The Seattle School Board’s plans for closing up to 21 elementary schools is audacious, but in ways that will disrupt the city rather than build a better future.
That kind of audacity — the board appears poised to shut the doors on a good one-fourth of all students and their families — would be better directed at the state and its political leadership. The lack of state political leadership is the biggest source of the financial squeeze that the board cites as a major justification for closures.
Seattle parents are hardly alone in facing threats of school closures in Washington state, or nationally. Part of the issue is, certainly, changes in family size and birth rates. But, as many school districts and school advocates like Washington’s Paramount Duty have warned for years, the major changes in state funding for education made in 2017 to resolve the McCleary lawsuit have left some school systems with greater overall financial challenges.
So far, state leaders have been quite adept at fending off criticisms and calls for any major additional budget improvements. When the Olympia district began looking at school closures, the Washington State Standard described Gov. Jay Inslee’s position as being that no one should be surprised if declining enrollments lead to less money for schools. The Standard noted a TVW interview in which Inslee said, “I can’t solve the problem of people having less children or their not going to public schoosl.”
That’s a smooth evasion. Public schools are his job, a very big part of his responsibilities and those of the Legislature, also led by his fellow Democrats. The Washington Constitution says that providing ample funding for public education is the state’s paramount duty.
Seattle school leaders — like those in other districts — make requests for better funding from the Legislature. But the pleas seem to fall on deaf ears. And Seattle’s requests aren’t any louder or more insistent than others.
That doesn’t have to be the case. Seattle’s representation in the Legislature is solidly Democratic and, if it united around fixes to state school funding formulas and more generous coverage of all districts’ needs, it could have significant sway. One Seattle Democrat, Sen. Noel Frame, has pushed a bill to create a “wealth tax” on stocks, bonds, and other intangible assets of the richest state residents.
But if the Seattle delegation and Democrats can’t unite around the Frame proposal, local representatives might well be able to find school funding allies among Republicans. That reach across the aisle might require only the willingness to entertain modest restraint on the growth of social service, environmental, and construction programs.
With a replacement for Gov. Inslee in the November election, leadership from a governor who would actually prioritize school funding in budget proposals could end the prospect of large-scale school closures in Seattle and elsewhere. Republican Dave Reichert and Democrat Bob Ferguson, the leading gubernatorial candidates, say some of the right things. Ferguson says he wants to eliminate a limit on special ed support that was a key problem with the 2017 reforms.
Unfortunately, education funding isn’t a major focus of the public discussions about the governor’s race. In Seattle, the School Board, whatever it might be doing in the way of behind-the-scenes lobbying, has clearly failed to raise the public awareness of what is at stake for students, parents, and teachers.
Instead, the board is preparing to vote for one of two sweeping school closure plans before the end of the year. In the slightly bigger closure plan, 21 schools would close next school year. Using the most recent figures (2023-24 school year) I could find on state sites, the plan would shut the doors on 7,073 students. That’s nearly 14 percent of the entire school population of 50,968.
But remember that the closure plan is targeting kids in only the first six of the 13 years from kindergarten through 12th grade. So it seems likely that one in every four of elementary school kids districtwide would see their schools shut. Even the smaller plan closes the doors for 5,453 students (by my count), probably in the neighborhood of one-fifth of all the students in those years.
The disruptions will be wider. The remaining students will have to move to the approximately 50 remaining elementary buildings in patterns that the district has attempted to help show. Looking at the maps the district offers, it’s hard to avoid a conclusion that the Seattle School Board is trying to take us back to a simpler America, where your address neatly fits you into a school and you have no other options in the system.
Or, as the Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat devastatingly documented, the district, with its plan for 21 closures, “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.”
Indeed, the district’s euphemistically named “well resourced schools” landing page makes it clear that a major aim here is to have every school operate at essentially the same size and the same share of resources devoted to every use. Thus, the bigger closure plan erases all or essentially all of the popular K-8 schools; and the slightly less draconian plan leaves one such school in each of four attendance quadrants.
It reeks of ideological purity and cookie-cutter thinking. It eschews any serious attempts to involve parents in budget decisions for each school and instead jumps to a profoundly Seattle-style proclamation of how very well we are doing about being equal. By turning schools into identical cookie-cutter designs.
What we know about the impacts of school closures makes this sweeping disruption to thousands of kids’ lives reckless. In particular, it’s reckless about impacts on children. A recent Education Week story noted that it is well established that students whose schools are closed suffer slowdowns in their educational progress for three years afterward. The main point of that story was that a working research paper looking at decades of school closures in the state of Texas points to long-term impacts on some students, particularly the most vulnerable.
Jeongyheok Kim, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Houston, said those in high school or middle school show lower rates of college attainment and even wages. The older students were also more likely to have discipline and attendance problems after their school closed. His paper additionally notes some modest educational problems among students at schools taking in the children from closed schools. So, we aren’t just talking about a fifth or a quarter of students being put at risk but also what must be at least as large a share of the student population in the remaining schools that receive the displaced children. What is sometimes seen as just a sad episode for children and their families comes with societal impacts.
The disruption will surely send many more families into private, suburban, and parochial schools. Even if Gov. Inslee can shrug his shoulders about parents feeling forced to choose to spend tens of thousands of dollars on private tuition, city leaders should not. As Robert Cruickshank, a board member of Paramount Duty, pointed out earlier this year in the Urbanist, the closures are radically misaligned with the city’s efforts to make itself more equitable, affordable, and walkable as it plans for a city population of 1 million residents.
It’s also hard to imagine that creating so much disruption in the school system really appeals to business leaders, even if some of them might be attracted to the cost-cutting veneer that the school board and administration have tried to apply to their plan.
Even by the district’s own estimates, the closures aren’t likely to save more than about $30 million and won’t come close to solving its budget problem of around $100 million for the next school year. That has caught the eye of progressives like Cruickshank and conservatives like Liv Finne of the Washington Policy Center, who argues that there is plenty of money in reserves and the central office budget to make all the needed cuts. And beyond that, Finne suggests, the district could renegotiate its labor contracts. As she also notes, the closed schools could become charter schools.Most people in Seattle probably wouldn’t share Finne’s enthusiasm for charter schools, but support would build among parents if thousands of kids lose their current schools.
As Cruickshank has noted in the Urbanist, state law gives charters priority when a school district puts up a building for sale or lease, and private schools might well jump in. He wrote, “Unless [Seattle Public Schools] plans to leave 20 school buildings closed and gathering dust, this plan could initiate the privatization of nearly two dozen public schools.”
So, the school board’s reckless targeting of elementary kids to suffer disruption in pursuit of dollars and ideological agendas may well weaken public education as a whole. And that can’t be good for equity, neighborhoods, the work force, or even businesses in the long run.
Assuming the board goes ahead with its closure vote in December, the next domino to fall will be the unveiling of further plans for savings next year. Since most of the costs of a school system are in personnel, expect lots of layoffs. Maybe some will be in central office staff, but it is hard to imagine that the board won’t be tempted to lay off teachers. If you can convince the public to accept a school closure plan, it should be easy to sell the idea that, hey, we don’t need so many teachers.
There’s one other bit of context that may be relevant. Almost all elementary school students, in one way or another, have had their education or social development impacted by the pandemic. The experience of school closures and broader lockdowns brought increased mental health problems for students everywhere, as well as widespread academic issues.
To their credit, the Seattle Public Schools system seems to be doing relatively well in bringing students back up toward pre-pandemic academic achievement levels. But, with school closures, the school board is, in effect, proposing to find out what happens if you follow covid-related closures with intentional shutdowns of school buildings — with all evidence pointing to bad outcomes and the students of Seattle serving as unwilling participants in the experiment.
That’s reckless.
Disclosures: The author has a granddaughter attending one of the schools that could be affected by the closures. As an editorial writer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the author supported the idea of school closures decided on by the Seattle School Board in 2009.
Great piece Joe, thanks. One factor not mentioned is that SPS caved to the demands of the teachers union in its last contract, when it was clear it was unaffordable.
I think this is more of a “yes and” situation. The state has underfunded education, especially in the area of learning disability services, but the district has made bad decisions every step of the way. Protracted COVID closures, elimination of popular programs, and other misses related to campus safety and academic rigor. I’d like to see the district display some introspection and own up to mistakes, self awareness, and good faith to community on a plan forward. I don’t see that. Until then, we need a go-slow approach with limited closures/disruptions and adjustments as needed, not a wholesale implosion of popular programs that keep families in district.
I want to note that, somewhat to my surprise, the Seattle School Board has begun to show some flexibility about the scope of the closure plan. A Times story from Thursday evening reports that all seven members are now expressing doubts about the particular options in front of them.
The Thursday story is here: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/board-members-have-doubts-about-seattle-school-closing-plans/
Regarding the “yes and comment”: Thanks for the good thought. A limited closure plan would certainly be more in line with what I saw in several decades of covering education in the Puget Sound area and the state. This plan is so extensive that I have a hard time seeing how the district could quickly develop a credible plan for modest closures this year, rather than, say, restarting the whole process for the 2026-27 school year. But who knows?
I agree with the point from my friend Tony above about the effects of the teachers’ contract. It would be extremely difficult for the board to even broach a renegotiation with the teachers or other employee groups. But Liv Finne, at least, has raised the idea.
Sigh. Over the past 7 years the Admin and Board have quite clearly and directly used crisis to kill academic related programs they find “inequitable”. They used Covid as cover to kill HCC/AL. Now they are using the deficit to kill K-*, Options, and the very last potempkin cover for HCC.
To clown that any of this is more than an ideological Harrison Bergeron jihad is simply…dumb and disengenous. If the Admin and Board got all of this fabulous money folks are demanding, they wouldn’t re-institute a damn thing, because killing these programs is the objective, not an unfortunate side-effect. They simply slap a shiny paintjob on their new equitable mediocrity.
It’s too late kidz. The damage this school admin and board, who the public elected while they did all of this BTW, is doing will not be reversed in less than a decade. The future of SPS is to see engaged middle class patents decamp for greener pastures, and engaged poorer parents to demand charters. Both will expand dramatically in the next few years.
And don’t be shocked when the Right shows up around the same time, mining the resentful engaged parents for voucher voters.
Thanks for this, Joe. More people need to be aware of this crisis. It doesn’t just affect kids at schools that are closing. It affects kids at schools that aren’t, because kids from the closing schools have to go somewhere. Some kids at schools that aren’t closing are going to be displaced to other schools. And have folks forgotten that schools are woven into the fabric of our communities? SPS wants to close Blaine, in Magnolia, which was built as part of an integrated development with the community center, playfields, and (built later) one of the city’s two outdoor pools. This will hurt business and accelerate the exodus from SPS.
The budget crisis is real and some schools may very well need to be closed. But the way this process has been handled doesn’t reflect well on the administration or the board.
Yes to what Aramisdc says, and also —what a complete failure of the Board to carry out basic functions of oversight. Seven board directors are charged with 1) holding the Superintendent accountable and 2) passing a budget. They are failing badly to do both. Remember that the Board hired this Superintendent without a robust search or selection process.
The Superintendent has been beating the Well Resourced Schools drum for over a year without any specific plan, to the detriment of the districts finances. The unresolved looming closures of schools and popular programs cannot be good for enrollment. The Superintendent is currently without a contract, he presumably wants to remain employed, and this is the performance he delivers? Checked out voters need to stop cribbing the Strangers election guide and pay better attention, because the operational and economic chaos that ensues from tanking an org with a $1.2 B budget and 50k families is going to be brutal.
Thanks for these very informative comments. It’s hard to guess the future but I certainly think it’s possible we will see serious consequences in terms of new school board elections races, quite possibly from those favoring, for instance, charters or the like, aramisdc suggests. It’s worth hoping for more serious attention to local issues, as Annie notes. To Benjamin’s comment about Magnolia: I had forgotten Blaine’s larger role in shaping the community. And I certainly agree with the concerns about the closures affecting the kids whose schools receive large numbers of incoming students. I don’t have the Texas research in front of me but I was surprised that it shows that both the remaining students apparently see a small but noticeable drop in academic progress. I don’t know if other studies have looked at that.