A preliminary report on Seattle school closures includes some surprising findings — including that 157 students chose to leave the district entirely when it closed five school buildings this summer. […] Students at the closed schools were expected to merge into designated neighboring schools — but the report found that happened only half the time.
[…] The district didn’t survey parents to find out why their students chose not to enroll in the merged schools, and it’s difficult to draw any conclusions from the numbers alone, said Holly Ferguson, a district manager who has supervised the school closures and who wrote the preliminary report.
“When you look at where the kids went, it was all over the map,” she said. “To me, it says parents just exercised the normal (school) choice process.”
Yeah, maybe. Or, if they had bothered to survey parents, they might have learned that parents were just sick and tired of having their children’s education sacrificed for the sake of political expediency. And they also might have learned that a lot more than 157 children left the Seattle Public Schools in response to the district’s ill advised and mismanaged closure process. Like, for example, my daughter.
The day we learned the shocking news that Graham Hill Elementary was on the preliminary closure list, was the day my ex-wife started looking for houses on Mercer Island. My daughter had attended the Montessori program at Graham Hill since she was 3 years old, and we all loved the school, but middle school was approaching and we weren’t thrilled about our neighborhood choices. We had reluctantly applied to transfer Katie to TOPS for fourth grade, hoping to beat the rush of parents seeking a middle school slot in the popular K-8 program, and while she was high up on the waiting list, it was no sure thing. Then the closure list came out.
Long time readers are well familiar with my obsessive blogging on the topic during the summer of 2006 as we fought to save our school from closure, but despite our eventual victory the process left many of us parents disillusioned with the district and its ability to meet the needs of our children first, and our politicians second. Two days into the start of the 2006-2007 school year Katie was offered a slot at TOPS, but exhausted from the closure fight and emotionally invested in our recently saved school, we turned it down, choosing to keep Katie at Graham Hill for fourth grade. A few weeks later her mother purchased a house on Mercer Island. Katie transferred to the island for fifth grade, so as to ease next year’s transition to middle school.
Katie was fortunate to have at least one parent with the means to make a choice like that, but I know for a fact that we weren’t the only Graham Hill family to leave the district after the emotionally draining closure battle. Several families who had been struggling to make the best of limited middle school choices simply gave up the fight, opting for private school despite the financial hardship. Others picked up and moved out of the city entirely, including one classmate who joined Katie this year at her new Mercer Island school. And I’m sure there are several others I don’t know of, as I’ve never seen such turnover at Graham Hill as I’ve witnessed over the past two years.
Perhaps Graham Hill was unique in that no other school was more misrepresented nor its parents and teachers more bitterly slandered by the district than Graham Hill was in justifying its closure. A handful of administration officials — including a thrice-failed principle with an ax to grind — had concluded that Graham Hill was a racist program, and were determined to cynically use the closure process as a cover for shutting down our neighborhood school. The Citizens Advisory Committee was force fed misleading, cherry-picked, and downright incorrect information, as well as, apparently, a fair amount of innuendo. Our PTSA, arguably the most active in the South End, was wrongly accused of draining resources from the conventional classrooms to benefit a less racially diverse Montessori program, and our school was publicly humiliated for failing to meet the educational needs of our minority and economically disadvantaged children, a charge that was demonstrably untrue.
Just last month Graham Hill Elementary was honored by the state as one of only six Seattle “Schools of Distinction,” recognized for dramatic improvements in reading and mathematics over the past six years — and one of only three such Seattle schools with over 50-percent of students qualifying for free or reduced price lunch. And yet this was the same school the district vociferously argued should be shut down for failing to educate its disadvantaged students… the same school that was held in such disdain by the district for its alleged racism.
And you wonder why parents like me find it so difficult to trust the district?
I was volunteering at the school when Raj Manhas made his final tour of Graham Hill before including it on his final list of recommendations, and I briefly spoke with him, without acknowledging who I was or what I had been writing. There were a lot of things I wanted to say to the superintendent, but instead I simply admonished him for missing a golden opportunity. I pointed toward all the hard work and enthusiasm communities around the district were expending in their efforts to save their neighborhood schools, and suggested that he could have harnessed this energy to fight Olympia for adequate funding, rather than pitching us against each other in a battle over diminishing resources. What a waste. The fight to save Graham Hill and the other schools was a heartbreaking experience that cost the district much more than can ever be quantified on a financial balance sheet. And the balance sheet doesn’t look so good either…
Already, though, the short-term costs have been higher than anticipated. The original plan called for the district to spend about $500,000 over two years on closing schools. The actual general-fund costs over the past year and a half have been $927,364, according to the report — and an additional $500,000 to $700,000 still may be needed.
The extra money was needed to pay for “transition activities,” from hiring moving coordinators to paying staff members at the merged schools to attend team-building retreats.
“I was a little surprised by the actual operating expense of getting the schools closed down and everyone moved,” said board member Michael DeBell, who heads the board’s finance committee. Still, he said, the district expects to see a net financial benefit of about $1.9 million a year because of closures.
But if enrollment continues to slowly decline, district leaders will need to take action, he said.
Future school closures are an option, but not the only one, he said: “I don’t want it to be the first thing we turn to.”
It’s exactly what we argued in the first place, that closures would never save the district anywhere near the money it was estimating, and would inevitably lead to further declining enrollment. Declining enrollment would lead to more closures, which would lead to more declining enrollment, and so on and so on.
Let’s hope we learn from this failed experiment, and reinvest in our neighborhood schools rather than shutting them down.
” … suggested that he could have harnessed this energy to fight Olympia for adequate funding, rather than pitching us against each other in a battle over diminishing resources …”
Now you know how the British veterans of the Somme must have felt, which, after all, was only a diversion to relieve pressure on the French garrison at Verdun.
OK, OK, maybe the Great War wasn’t THAT apolyptic, and doesn’t really compare with The School Closure Battles. But I don’t think it does much good to rail against the superintendent for not trying harder to get more state funding when the Seattle School District has been the lead plaintiff in a number of lawsuits against the state etc. etc. The state doesn’t have the money, period. The choices here are a brief opportunity to raise property taxes at the cost of delivering our state government into the hands of wingnut politicians, or working for a state income tax, which is a long-term project, or trying for a more rational school district administration that will make better use of existing limited resources, which entails getting rid of the democratic process that always mucks things up by allowing irrational citizens to have a say in decision making.
sp correction
your choice of apocalyptic or apoplectic
Speaking of pitched battles over diminishing resources, this should be a lot of fun for the armchair warmongers as oil demand and oil production trend in opposite directions over the next few decades. Of course, for maximum enjoyment, they should enlist and enjoy the real thing, instead of playing with blow-up dolls.
Goldy…
Your take on the ongoing battle Danny Westneat has waged with those at Madronna Elementary who labeled he and other parents racist resulting in him withdrawing his daughter from that school.
Yours a similar struggle?
And what about this business where, per the School District, Thanksgiving isn’t supposed to be a day of celebration any more? Crap!
Since yours was about the longest post I’ve seen you make since beginning to hang at HA, I’m curious…
Hey! Rabbit! Sgt. York sends his regards and would like you to consider getting in his pot for Sunday supper.
The Piper
@5 Sgt. York can meet me at my hole at 9 PM with his rifle in hand. May the best rabbit win!
Maybe Piper can amuse us with his own stories of struggling to keep his neighborhood from being annexed by the People’s Republic of Kirkland (or from being overrun by temporary encampments for the homeless)? Or about how peeved he is over paying property taxes, even though annexation to Kirkland would personally save the Piper over $1,000 per year?
children’s education sacrificed for the sake of political expediency.
More like sacrificed for short-term economic illusions, that, in the language of John Bogle (see his Bill Moyers Journal interview on the future of Capitalism), requires managers and directors to look no further than the bottom line of a single year ahead. Education is a multi-decade outcome-based project; single year visions of economic status destroy all of our futures.
Oh I love this shit. The utter hypocrisy of white liberals taking their precious white kids out of the “bad schools” where you have 70% African-American student body is precious. Sorry, Goldy but it stinks to high heaven YOUR HYPORCRISY!!!!
#8 spyder:
Public education has had decades and the outcome is miserable. Time to let the markets work.
Already, though, the short-term costs have been higher than anticipated. The original plan called for the district to spend about $500,000 over two years on closing schools. The actual general-fund costs over the past year and a half have been $927,364, according to the report — and an additional $500,000 to $700,000 still may be needed.
Costs are higher than anticipated….
Well don’t they teach that at government admin 101?
I mean, did the same folks do the budget estimates for Seattle school district as Sound Transit or the Monorail?
I’m shocked that actual costs are higher than expected…..
please…
Sorry that families have to lose their neighborhood school. That sucks. Of course based on the above statement the absolute last thing that should happen is throw money at the problem…
What percentage of the Montessori students at Graham Elementary School qualified for free or reduced price lunches? Somehow I am thinking that this number was not very high at all …
I wouldn’t call these kinds of programs racist — since they are equally open to well-to-do black and Asian families, as they are to well-to-do white families. But they certainly can be called elitist, and a higher percentage of white families are able and willing to enter their children into these programs, than is the case for minority families.
Liberals answer to failing public schools is just throw more money at it. It’s all about propping up the WEA and preventing private schools from flourishing.
When I grew up (admittedly some years ago) Seattle High Schools (and Seattle schools in general) were quality institutions. But that changed. There may be a lot of reasons why it changed, and we may differ on the relative importance of those reasons, but THAT the schools ceaseed to be quality schools is a fact, attested to by high dropout rates and low achievement…not just in standardized tests, but by any of the global indicators one can use for student achievement.
I don’t think it has anything to do with race….back before we started mandatory race-mixing (which we fought to the Supreme Court of the US and got slapped down), Garfield was much less racially mixed than the schools of today, but it was still a quality school, at least at that time.
That’s really the problem, IMHO. Seattle is losing its children to the suburbs because Seattle schools, for whatever reason, are no longer successfully competing with suburban schools in the minds of those parents who truly care for their children.
Until that problem is somehow fixed, Seattle’s decline can only continue.
I’m very happy to see Seattle’s decline. It warms the cuckholds of my heart.
@7…RP…
Wrongo, Your Popiness…
Estimates from city staff show a decline in property taxes that is then offset by an increase in utility taxes resulting in an almost negligible net, net, net reduction.
And it’s no secret I helped lead the fight to expose Tent City 4 to be a humbug, which it still is. But in that fight, we successfully got encampment ordinances in several Eastide cities, forced SHARE/WHEEL to abide by permitting processes, obtained warrant/sex offender/ID checks at each location, and generally got TC4 to go mainstream and middle-class.
Now days, it seems to limp along going from one location that doesn’t seem to invite it back to another.
In the meantime, scores of other, results oriented Eastside programs for the homeless are making progress toward reaching the goals set forth in the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness, which SHARE/WHEEL pays lip service to but with which it refuses to fully abide.
Lest we forget, there’s always the snit of the Safe Harbors MIS program to track and evaluate the success of homeless service agencies and programs, which SHARE/WHEEL refused to participate in.
Nice to see you can Google my name…
The Piper
A little background research is interesting. It would appear that the budget for school year 2007-2008 is about $520 million, and enrollment is right about 45,000 students, for an average expenditure per student of roughly $11,500.
The national average is about $8700, although some states (New York) went as high as $14,200. Seattle per capita spending approximates that of the state of Connecticut, the fourth highest state after NY, NJ, and Vermont.
http://www.census.gov/Press-Re.....10125.html
That would seem to call into question whether the citizens of Seattle are really getting VALUE for their education dollar.
It would also confirm Goldy’s point that the school closing was an exercise in futility. The anticipated savings for the closure was a relatively measly 1.9 million a year after anticipated closure closure costs of $500K which appear likely to be near triple that. But with the loss of 157 students@$11.5K a head, the real savings would be less than a hundred thousand dollars (assuming even more students don’t leave in year two of this two year exercise) permitting the upfront cost of this closure effort to be paid off over a measly fifteen years.
This isn’t a retrenchment, it’s a death spiral. Perhaps Seattle Public Schools should stop taking cases to the Supreme Court to defend their number three tie-breaker for school selection choice and instead concentrate on just providing a quality product with the budget they have. That might attract back a few of the students they have been losing.
LOL. Fuck the Seattle School District. Bring on the vouchers and break the WEA!
@11 Given the Bush Devaluation, dollar estimates are a moving target.
@15 “cuckholds”
So where did you graduate? Cleveland? Yes, I see the public schools have gone downhill.
@15
cuckhold
WordNet
noun
1. a man whose wife committed adultery
verb
1. be sexually unfaithful to one’s partner in marriage; “She cheats on her husband”; “Might her husband be wandering?” [syn: cheat on]
Well, if you say so…..
Piper @ 16
That doesn’t make sense. You would personally save more than $1,000 per year by applying the Kirkland property tax rate, instead of the tax rate for your pocket of unincorporated King County. Your assessed value is typical of your neighborhood.
How can you get $1,000 per year of utility taxes by becoming part of Kirkland? Normally, the city rates aren’t any more than 5% to 6%. Let’s assume they apply to everything in Kirkland — gas, electric, water, sewer, cable, telephone, garbage — and nothing at all in unincorporated King County. Does your family really spend over $20,000 per year in utilities? Amazing!
Maybe Seattle just makes bad decisions.
This exercise was about saving $1.9 million…and it turned out to possibly save $100,000. But let’s look at where Seattle could have saved money in the not-too distant past.
Key Arena. That 1995 refurbishment cost the city $74.5 million in then-year dollars…close to $100 million today, to keep the Sonics. That investment in education would have kept these schools open for another fifty years.
I’m not sure what the ill-fated monorail project cost. My understanding is that at one time they had about 140 million dollars in real estate assets for future construction although some of that was from a bank loan Actual tax payments to the corporation were somewhere north of $80 million…I have no idea if any of that money was ever recouped. My guess is that it just sort of went away…as consultants were paid off and the whole project liquidated. But while it was going on…about $45 million a year was being used to support it. That would have kept these schools open another quarter century.
Maybe the people of Seattle just make bad decisions…I don’t know.
Wait a minute Goldy!
My Kid still goes to school in Seattle, is on the honor roll, and has just recieved his Eagle Scout rating.
No school closures in his district
What’s the difference
He is in a well known Private Boys school in Seattle!
We PAY his way
He ain’t a liberal
Do the math
Private > Public
Any Damn Day!
I can remember when Seattle schools weren’t all that bad. My sister and I were the first white kids to be bused out of our neighborhood (South Park) in 1976 to attend Wing Luke Elementary up on Beacon Hill (right? I always got the names of the hills mixed up when I was a kid). Concord ES was a decaying shitpile in a white-trash neighborhood (Now South Park is mostly Hispanic, and to be honest, it’s a better place now than it was then) that was half a step away from anarchy. At Wing Luke, my sister and I excelled (I wound up in the gifted program), and we were both much more comfortable in a school that was 70% Black, 20% Asian, 9.9% Hispanic and so few white kids you could count them on your hands and have a finger or two left over.
Seattle schools are being horribly mismanaged, that’s obvious to me. But abandoning them for ‘private schools’ (Rethuglican code for Evangelical Christian schools that are little more than indoctrination camps with math classes) is far, far worse. New leadership is required to save the Seattle SD from its own incompetence.
He is in a well known Private Boys school in Seattle!
That would, I assume, by O’Dea. An interesting place, that, where for $8019 (or less) annual tuition, $3500 less than the average for a Seattle Public School student,your son goes to a school that is 40% minority, and where the students have a 98% chance of going on to post high school education.
Seniors who graduated in spring 2005 enrolled in 4-year colleges 87%
Seniors who graduated in spring 2005 enrolled in 2-year colleges 11%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O.....igh_School
http://community.seattletimes......de%5B%5D=P
It would appear that the students going here get quite a bit more for their money than do the taxpayers paying for public schools.
New leadership is required to save the Seattle SD from its own incompetence.
While I would tend to agree wholeheartedly I would also say that the leadership of Seattle Schools really does reflect the leadership of the city of Seattle. Even so, it pains me to see the children hurt by their ineptitude. And increasingly, they are just plain embarassing. Spending money defending racial preferences at the Supreme Court was stupid. THIS is as bad or worse:
http://www.king5.com/localnews.....49914.html
Seattle public schools may have high dropout and low student achievement rates but they are number one in political correctness……
26
You are correct, and he is getting one hell of an education, free of Liberal Bias!
Yes it costs us, but it is worth every Nickel, as the road signs used to say, but I’ll spend all my dollars there (as the road signs now say), because it is where he loves to go, where he truely finds success, and where he is mentored every single day!
It’s a great school.
He will go to Seattle U next!
@26 O’Dea is NOT cheaper than Seattle for the obvious reason that there is no tuition in the SPS. You can not compare tuition at a Catholic School wiht the ocst of running the place.
There are other important differences as well. O’Dea does not take all comers and I will bet you that its defintion of minority implies a lot fewer free lunch kids thah the SPS.
Comparisons like this one MUST be made between similar students in each system. I did such a study years ago at Gardield and found that for similar upper middle class kids at GHS, Lakeside, Mercer, Isdland, and Bellevue .. GHS was easily #1.
Goldy
I shudder every time I read stories ike this.
The fndamental issue in the SPS is that the folks that run the place don’t regard kids as free individuals in a free market. Little effort is made to please parents. programs like the one your daughter was in a regularly closed, often based on fictitious claims about racial balance. Successful programs, if they do address the district’s #! issue, racial equity, get no publicity, no support.
The District runs on Newspeak, once code words like “All kids can learn” ..meaning that any disparity between groups must be the school’s fault and resulting in efforts to dumb down the better classes.
What happens .. is what YOU did, parents choose to flee.
Rainier View Elementary was added to the closure list for the first time with the final recommendations, three weeks before it was closed. Could have mobilized citizen involvement to keep Graham Hill open if it had appeared for the first time in the final recommendations?
It would actually help use facts, Goldy. One, Graham Hill was on the preliminary list in Phase 1 so Raj could not have been going through Graham Hill for final recommendations in Phase 1 because GH had been withdrawn. GH did not appear on Phase 2’s list.
Two, the district has been losing students so whether these students were extra or not is unclear. And yes, of course, it’s bad to be losing students. It’s money walking out the door.
Was the CAC given unclear information? Likely so except that when they visited the school it was pretty clear that the school was not operating as one unified school. Is that a bad thing for students and parents? Yes, it is. Did parents, after they got off the list, tell the CAC that it caused them to take a good hard look at themselves and their school? Yes, many did but maybe not Goldy.
And telling Raj that the energy parents spent to save their schools could have been used in Olympia? The Seattle Council PTA regularly tells parents to participate in the PTA Focus Day in Olympia and not many parents participate (either in person or sending a message to their legislator). So it seems like people want a lot without wanting to work for it.
Yes, it is outrageous that the district has done woefully poorly on its closure cost estimates. (And you have the Facilities department – one of the least watched over departments in the district and yet the one with a lot of money – to thank for that. They’re going to audit that department someday and find a lot of problems.)
Cost of closing a school- $1.9 Million
Cost of an SPS letter saying that Thanksgiving Day be a period of mourning–Priceless!