Closing schools: here's a better way
A former school board member looks at the school closure options the board must vote on Jan. 29 and suggests that the members delay a year, partially reject Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson’s proposal, and instead create more K-8 schools.
There’s a case to be made for closing a few Seattle schools. Saying no to all closures and program moves ignores realities — and opportunities — that have existed since well before the current hyperventilating about budget shortfalls became the rationale for the final plan Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson released last week. No one can blame the groups of alarmed parents that have formed to defend their children’s schools from proposals that seem capricious and bureaucratic.
But not everything in Goodloe-Johnson’s plan is bad, though most of it is. The worst part of her plan is what she hasn’t proposed, the opportunities missed that are more likely to strengthen Seattle Public Schools than what the superintendent offers. And it’s those latent opportunities that should make the school board pause.
The seven-member board has three options available. First, they can follow Goodloe-Johnson's plan. Since school boards have a strong built-in bias to accept the leadership of the superhero they’ve hired to “save” or “rebuild” their district, this is likely. Reinforcing this tendency is the bleak economy and budget outlook. This behavior was epitomized last week at a budget work session where, as quoted in a P-I story by Keri Murikami, board member Cheryl Chow admonished her colleagues, saying, "The experts [meaning Goodloe-Johnson and her staff] have been at the table and they have been pounding these numbers and living in this (budget) squeeze every day." At the other pole is board member Mary Bass who sounds as though she opposes all closures.
Chief among these restructuring ideas is the superintendent’s proposal to send half the enrollment in gifted programs at the Lowell Elementary building and Washington Middle School to other buildings. The result would be four buildings (instead of one, Washington) in which the accelerated progress program (APP) would split the space with neighborhood school programs. The history of buildings with split programs has been one of conflict, two separate programs under one principal grumbling about the division of scarce resources. The problem continues today at Washington.
In their lobbying to head off an adverse vote, APP parents, a well-organized and influential group, are reminding board members of the conflicts when APP shared Madrona elementary with the neighborhood program. To end that dispute and strengthen both programs, then-Superintendent John Stanford moved APP to the Lowell building and, despite community objection, dispersed the Lowell kids to other Capitol Hill and Central Area elementaries. Positively, the move also created Madrona K-8.
There’s not a lot more in the “do no harm” agenda because of the way any school closure plan that moves programs interlocks like a Rubik’s Cube. But here are some variations the board could suggest:
1. Move the Pathfinder K-8 program, closing its current home, the Genesee Hill building in West Seattle, to the Cooper building on Pigeon Point north of South Seattle Community College. This would disperse the Cooper enrollment of 300 to other West Seattle elementaries, but it has the advantage of strengthening a K-8 program and is the least harmful item on Goodloe-Johnson’s list because of that.
2. More harmful because of its impact on the Central area, the board could disperse Meany Middle School students and do as Goodloe-Johnson suggests, move the Secondary Bilingual Orientation Center (SBOC) from the Old Hay building on Queen Anne Hill and NOVA Alternative High School from the Mann building near Garfield into Meany. Old Hay and Mann, both old buildings that the district has allowed to deteriorate, would close
3. Still more harmful to the Central Area, the board could follow the superintendent's plan and close T. T. Minor Elementary, dispersing the 206 students there.
4. Also harmful because it kills a program without providing an alternative that would strengthen the district, the board could go ahead with the proposal to close Van Asselt Elementary, moving the school’s nearly 500 kids into the new building now occupied by the African American Academy. The AAA program would end, with approximately 350 students dispersed.
5. An adventurous board could also resurrect one option Goodloe-Johnson took off the table, closing the Pinehurst building in the Northgate area and ending the Alternative School #1 (AS#1), an alternative K-8 housed there. AS#1 has underperformed and is subject to No Child Left Behind federal sanctions.
Those actions close all five of the schools Goodloe-Johnson has on her current list plus one, and the impact isn’t small. About 3,000 students would be moved or dispersed, but it’s less than half the 6,000-plus who would be affected by the superintendent’s additional plans to close, split, or move other programs. Thus the board has the option of minimizing the Goodloe-Johnson plan’s impact by focusing narrowly on closures — which is what this is supposed to be about — and discarding the superintendent’s over-reaching add-ons. This approach also has the advantage of minimizing the impact on special education programs, many more of which suffer relocation under the superintendent’s plan. And, of course, the board can stop anywhere between one and five or six schools as it might choose.
But there is a third path the board could take by delaying the whole plan for a year. The cost of delay wouldn’t be that high. In the district’s current proposal the net savings from closing five school buildings for the 2009-2010 school year would be about $2 million — less than 10 percent of the predicted $25 million (and rising) shortfall.
And there’s some funny stuff out there. In the same P-I article referred to above, Don Kennedy, the district’s chief financial officer, is paraphrased as saying there would be “37 positions being eliminated by the school closures.” If that’s the case, taking the $72,000 per year average cost (including all benefits) of non-teaching staff, that totals more than $2.6 million (higher if any teachers are cut, average pay including benefits, $86,500), or most of the predicted $600,000 per year per school savings. That means of the $3 million per year maximum savings from closing five schools, only $1.4 million per year going forward (inflated, of course) actually comes from building operations, a pretty small figure in the $25 million deficit for next year.
It’s also a reminder that when it comes to the bottom line, the real problem in school finance is chronic state underfunding, not building operations. State underfunding, making a long story short, shifts payroll costs to the local levies. If this weren’t the case, a local district would have the money to make rational decisions balancing the number of neighborhood schools against other local program enrichment options.
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Jan 22, 9:10 a.m. Inappropriate
Thanks, Dick, for taking the time to come up with thoughtful alternatives. I think it's a helpful part of the ongoing discussion about how to make the District more efficient and effective. I hope the Board members and the District administration see your efforts in that light.
To me, as a parent no longer with students in the District, the division of the APP program makes little sense. The District has flirted with this idea before, several times, and abandoned the proposal each time as unworkable. You're right about the tug-of-war that ensues between neighborhood programs and APP. There is also the question of whether the District can effectively staff a second school to meet the needs of APP students, and what happens to them during that painful startup period. Given faulty union contracts and hiring restrictions during a time of likely teacher layoffs, the ability of even a super principal to hire the teachers who are qualified to teach advanced classes is dicey at best. If my kid were APP and assigned to the new Hamilton program, I'd be very, very concerned.
An element that has not received much public attention in this debate is the likely destruction of the extraordinary music program at Washington. When you look at the numbers of students involved, what's happening there is miraculous. Dividing the APP cohort threatens the critical mass of music students that are the core of this program, which now ends up recruiting neighborhood kids in significant numbers, too. The ability of the District to create a comparable program at Hamilton is highly suspect: in my 30+ years in Seattle, the District has never been able to create a program of comparable stature. Indeed, such programs often have continued to exist only because of dogged parent support. In one fell swoop, the Goodloe-Johnson plan pulls the rug out from under these parental efforts.
For APP, the division is all about the numbers and not about enhancing achievement. It is quite possible that if this is handled poorly, it will lead to the flight of some of the brightest students, and their motivated parents, from the District.
Posted Thu, Jan 22, 11:58 a.m. Inappropriate
I agree that Van Asselt should remain in place. It makes no sense to move it to within three blocks of Wing Luke and try to pump it up to over 600 students. It also squanders a K-8 building to put a K-5 school into it.
A better solution would be to move The New School into the AAA building. There is even room for all of the AAA students to remain if they choose.
That would make the newly remodeled South Shore building available for use as a middle school. A new middle school in a new building with a new principal, a new staff, and a new culture. The middle school B.O.C. should be located with it and the school should be made an international school. There are 275 students from the Southeast who commute to Hamilton for an international middle school. If the district created an international middle school in the southeast, those students could stay in their neighborhood and they would choose to stay.
Then the District could close the Sharples building (Aki Kurose). This would save more money than closing Van Asselt and it would provide the District with an interim site in the South where they desperately need one.
Posted Sat, Jan 24, 12:04 p.m. Inappropriate
Dear Mr. Lilly,
I respectfully disagree with your proposal that the board reconsider closing AS#1. Closing the Pinehurst building and discontinuing AS#1 will make the capacity issues in the North and North East clusters even worse as it would take ~300 seats offline. The savings from the Pinehurst building would be less than $130,000 and the potential loss from parents that would pull their kids out of SPS would be a lot more than that.
As for the program's underperformance, the district has admitted that they have not supported the program as they should have and the AS#1 community deserves the chance to restructure with real support. The school's K-4 program has shown steady improvements in reading, writing, and math using approved alternative assessments such as the DRA, edusoft math, and Writer's Workshop rubrics. The middle school was restructured just this year and have the opportunity to demonstrate whether its an effective improvement.
Having another strong K-8 alternative that draws in families who would otherwise avoid public school is a much better option than reducing choice in North Seattle. AS#1 has a 30 year track record of serving Seattle's families seeking a student-centered, hands on education education. There are countless stories of children who failed in other schools (many with high WASL scores) only to find success at AS#1. The fact that AS#1 has had a difficult transition into a standardized educational scene should not be surprising, but the school is turning the corner on that in a way that protects it mission as A Socially Aware Family of Free and Responsible Learners.
Posted Sat, Jan 24, 11:56 p.m. Inappropriate
I'm confused. You see, in this article:
http://crosscut.com/2008/12/11/seattle-schools/18700/#c10186
you argue that the SSD is blaming the victims and in fact,
"Claims that the proposed closures deliberately and unfairly undercut alternative schools may have merit," and "School performance should not be a criterion for closure, because the success of a program is the responsibility of the superintendent who appoints the principal and district policies on how much is spent on what." And I thanked you for those keen observations.
Yet here you argue that AS#1 should be closed due to underperformance, which as MeganMc pointed out, is in large part due to District neglect and, since NCLB, changing standards. We are doing what we are legally required to do yet you would have us closed before our due process, for no gain to the district (except eliminating that annoying alternative school).
AS#1 serves its population well *despite* having curricula forced on them that do not work on this particular cohort.
Why the animosity towards AS#1? By taking the kids that would not do well at other schools, we allow those schools to meet their performance goals while we nurture our kids in the style they need. With you as a friend, seems we don't need an enemy.
Posted Sun, Jan 25, 2:22 p.m. Inappropriate
There's some good stuff there, Dick, like Wilson Pacific. I proposed a community school on that site which I called "Licton Springs K-8) 2 years ago and again a year ago. There's a lot of density around there and there will be more to come. A lot of diversity as well. A community school that went on into the night, weekends, and summer with good family habitat and support would be useful. The Home School Resource Center controls that building which I find interesting.
The administrative obesity is another good point. These bureaucracies always claim economy to centralization and it seldom pencils out. They've got $2M in for some remodeling at the John Standford Center as well.
They need to get out of their silo and participate in planning in this city. With the transit oriented development concepts around light rail and bus rapid transit, they should be planning facilities in unison with that, not in apparent ignorance of it.
They often manage their properties by cutting away the rotting limbs instead of having to take responsibility for mismanaging the facilities into decay, deterioration, and hopelessness.
I think one tool perhaps worthy of consideration to dismantle the self-fulfilling prophesy that is the lockstep of the school boards and superintendents, a way that accountability could possibly be injected, would be to form a citizens oversight panel that wasn't adhoc, but on-going and one with continuity. Possibly one not appointed by SPS. I think this might be a way to keep them in check and on-task as opposed to enabling the status quo which is what I think Cheryl Chow's and Michael DeBell's roles are. It would be great to delete bad principals as well as supervisors of bad principals and bad administrators as well as supervisors of bad administrators. There's some nice cost savings by getting those folks gone...directly and indirectly a significant and systemic root cause of many SPS problems.
Let's start with Carla Santorno. For a couple of cheap fixes on the academic achievement side after she's gone, let's get math curriculum that works. Ask all the parents paying $50 / hour for private math tudors to start actually complaining instead of writing checks to Kumon.
And also, make homework center an essential and mandatory part of each and every school day.
Encourage SPS to embrace the free public on-line education that is available in our state...WAVA....the Washington Virtual Academy. That would cater nicely to both gifted and not so gifted students and painlessly up our Seattle achievement statistics by not making the kids enroll in Steilacoom School District to do it.
School closures (especially in this town) are a symptom of bad management on every level. The "declining enrollment" label hides the realities nicely for the bureaucrats and being able to sell real estate to pay off their mistakes is convenient for them. How about less euphemistic expressions and more truthful ones? We need a lean, green, education machine. They either need to lead that charge or get out of the way.
-Kate Martin
Posted Wed, Jan 28, 10 a.m. Inappropriate
There are some pretty compelling data points/details in the article linked below. Highlights the shortsighted nature of the current plan (and why Dick is absolutely right that they should delay for a year to come up with something more thoughtful.
http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/2009/01/27/school-closure-plan-central-cluster-
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