Seattle Schools to hold community meetings before closure proposal

Update: The community meeting originally scheduled for Saturday at Garfield High School has been changed to Thursday, May 30 from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

Seattle Public Schools will hold four community meetings over the next few weeks to discuss its plans to create “a system of well-resourced schools,” which could lead the district to slash the number of elementary schools from 73 to about 50 by the 2025-26 school year.

The meetings, are scheduled for:

• May 28, 6-7:30 p.m., at Roosevelt High School, 1410 N.E. 66th St.
• May 30, 6-7:30 p.m. at Garfield High School, 400 23rd Ave.
• June 1, 10:30 a.m.-noon, at Chief Sealth International High School, 2600 S.W. Thistle St.
• June 4, 6-7:30 p.m., on Zoom.

The School Board last week gave Superintendent Brent Jones permission to develop a plan that could reduce the number of elementary school sites to about 50.

The plan hinges on creating what Jones calls “a system of well-resourced schools” and the district’s efforts to close a multiyear, multimillion-dollar budget deficit.

The district faces a $105 million funding gap for the upcoming school year and a $129 million deficit for the 2025-26 academic year. SPS is in its current financial bind as a result of years of spending more money than it received, the end of federal COVID relief dollars and other one-time aid, enrollment declines (which is often tied to the amount of state funding a district receives), and higher expenses for things like insurance, transportation and special education services. The district also agreed to a teachers union contract in 2022 that added to the deficit. 

In an updated FAQ on its website, SPS said that it could save between $700,000 and $2 million by closing a school.

The vote last week set off a host of questions among parents and staff, in part because of the absence of detailed discussion on the criteria the district would weigh as it considers whether to close a school, the extent of the savings it would generate by doing so and other cost-cutting alternatives.

Some parents were also wary of the “well-resourced schools” plan, saying that the district collected the input last year but didn’t return to the community until now to say how the feedback was used. The teachers union had a number of questions, including how racial equity would be considered and the effect of potential closures on student-teacher ratios. 

Jones said he used the information from community and staff engagement sessions last year to develop a model of what a “well-resourced school” would include.

Those schools would have minimum staffing levels, more than one teacher in each grade, art, P.E. and music teachers, and budget stability year over year, the district said.

Jones will use the community input from the upcoming meetings to inform a proposal he is expected to present to the School Board next month. The proposal will include a preliminary list of schools that could be shuttered and the effects of closing those buildings.

Translation services will be available at the sessions in American Sign Language, Amharic, Cantonese, Spanish and Vietnamese, according to the district.

The district said it will soon release a schedule of sessions for its staff.