It ought to frame the debate during the most pivotal moment for Seattle Public Schools in my time in this city, which dates to the 1980s.

Cookie-cutter wasn’t the answer then, and I seriously doubt it’s going to cut it for Seattle now.