Stevens Elementary has stood on Capitol Hill since 1906 (Image: Seattle Public Schools)
Changes in state funding and a forecast for a continued near-term drop in enrollment has Seattle Public Schools scrambling to cover a $131 million budget deficit for the coming school year with continued financial shortfalls on the way.
None of the district’s campuses will be closed immediately but “consolidation” is on the table for the 2024/2025 school year, district officials told families this week.
According to the district, officials have started planning for a system of “well-resourced schools” with SPS cutting its lowest enrolled, most challenged campuses, “developing a system of schools with sufficient enrollment to have a broad spectrum of resource and educational choices.”
The closure process will focus on “inclusionary practices and services” and “be guided by Racial Equity Analysis Tool to assess impacts,” the district says.
To address the more immediate deficit, Superintendent Brent Jones is preparing for layoffs including a reduction in the number of assistant principals in the district.
At the center of the district’s financial challenges are statewide funding decisions made before the pandemic that have hobbled public school funding for cities like Seattle by limiting local taxes. The changes five years ago increased state funding to each district but were tied to caps on local operations levies.
Meanwhile, SPS forecasts falling enrollment across the district for the next 10 years due to factors including high housing costs which will also bring a reduction in available funds from the combination of local, state, and federal sources that power the district.
In previous belt tightening , the district closed schools but kept campuses busy by shifting programs or leasing the properties to private and charter schools. By 2016, the district was reopening its shuttered or repurposed Capitol Hill and Central District area campuses. The start of the 2024/2025 school year could see similar closures, leases, and shuffling.
Earlier this year, Seattle district officials began floating the idea that some schools in the city may need to be closed in order to cut costs. Meanwhile, long-term needs and more solid funding for non-operations investments like campus upgrades and new buildings means projects like a massively expanded Montlake Elementary are moving forward.
The renovation was approved as part of the February 2019 BEX V levy. The overall levy funds dozens of projects scattered across the city to the tune of $1.4 billion. The Montlake renovation portion of that levy is budgeted for $64.8 million.
After the renovation and expansion, the school will be able to serve 500 students. In the current, 2022-23 school year, the school has an enrollment of 184. That is down from a recent high of 268 students in the 2017-18 school year.
With Montlake, the district is preparing for long term trends that it expects will bring more students to the school. With consolidation also on the horizon, that might mean that population trends will be joined by the closure of other nearby schools in further justifying the Montlake investment.
For now, families at nearby Capitol Hill’s public campuses like Stevens Elementary and Lowell Elementary will be watching, waiting, and advocating to keep their schools open.
Learn more at seattleschools.org’s Funding Our Future site.
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I seem to recall that Seattle was able to bypass the levy limitations, thus maintaining their elevated funding levels, after the legislature increased state funding five years or so ago. Please correct me if I am wrong there J.
That is one of the reasons why property taxes went through the roof around that time. The main reasons the budget is busted in Seattle is enrollment declines and large increases in teacher salaries over the last five years, which make up a very sizable portion of the overall budget. You can certainly argue the salary increases were justified, but they still swelled expenses beyond increases in funding. The enrollment declines are likely the result of general mismanagement and family and student unfriendly policies by the district. For example, the district notes they are losing customers (students and their families), but makes little to no effort to determine why they are leaving. What other entity whose funding is threatened by declining customer numbers does no research to determine why and where they went? I suspect they simply don’t want to hear the potential responses.
Public education is a product too… When you don’t teach kids well, when you don’t teach the right things, when parents don’t feel their kids (the most important thing in their whole life) are not set up for success, of course they will escape out of Seattle public schools and either go to private schools or Eastside.
It’s actually pretty dangerous and City of Seattle is messing it up (along other critical issues like homeless, crime, infrastructure). You don’t want a city to have a population flight and end up with no families and filled with poor, naive youngsters who are “progressive” when they are young and then immediately escape to Eastside when they get older.
I agree. Seattle needs to do a better job of attracting and retaining families by making this a safe and desirable place to raise kids as well as grow old. A multigenerational city is a vibrant city. Many twenty-something’s seem to be fine with fentanyl zombies, sex offenders and criminals camped in their neighborhood. Reasons why this is the case include: they are just passing through during a chapter in their lives, it is edge and exciting, they have an overly simplistic view of compassion, and they haven’t been around long enough to understand how Seattle’s failed and very expensive social experiment led to this outcome. These same qualities make Seattle in 2023 an unattractive place to raise a family, open a business or stay over the long term.
Look around the country, this isn’t a Seattle-only issue! We’re seeing the effects of a country that never fully recovered from the 2007 housing crash… income inequality has increased since this time, and most relief efforts have gone towards efforts to improve the stock market and grow new tech markets rather than truly investing in basic infrastructure, education, and healthcare. Since that time we have seen more of these institutions becoming privatized, leading to one of the most ridiculous acts of modern society, the closing of hospitals during a global pandemic!
It’s easy to point a finger at some demographic and say they are the reason, but the reality is that most people are more than happy to ignore these issues or expect someone else to solve them. It’s going to take a whole of community effort to address these pressing issues.
I have looked around the country. I have looked beyond the west coast “harm reduction” disaster. Have you?
A quick Google search suggests this is happening outside the west coast…
https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/state/2023/03/03/kansas-homeless-advocates-decry-sleeping-camping-ban-for-public-land/69957826007/
You can keep saying that harm reduction is a disaster, but the alternative, without any changes or improvement is also a disaster. Mental health and drug addiction services are continually spread thin while society hopes for some pharmaceutical or technological solution.
Except none of the systemic issues you scapegoated are actually the real cause of Seattle’s decline: crime, public education’s wokeness (are we not teaching kids’ maths because of income equality), and rampant incompetency in running a city (look at homelessness and CHOP).
Where do people live is an investment process… Unlike Capitol Hill hippies here, the decision depends a lot on “how much confidence do I have in this city for my family’s success” and much less on “how many bars are within my walking distance”. And Seattle is failing spectacularly to convince the adults.
Investment in basic infrastructure, education, and healthcare (i.e., the things I said we should have invested in since the 2007 housing crash) have been shown to reduce crime and I’m pretty sure would have a big impact on how much confidence someone has in a city providing for them and their family…
CHOP was the decision of a mayor and police department that both had very little public confidence, but the backing of most of the non-progressives in the city.
As for the homelessness, as I said, look around the country, this has been generally on the rise since 2007 and skyrocketed in the pandemic all over the country.
Your lame excuses about “woke” education need a reality check!
@Matt Do you even remember the topic at hand? That only Seattle school district is suffering from student drain… Not sure what you are smoking when typing the below and thanks for pointing out the obvious.
“Investment in basic infrastructure, education, and healthcare (i.e., the things I said we should have invested in since the 2007 housing crash) have been shown to reduce crime and I’m pretty sure would have a big impact on how much confidence someone has in a city providing for them and their family…”
P.S.: this is the problem with this city. People don’t have ability to make an argument without escaping into cliche.
Not a cliche… these are national trends based in large part on the issues I mentioned: https://www.axios.com/2023/01/08/public-school-enrollment-decline
Also, it’s pretty rich saying that I was escaping into cliche when that is the entire premise of your comment…