As Seattle weighs school closures, parents demand answers

Megan Callow’s family found a home at Sacajawea Elementary School in North Seattle. Her fourth grade son walks himself to and from school. All of the staff — not just his classroom teacher — know him well. The other families at the school have become close friends.

“There is definitely a strong feeling that we are all growing up together and supporting one another,” Callow said. 

But with just 229 students enrolled in an older building, Callow has known her beloved school checks many of the boxes that Seattle Public Schools will be looking for when deciding which schools to shutter or consolidate. 

Which is why on Wednesday night, when the board unanimously approved a proposal that could eventually close more than a quarter of the district’s nearly 70 elementary schools, aimed at curbing the district’s more than $100 million annual budget gap, she was surprised by her emotional reaction. 

“It felt wrenching when it became real like that,” Callow said. “It’s all going to get pulled out from under us. What are we going to do? I have no clue what the district is planning for the families of schools that are going to be closed. Is it going to be left to families to figure out what schools to go to? Are we going to be shuttled to another school?”

Questions like Callow’s echoed through parent circles Thursday as they’ve now entered an uncomfortable waiting game, worried whether their children will have to move schools. The concerns are particularly acute for parents at smaller schools, even though the district stresses there are many factors that will determine if a school will close — not just population size.

If Seattle goes through with a plan to close 20 elementary schools by the 2025-26 school year, it would result in one of the largest one-time closures of schools in the country in a decade, since Chicago closed 50 schools in 2013 and Philadelphia shuttered two dozen that same year. Both cities have student population sizes much larger than Seattle’s, but their reasons were not very different: budget deficits and underused buildings.

For a while now, SPS has been spending more money than it took in. Federal COVID relief dollars have dried up, the district has lost more than 4,000 students since before the pandemic and an expensive teachers union contract added about $94 million to the deficit. 

School Board Director Brandon Hersey, who represents District 7, defended the union contract, knowing that it put the district in a deeper hole.

“Many things can be true at the same time,” Hersey said. “Do our educators deserve the amount of funding that we placed into that contract? 100% they did. … [Did] we have the resources at that moment to fund that contract for everything that it was worth? I think the answer is emphatically no. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t do what we know is right for our educators and our families, because this is an incredibly expensive city.”

Washington does not fully fund the cost of educating the state’s students. Even after the McCleary lawsuit — a long-running battle over the state’s role in funding, which led to an increase in K-12 dollars in the 2018-19 school year — funding was not fixed for many parts of the education system. 

The formula the state uses to determine how much it sends to districts relies on a set of staff-to-student ratios: The number of students in a district determines how many teachers, principals and staff the district needs and ultimately what the state pays. But some costs are outside the scope of what the state considers “basic education,” and the formula doesn’t take into account variations in the cost of providing special education services, transportation, more expensive insurance and inflation, board President Liza Rankin and Superintendent Brent Jones said.  

“It’s an allocation formula that’s disconnected to the number of students and a whole set of assumptions about what a school needs to … support children, that’s not actually connected to meeting the needs of students,” Rankin said. 

“What we need is a funding formula from the state that is actually connected to the cost of providing education,” she said.  

The district’s move to consider closing a historic number of schools is tied to its plan to develop what it calls “a system of well-resourced schools” — a term the district uses to describe schools that have what students need to succeed, including a minimum staffing level, arts, music and P.E., and multiple teachers at each grade level. 

“No one wants to close schools,” said Gina Topp, who represents District 6, but the alternative is “continuing to water down our current services.”

The current proposal “provides stability and predictability to parents,” Topp said. “If you enroll your child in Seattle Public Schools you know that your student will have a full-time teacher in art, music and P.E. That is the one thing we heard through engagement that was one of the most important factors.”

She hopes that even though the proposal could include closing schools, in exchange it will mean remaining schools will be more fully equipped to serve students and provide stability for families in the long term. 

There are a lot of steps between the vote to explore closing and consolidating schools and when the district votes to do so. The district also stressed that Wednesday’s vote does not commit them to anything beyond developing a proposal.

The district plans to hold a series of community engagement meetings to solicit feedback from families. And there are legally required steps, including public hearings, that the district must follow.

Large school districts have resorted at various times to closing schools to address budget problems, declining enrollment and low performance, but research on whether closing schools leads to financial and academic gains is mixed. What’s clear is that closures can divide communities and cause significant political fallout.

A 2011 report by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which looked at large-scale closures in six urban districts, found small financial savings in the short term. Big savings came when the closures were accompanied by layoffs. 

Beverly Redmond, the district spokesperson and chief of staff, said this week that the district plans to speak with its labor partners about how closures and consolidation could affect their members. She did not answer specific questions about the possibility of layoffs. 

Researchers at the University of Chicago, who examined the impacts of Chicago’s 2013 closures, found that both the students who moved and those whose schools absorbed students saw their test scores decline. In the year the district announced the closures, students from the schools that closed lost the equivalent of about a month and a half in reading and about two months in math. While their performance in reading rebounded after a year, math scores continued to lag for several years.

The work the district has done toward equity and inclusion could be diminished, said Christine Tang, the executive director of Families of Color Seattle. 

“The concerns are that schools are going to be overcrowded and really young children are going to have longer trips to school and not be able to walk to their schools with their friends and neighbors,” Tang said. “[The closures] will impact the sense of community.”

Alex Wakeman Rouse, a parent of a student at Dunlap Elementary and a leader of All Together for Seattle Schools, says she hopes the threat of closures helps reinvigorate parents to advocate for the state to more fully fund education. 

Rouse is worried the district won’t share details about which schools will close, how these changes will address the budget crisis, or how they will improve racial equity and student outcomes until June, which will be too late, as many families are detached from the school community during summer break. 

Topp says it is a tricky balance. She understands the concern that less feedback will happen during the summer, but also wants to get the process moving so that families have enough time to adjust their routines if their elementary school is closing come fall 2025. 

To figure out which schools to close, the district is going to look at each school’s current and 10-year enrollment projection, the age and condition of the buildings, academic offerings and equity, and distances between schools and safety issues, district officials said.

Kyle Bergquist, who lives in the Magnolia neighborhood and has two children in elementary schools at SPS, said he disliked the idea of closing schools and the potential disruption to children and families.

“They have a community, they have their friends, they have a support system, they only get one childhood,” he said. “As parents you want to do what you can to make the best of it, and relocating schools halfway through someone’s elementary career, though they’ll be fine in the end, it’s not ideal.”

But he could see ways that consolidation could work for neighbors in Magnolia. The neighborhood has four elementary schools — one private — within a short distance of each other, and no stand-alone middle school option. The only middle school offering is at Catherine Blaine K-8. Parents drive students to McClure Middle School in Queen Anne, he said.

The district, he said, could use this opportunity to turn Blaine into a full middle school to accommodate the number of young children in the neighborhood, while moving the elementary students who are now at Blaine to Lawton Elementary School or Magnolia Elementary School. Both of those schools are not full, he said.

“Everyone in Magnolia would sign on for this, because it enables us to send our kids to a middle school in the neighborhood, where they could bike or walk, or as a parent you could bike or walk with them,” Bergquist said. 

The alternative is to use the bus, drive students to another neighborhood, or transfer them to private schools, he said. 

“It’s a dynamic up here, parents either have to say, ‘If I am going to drive my kid to school, do I want them to go to McClure or do I want them to go to a private school? I am stuck having to drive either way,’ ” he said. “So it almost encourages an exodus out of SPS, having it set up the way it is right now.”

Bergquist still has a lot of questions for the district, including the other options officials could consider before pulling the “nuclear option” of closing schools and how much the district would actually save if it goes through with a plan to close 20 schools.

While officials hope to vote on a final plan in November, Jones and the board indicated that that timeline was not set in stone.

Noting that closures will always upset communities, The Pew Charitable Trusts offered ideas in its 2011 report to help districts through the process. It helps to start early and clearly communicate to families the criteria they plan to use to determine which schools will close.

Outside experts, who can be seen as “fair and disinterested,” can help districts manage the process. Districts should also be open to modifying their plans along the way, the report said. A single vote, as opposed to voting on each individual school site, can avoid pitting neighborhoods and communities against each other, the organization noted.

Hersey, the board member, stressed that like many residents he also has questions, and that voting to explore a proposal doesn’t mean that the outcome is predetermined. He’s heard from many residents who are concerned about equity and want to ensure that there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

“I don’t know what the right number is,” he said. “I don’t know what the buildings are. I don’t know any of that. But what I do know is that we are operating our elementary schools at 65% capacity, and that is not financially sustainable.”