Seattle Schools Board Special Meeting Sept. 24, 2025

It is 4.34 p.m.

We are going to call the board meeting to order in just a moment.

We have quorum here.

We have three directors online.

Three directors here in person.

All right, good evening.

This is President Taup and I'm now calling the board's special meeting to order at 4.35 p.m.

Please note that this meeting is being recorded.

We would like to acknowledge that we are in ancestral lands and the traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish people.

For the record, I will call the roll Vice President Briggs I don't think she's here Director Clark Present Director Hersey You came off mute for a second then went back on mute Now you're off mute One second, got it

How's that?

Yes, we can hear you, Director Hersey.

Bet.

I'm here.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Director Mizrahi.

Close, Director Mizrahi.

We hear background noise.

We do not hear you.

I'm here.

Can you hear me now?

Yes, we can.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Director Rankin.

Here.

Director Sarju.

No tech difficulties in here.

And this is President Topp.

I am excited for this board work session this evening.

We do have a lot to cover.

I just want to start off with one quick reminder we are in the middle of our board engagement on our superintendent leadership profile report our next meeting it will be a general session sharing out that report this Saturday at 1 p.m.

I am looking for an additional board director to join so if you're available please let me know and we will begin this evening with a presentation from Education Resource Strategies.

We have them here.

They have been working with staff to conduct an analysis on our current resources in alignment with our goals and guardrails.

This work is laying the foundation for our strategic plan.

We heard about that a little bit and how that was going on our strategic plan at our last board meeting.

after our discussion with Education Resource Strategies or ERS we'll have a presentation from staff on the 06-07 budget get a brief update on October staffing adjustments and then high school lunch changes so there are four topics that we hope to cover here this evening 2026, yes.

Oh, yeah, well, not the year that I graduated high school.

2026, 2027. But I'm gonna hand it over now to Superintendent Podesta to introduce ERS.

Great.

Thank you very much, President Topp.

As you noted, we've talked about the overall strategic planning process a few times and most recently last week.

This step that we want to talk about today is the first part, a deep dive into how we're allocating resources and how well we're using those.

It's been so great to have our partners in education resource strategies to get an objective voice.

It's not that we can't drill into our own resource use, Having a partner that brings a methodology, that brings extra capacity, and brings the ability to not just benchmark against peers nationally, but to give us some qualitative descriptions about different things they've seen in other places is just invaluable.

You start a strategic plan.

If you're trying to figure out where you're trying to go, you need to know where you are.

And we may think we know where we are, but it's really good to get another perspective of where we are.

And again, to have that objective view and a proven methodology for doing this.

I note that resources are, everything on this agenda is about resources.

Obviously this study, but we're going to talk about the budget, which is by definition resources.

We're going to talk about staffing adjustments we make, which are all about aligning resources to where students actually are.

and we're going to talk about our school lunch schedule which is also how we use time.

What are the competing needs for students' time, for staff time during the day.

So all these subjects, this is the resource meeting and so we're going to go off to a great start.

It's also, I joined the district when we just adopted the previous strategic plan and the This is a great improvement to have extra capacity to have an outside partner.

We had a little bit of that the last time, but that was a little bit more of a DIY project and there's the downside to that.

There are things we know, but running a school district, you run a treadmill all the time.

So having extra capacity and having that objective look is really important.

So I will turn it over to our partners and I'll ask them to introduce themselves so I don't screw it up, but thank you.

Good evening and thank you for the opportunity to be here tonight.

I'm Dr. Angela King-Smith and I'm going to start us off.

I want to thank the board for this opportunity and President Topp for allowing us to share during this board work session.

On behalf of ERS, I want to begin by expressing our appreciation for the partnership with Seattle Public Schools on this important work.

At ERS, our mission is to help districts really make the most of their time, people, and money, so that every student, especially those furthest from the opportunity, can thrive.

the report we developed together is not meant to prescribe a set of solutions instead we're hoping that it creates that fact base about how resources are distributed across the district today and that it helps you all to have clarity in terms of how you might plan for the future and so that the decisions that you're making is grounded in evidence rather than assumptions As the superintendent said, like many districts across the country, Seattle's confronting a number of complex and difficult realities.

You all have undergone or are currently undergoing enrollment shifts, you all are trying to address deficits, and you all also are really trying to address the gaps and persistent inequities in terms of student outcomes.

These challenges do not have simple fixes, but this analysis is a critical first step towards navigating them with transparency and with purpose.

As a former district leader myself, I think that this type of information is so, so valuable.

We hope that it helps you to have a sort of a national perspective, that you've got now analytic tools and lessons from other districts, you've got benchmarks within this study, while also ensuring that the findings reflect the unique context, priorities and values of Seattle Public Schools.

So this is a starting point, a foundation for thoughtful dialogue across the district, responsible stewardship, and ultimately better student outcomes.

And so we are encouraged by the district's commitment to use this fact-based to inform choices and to guide conversations with the larger community.

Tonight we'll provide a snapshot of the full report and share some of the key insights and themes.

Thank you.

Our time together will be organized into three main sections.

Each section represents a main or major focus area, and within each one of these, will share key insights and data for you.

Our first section will focus on understanding overall resource levels at both school and the district.

Our second section will dive into analysis around advanced courses, as well as understanding the student and teacher experiences, highlighting opportunities and challenges.

Our third section will cover what we've learned about principals and the central office, particularly around current conditions related to support and services.

Now we will pause after each section to allow the board to ask clarifying questions.

And then finally, at the conclusion of the report and sharing out all three sections will hold a longer period of time for deeper discussion, reflection, as well as additional questions.

So there'll be multiple opportunities to sort of weigh in.

On the next slide, which we're gonna try to see if it clicks.

There we go, all right.

ERS has been honored to work in close partnership with Seattle Public Schools on this analysis.

I know you've looked at this timeline previously.

Tonight we're going to share the bolded item on the screen in the blue box.

We want to focus and prioritize sharing the work that has been conducted over the past nine months, developing a comprehensive diagnostic and fact base.

We feel like we really want to situate the data and the information so that you can really understand how it will inform the larger timeline or the broader timeline.

As you all have discussed previously, this really fits into helping to build the foundation for your next strategic plan and as a tool as well as you're undergoing a leadership transition.

So I do want to drill down a little bit around some of the work that we know that the district has undertaken around the goals and the guardrails and the relationship to this report.

Throughout this work, we collaborated closely with district leadership to ensure that our analysis aligned with and supported ongoing efforts already underway or things that you all have undertaken in the past.

In particular, we were intentional about connecting our work to the district and also connecting it to the work around the goals and the guardrails.

Those goals and guardrails helped to inform our work and guide the detail analysis in a number of different ways.

So you may be wondering, so how was it connected?

How did it inform the work?

Well, honestly, we were looking, trying to understand the patterns and resources and how they were used here in Seattle Public Schools and how that compared to other districts similar across the country.

I see that there's about three main areas that I think that the goals and the guardrails really help to support the work.

One, you all have a huge emphasis on equity and prioritizing equity in resource allocation, and so the diagnostic helped us to understand and analyze whether funding, staffing and instructional time, how it's being used across the system, and if resources are distributed equitably across schools and student groups.

Two, I think it's important that we really wanted to understand and identify misalignment between strategy and spending.

The diagnostic helped us to review district investments across critical areas.

And the diagnostic served as a tool to really understand and determine places of investment or low investment, alignment or misalignment.

And so the guardrails also helped us to frame that.

And then finally, I also believe that it served as a tool to help us to understand and link resources directly to the student experience.

And the diagnostic can really help you all to understand how resource patterns enable or limit the current teacher and student experience.

This analysis is more than just numbers.

It's about understanding how resources are allocated and used across the system.

The goals and guardrails have served and will continue to serve as a clear tool for ensuring the system provides differentiated resources consistent with student need.

At ERS, we see that as resource equity.

and so the diagnostic helped us to understand how the system is really aligning itself or like I said misalignment with our definition of resource equity which is up on the screen.

For us, resource equity means that schools, the district and the broader community work together to ensure every student has access to the right mix of resources and supports higher learning.

It's making sure all schools, not just some, are able to create strong opportunities for every student.

Now, this report is a long document.

It has over 160 pages and includes several detailed sections.

Tonight, we will only focus on a high-level executive summary of that report, and so what you see on the screen is sort of the table of contents for the full 160-page report.

Tonight we're going to use the getting to action section or the key insight section that really focuses on sort of the I call them gold nuggets of the report and it shares selected pieces of analysis that are most I think relevant for tonight's discussion.

So we will use that as our framework, but in front of you are printed copies of the 160-page report.

Again, it is quite extensive in a number of different detailed sections.

In the full diagnostic report, you'll also notice that there is sort of a guide because the intent for that is to be a written or for it to be read.

And so on the side, we've written sort of like a key to sort of help you to contextualize as well as to help understand the data that you're looking at.

So this report provides a snapshot of those resource use patterns for the 2024-2025 school year, and it examines the factors that contributed to those patterns.

And so you've heard me talk about what this report focuses on.

I want to take a moment to talk about what this report does not include.

This report is not a deficit reduction plan or a deficit reduction strategy.

While it identifies cost pressures in areas where efficiencies can be found, the intent is to provide a clear fact base that shows how current spending patterns connect to strategy, practice, and a lived experience in Seattle Public Schools.

So this should serve as a foundation for planning.

It should help to inform and serve as a guide as you're undergoing leadership transition and for you all as you're thinking about making trade-offs and decisions.

We tried to build on a lot of the work that had already been done, looking at all of the various reports and analysis that had been done in the past.

We built on that.

But we also did a lot of new data collection, both qualitative, quantitative, and other types of interviews, focus groups, where we were really trying to understand some of the challenges and themes across Seattle Public Schools.

I want to take a moment to really thank the staff and across the board for their candid feedback and sharing data with us to be able to complete this analysis because it was quite intensive, if you can imagine.

This 160 pages is only like a little snapshot of all of the data that we collected.

Today we're going to be sharing highlights of the full diagnostic report that focuses on these six key insights.

And so each of my colleagues here, they're going to introduce themselves as they're presenting the information.

will give you both, like I said, the qualitative and quantitative data behind each of these insights as well as potential strategies that the district might consider as you move forward.

So let's dig in.

My colleagues and I are going to go through each of these three sections as a friendly reminder.

We will present two insights and then provide the board an opportunity to ask any sort of clarifying questions regarding the two insights that each of us will be presenting.

At this time, let me turn it over to my colleague, Jonathan Travers, who I'll let him introduce himself.

Go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Jonathan Travers, president of URS.

Turn on the mic.

Flip it up.

How about this?

Awesome.

Okay.

Great to be with you all today.

My job is now to engage in the first two insights, looking at an overview of what our analysis showed in terms of school resourcing levels, and then stepping back from the school level to talk more about district operations, district funding levels overall, and the relationship to cost structures moving forward.

So let's dig into school funding.

We dig in here, we start here because this is actually where most of SPS resources and most school districts resources go directly to schools.

And I think accounts, we account for the vast majority of district spend here.

This insight also speaks to the district guardrail around resources not being allocated in a manner inconsistent with student need.

and frankly aligns with the research on effective school funding models.

Our research tells us two things.

One, it's important that school funding levels are foundational, that they enable all schools to be able to provide the service levels that we aspire for students to receive.

And second, that they're differentiated.

They're need-based.

And schools that have additional needs are resourced commensurate differently, commensurate with those needs.

I feel like I need to encourage you to ignore my outbursts and my body language because it's already starting.

Like you're already hitting the nail on the head.

Some of us have been saying this over and over and over again and being looked at like we're crazy.

So just ignore me because I already can tell this is gonna be riveting.

And true and good, right?

Like what we choose to do with this will be telling about the adults and their commitment to the kids in our district.

Thanks.

You're welcome.

I'm going to keep going.

So basically, in this section, we are seeking to explore with you three questions.

How much are we differentiating across higher and lower need schools?

on what basis and how does that align with our desired student and staff experience?

So let's get into that.

To start, we want to talk about what we mean by need.

When we say differentiated by need, what do we mean by that and how do we measure it?

So typically, in most districts, and here also, it means three main things.

Differentiated, consistent with special ed enrollment, consistent with MLL, multilingual learner enrollment, and with poverty.

So we're going to unpack that as part of what we get into right now.

And I would say what was interesting as we got deeper into this, what was interesting too as we got into it was the relationship between poverty and student outcomes.

And so that's actually where I want to start with this.

This analytic just looks at the relationship of each of your schools between its percent for the introduced lunch, going across the horizontal, and student outcomes.

In this case, ELA proficiency rates.

Your scatter plots that we show here for both elementary and secondary are similar to what we see in many districts across the country, that there is a relationship between a school's outcomes, as defined by proficiency in LA, and the percentage of students in the school who qualify for a previous lunch.

It is important to note, particularly as we look at elementary, in those higher poverty elementary schools, we actually see some interesting variation.

Those schools are not directly right on that line.

And so there are, in fact, some higher poverty schools that have very different proficiency levels, even if they have very similar poverty rates, free and reduced lunch rates.

We think that that's important in two regards.

One is it's important to understand To what extent is that a consequence of school effectiveness?

Of schools delivering different outcomes for kids with similar needs?

And to what extent is that actually a consequence of our measurement?

Of actually percent free introduced lunch not actually capturing the full depth of the need in some schools, in some communities.

As SPS moves this forward, this question of how are we really measuring student need and does the percent free and reduced lunch percentage, does that poverty measure, is that robust across the communities that we're serving, I think will be an important part of what this leadership team will need to consider.

So with that as preface, I do want to turn to the extent of funding differentiation per the guardrail across higher and lower need schools.

So to be clear, just to lay out what's in this chart, we see that for both elementary and for middle and for secondaries, we've got a roughly 40% differential between the lowest to highest quartile schools in terms of their overall per pupil funding.

So our highest poverty schools spend, we spend in those about 40% more than in our lowest quartile poverty schools.

to give a sense of the magnitude of this.

So is that a lot?

Is that a little?

To give a sense of the magnitude of that, we actually think it's important to think about it in terms of, well, people.

Most of our spending is actually in schools, is people.

And so how many more people are we allocating or replacing into our higher and lower, to our higher need schools?

and to what end, what type of positions and so on.

And so that's where I want to go next.

And just share that 40% in an average, in a composite 350 student elementary school, translates to about almost 20 positions, 19.5 FTE, so that's 35 FTE on average in a lower poverty school of 350 kids compared to 55 in the higher poverty group, so a difference of 19.5 FTE.

What was interesting to us, and I think what's really important to carry forward out of this, is the breakdown of those positions.

So we see on the right here, almost half of those are special education positions.

You know, just under half.

Our analysis shows that students with IEPs comprise a larger share of students in higher poverty schools.

It may be that the intensity of services needed in those schools may be higher.

It may be that there's deliberate placement of program.

and so all three of those things I think are very important to think through as we get into this and I think need to be isolated, sort of separated out from the calculus on this guardrail.

To what extent are we differentiating resources in higher and lower need schools and how is that consistent with our vision for how we're aspiring to serve students.

Very similar point on our multilingual learners.

The extra resources, as you all may know, you have very little MLL service delivery in your lowest poverty quartile of schools, much more in highest poverty.

So that difference of four and a half FT, that's about a quarter of the difference of the 20 that we're showing here.

That is a function largely of where the students are and what the service delivery is for them.

What we're left with then is this remaining quarter or so as I think about where are we relative to guardrail.

And what was interesting to us is the mix of positions and really the theory of strategy.

What are we trying to accomplish with these positions in our highest need schools and what does that say about the experiences that we're trying to create for students in those schools.

I do want to make one very specific note about that first row there, that teacher row.

So in our highest quartile poverty schools we've got an extra half teacher FTE, a sort of regular classroom teacher.

As you all I think are probably aware, you have a line item in your budget that pushes more teacher staffing to highest poverty schools.

Our analysis shows, and that's actually $6.2 million in the year of this analysis, 24-25.

Our analysis shows, as you can see, that yes, it's something.

It doesn't materially change the classroom configurations in those highest quartile schools and so as the district advances its thinking here on how really what are we trying to accomplish with these extra resources this will need to be part of the thinking of what are we trying to do and then working backward from that to and therefore how are we differentiating resources.

Just to come back to dollars here, the magnitude of this, once we take out special ed, once we take out MLL, the magnitude here is about half of what it was.

Instead of 40% incrementally, 40% higher, it's 20ish or so, a little bit less than 20 on the elementary side, a little more than 20 on the secondary side.

I wish I could point you to research that says that there is a specific percent that is correct.

There isn't.

Our counsel to folks on this question is to work backward from student experience and the resources you have available, the revenue you have available, to figure out what exactly should the footprint of resources be in highest versus lowest need schools.

The last point I want to make on school funding relates to transparency and principal perception.

As Angela shared earlier, Dr. Kingsmith shared earlier in the session, we have a principal survey was a really important part of the data collection for this.

How are people experiencing, how are school leaders experiencing the resources in their schools?

I would share that in every district where we've done this survey, principals generally don't feel like they are sufficiently resourced.

We think that there's an opportunity, an improvement opportunity here.

Oh, and also I should say that there is actually a really interesting research that's come out of Georgetown that shows the relationship between principals understanding the transparency principals have into the resources in their schools and the efficacy of resource use in those schools.

So interesting improvement opportunity that I think is grounded in research that As you think about where to go from here, I think we've got to be clear with school leaders what they're getting, the basis for that allocation, and why that is similar and different to other schools within the district.

One challenge of this, just to be transparent about it, and this is not an issue unique to SPS, significant portions of resources that play out in schools aren't on school budgets.

And so there is just a transparency challenge of being really clear with school leaders, with other stakeholders on what the full footprint of resources is and how those all fit together.

That was school level.

I'm now gonna flip up to district level.

Oh, sorry, no, just to close.

So I think I have said these things, but just as a little bit of a summary here.

We think that, so what is the implication of this for SPS moving forward?

We do think that there is an important need as you all advance your theory for how you want resources to be differentiated across higher and lower need schools moving forward, to be deliberate about how you are measuring need.

and the sufficiency and really the sufficiency of free and reduced lunch of poverty, the sufficiency of that as the metric that drives the resource differentiation.

Second, as I said, straight from research, we encourage you all to work backward from what you're trying to enable in schools from a student experience, from a service delivery perspective, to really back into what that resourcing model should look like.

And then to be very clear and transparent with school leaders, with other stakeholders, for what the basis for these resource allocations are.

Okay, I'm gonna keep us moving forward and shift to now flip up to district level and speak to what we see as sort of unsustainable district operations given current fiscal conditions.

And I'll say a little bit more about what I mean by that in this section.

And I would also say that I think our, the full report has much more detail behind the analytics, beyond the analytics that we're sharing here.

So we're gonna start at the very highest level.

How much are you spending per pupil?

And how is that overall spending level similar or different than to what we see in other districts across the country?

The short answer is it's a little bit higher, even after some regional cost differences, it's a little bit higher in aggregate than the comparison districts that are not inside Washington State that we see nationally.

But the tricky thing, the challenging thing here is not just the overall funding level, it's the purchasing power associated with it.

So we're at $22,000 per pupil.

What can we buy with that $22,000 and how is that similar or different than other places?

The way that we think about this as a point of entry in terms of purchasing power is how many students worth of funding is needed to cover the cost of a single teacher.

Why is that important?

Teachers are the single biggest part of our investment.

And so that's a good starting point for understanding purchasing power.

Okay, so I'm going to pause.

Is that what?

Okay, great.

Is that okay with you?

Sure.

Director Mizrahi.

Then I'm going to go back.

Oh yeah, I don't want to interrupt your flow, but I had some questions about the school level slide.

So is now a good time to ask those?

Let's do this.

Let me finish.

We're going to do two loops at a time and then go to questions.

So let me finish this district level funding loop and then we'll pull back and take questions on both if that's okay.

Yes.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Sorry to interrupt.

Great.

Okay.

So we're looking at overall funding level.

We're going to start at the highest level and work our way in.

And so the question is not just how much are we funded, but what is the purchasing power associated with that funding level?

And one really interesting thing that stood out for us is that it actually relative to these other districts, some of whom you are higher funded than, you have less purchasing power.

What I mean by that is it takes more students' worth of funding to cover the cost of a teacher here than in the other districts that are part of the comparison group.

And it's significant.

The difference, 6.4, 5.7, I know those numbers don't seem that different.

If you gross it up to the entire district's spend, that's over $140 million difference accounted for just in this difference.

To be clear, I want to be really clear about this, the issue here we would say is with the denominator and not the numerator.

Your average cost per teacher, your pay schedules, are very consistent with other Seattle metro districts.

which are the districts with whom you're competing for talent, right?

So the issue is not that teacher compensation is somehow misaligned here or it doesn't fit the labor market.

It is in line with labor market.

The challenge is the per pupil funding does not fit.

the labor market.

And that's gonna be a challenge for you.

And so while it is, of course, important to make sure that you're spending all of your revenue as wisely as you can, it's also important, particularly in this district's case, to make sure stakeholders understand the trade-offs that we see as inherent in the existing revenue levels.

I do want to say one more thing about cost structure here.

We go into a bit more detail and nuance in the full report here, but I did want to speak to another cost driver, which is the elementary school portfolio.

To be clear, we are well aware that this board and others before it have engaged deeply in the pros and cons of running low enrollment schools.

And as the next strategic plan lays out a vision for student and educator experience, your ability to effectively resource that experience is likely going to interact with the current configuration of schools.

So, absent significant new revenue, I would caution you, I just want to raise the challenge that organizing people time and money to deliver on this future vision of student experience will be limited by the lack of scale in some of the district schools.

So to summarize and then let me pause for clarifying questions, you're getting some of the strategic implications of this analysis that it is important to understand and assess the district portfolio and school configurations to understand the relationship between the portfolio of schools and how you're going to deliver on that student staff experience.

we think that you're gonna have to develop a multi-year fiscal strategy that enables you to align resources with student priorities.

And I would say that looking for additional revenue here is likely gonna be part of this, would encourage you to think about that as part of the solution.

Yes, there are cost reduction opportunities.

We mentioned them more deeply in the report.

I'm not gonna talk about them here.

And being clear about the trade-offs associated with existing revenue levels is gonna be important.

maybe pause for clarifying questions do you want to call on folks who would you prefer I call on folks however you want to do it all right director Mizorahi yeah thank you uh well this is a very helpful report um so really appreciate it uh and and glad we can ask questions here so um on on the 40 percent um more that we're spending on the lower income schools with higher free and reduced lunch.

I have a few questions about that.

So first of all, helpful to understand the tranches of where that money's going.

Is that inclusive of all funding?

Like, so does that include money that comes in like Title I funding from the federal government on the higher end and then on the on the schools that are higher income, is that including, I guess not necessarily only the higher income schools, all schools, is that including the extra money that comes in through like PTA funding and things like that?

Is that all included in there when we look at that 40% more?

Let me take a crack at that and then I'm going to defer to my methodology guru who did the work and was leading the direct analytics.

There are two important ways to answer that question.

First is we are looking at operating spend.

So we are not looking at capital.

This is one year's worth of operating spend, which includes categoricals and general fund.

So it includes Title I, for example.

Second, it includes all resources that play out in schools, even if they are not accounted for at the school level.

So if you have custodians that are budgeted centrally, but that are deployed to individual schools, we have pushed the cost of those down to the individual schools as we have it.

The costs of resources that are entirely central, superintendent, this group, for example, are not part of those school allocations, so we've not included those in the numbers that we've got in this data.

How'd it do?

Great.

That was great.

And do you know about the PTA funding piece?

So if there are schools that are funding more through their PTAs, is that included in the difference or does that narrow that gap when you include that money?

Rob, it's the PTA funds that run through the district.

So they are included?

Got it, okay.

And then I know that you were not wanting to say this is the right percentage or not the right percentage.

I'm wondering if there's any analysis of how, because I understand when you back out the MLL funding, when you back out the special education funding, which is sort of like direct student services that are tied to the student, and then you look at just how much more we are funding our lower income schools.

It's a fairly small amount.

Do you know how that compares to other districts?

Is there any analysis of where similar districts are spending or how much more they're spending to sort of close that opportunity gap?

I can answer in this way.

Our sense is that this level of differentiation is not inconsistent with what we see nationally.

I would say two things about that though.

First is that in general very low funded districts just in parts of the country that have very low per pupil spends differentiate less Very high funded districts and states with much richer school funding models tend to differentiate more.

One.

Two is that the heterogeneity of schools in a district I think is a really important thing you've got to consider in this sort of thinking which is why actually I don't feel great about doing, like it's hard to do apples to apples comparisons across multiple districts.

You all have, particularly at the elementary level, pretty broad heterogeneity in your portfolio in sort of the mix of elementary schools that you have relative to other city districts that we've done this kind of analysis and other places.

That depth of heterogeneity in my mind would lead us to have an opening bit of differentiating more.

Sorry, are you talking heterogeneity in terms of student population or in terms of the school portfolio offering?

Thank you.

I'm saying heterogeneity in terms of the percent FRL of the school.

So you all have some schools that are less than- We have schools that are either very high poverty or very low poverty.

Yeah, I mean actually we can go back to that slide and see you've got a continuum, whereas in other places- the preponderance of their schools are roughly 35% FRL to 60% FRL.

So really there's less differentiation, there's less priority and differentiation in that community than there would be in a place like Seattle.

So that's how I would answer the question.

Director Clark.

Thanks.

So my first question is about the school at the school level data.

I was curious, you had said that free and reduced lunch might not be the best measurement.

And it made me recall back to some other data that we received last year that I'm not sure if it was included in the study or not from the analysis was done by the Council for Great City Schools.

and it was a needs assessment and they found that our highest poverty students were the population of students that needed like more like the most support and I believe they also use free and reduced lunch as as a measure of that and so I was just curious if in your work with other districts or similar districts like or just in I guess education research generally has there been other metrics that are identified that we could consider using in the future to help us.

Yeah.

Yeah, so let me take that in two parts.

Yes, we built off of where the CGCS were picked up.

Do you want to say anything more about just that we did?

Yeah, just exactly what you named there, Dr. Clark, in terms of knowing what that assessment said, what those needs are in terms of the different student groups and their performance levels.

So that was something that we were aware of as we were building this report.

Yeah, okay.

Second is what we know from research or what we know from other communities.

We are understanding that freedom's lunch captures need of students with additional needs more and less effectively in different student and school communities.

And so we just need to be cautious and understand how that is a good metric in some places and a less good metric in others and then adapt.

One point actually, one point that I should have made when I went through this, just to come back to it, as ERS thinks about effective proxies for need, we think it's important to use proxies and not the need level itself, and not the academic performance need itself.

Like one way of thinking about this is let's just fund schools on the basis of percent proficient.

And so schools that have higher proficiency rates or lower proficiency rates will give those schools extra resources commensurate with their rate.

It creates a very strange incentive, number one.

Not that schools are going to actively, I don't want to lose money, so therefore I'm going to tank my results.

I've never heard that actually happening.

But it just sends a very strange message that if we are successful, then we are penalized for that success.

So we really discourage that way.

of thinking.

The other thing is that we want effective schools to be rewarded, right?

We want schools that are, in fact, beating the odds with the student population that they're serving, if anything, to get, you know, let's put more into that school, more kids into that school, let's see, let's really try to get the best outcomes that we can from that.

So that is a little bit of a cautionary tale for using real-time student performance as a basis for resource differentiation with the exception of extreme turnaround cases.

One really interesting way of thinking about proxies for student need, particularly for secondary level, is incoming student performance.

So if we know the academic profiles of students coming into the school, we have, as a school, if we're successful with them, we're not being penalized or not.

We're not having resources taken away from us.

We're being resourced based on the needs of the students when they get to us.

and so schools that have higher concentrations of students that are coming in further behind should get more resources because they've got more ground to cover with those students.

Schools that have fewer students with those additional needs coming in would get less resources because there's less distance for them to cover.

that's much more attractive at the secondary level than it is at the elementary.

And so you can think about kindergarten readiness, reading, reading assessments and all that.

But I'll pause my answer there.

Thank you.

Director Rankin.

Oh, sorry.

That's great.

Thank you.

I did have one other question, but I guess we can move on.

No, go for it, Director Clark, and then we'll head to Director Rankin.

Okay, and I know we're not getting into nitty-gritty tonight, so I might be going there with this question, so feel free to stop me.

But going back to now, I'm sorry, I just lost my word, my school level, I think.

we were talking about the elementary portfolio and the current configuration of schools.

And I know that we do have some school, like we have numbers of schools that have less than 350 students.

And it was my understanding that just from the report that the difference in spending between larger and smaller elementary schools is around 5%.

So is that I don't think I'm saying this well.

Why don't I gather my thoughts for a moment.

We can go to Director Rankin and then I'll raise my hand again.

Thank you.

Perfect.

Director Rankin.

I'm, like, beside myself, so I'm trying to...

My mind is absolutely racing.

This is...

For those of us who have been around for a while, this is really, really validating, which is less important than the fact that it's real.

and so like Michelle said earlier this moment in time really like this is also not the first time that our school district has looked at what is the reality what do we need to do and then proceeded to change nothing so um this is on on our board and my biggest fear right now is that depending on the outcomes of our elections the school board could decide they don't care about this and could decide that what they care about the most is keeping the same people really comfortable.

And so this is not an opinion on any particular people or group of people.

This is the reality in our schools.

We have a whole bunch of schools that are under the number of students needed to provide resources.

and that means that those students are getting less access to what we would all consider a basic education.

We are choosing right now, if we continue to choose, if we continue to approve budgets where nothing changes, we're continuing to accept the reality where if a student happens to go to a school that is under enrolled, that student has less access to music, art, academic support simply because of how many kids attend that school.

That's a choice that we've made and it makes me absolutely sick to my stomach.

So I am really curious about how in the differences in spending in a high-poverty school and a non-high-poverty school, this is probably more of a question for the superintendent, but seeing that the gen ed allocations are really minimal as we think about student experience and where students need support, I would be interested if you all have kind of what's the biggest bang for your buck in terms of There's really mixed data on class size.

And we have a middle school with seven students in it, and if class size was the most important thing, they would be outperforming every student in the district.

I'm already going to the next steps, which I understand is not what this is about, because I've lived in this reality for many years very frustratingly.

So what should we be thinking about with that baseline student experience and what different tiers of support or what resources should we be looking at in the gen ed section to improve, to address the needs at higher poverty schools.

I think we've gotten pretty comfortable with just throwing more adult bodies.

and not evaluating whether or not that's actually effective.

Not to say it's not helpful, but our evaluation as a district has kind of been, well, did we add more staff?

not what type of staff, what type of support, not necessarily even the qualifications of that staff, and if it's making a difference for students.

I am beyond excited and I'm trying to be...

focused, it's very hard for me.

But I'm really interested in that gen ed position.

If you have other modeling from other districts about what it might look like to think about some kind of allocation methodology to add to the basic gen ed experience that's a little more nuanced than just a little bit more .5 here, .5 there.

Because I think, I mean, if we're talking about free and reduced, or higher, highest free and reduced lunch rates only adds a .5 teacher.

that is barely making a dent in the general education experience.

And of course how that plays out depends a lot on how many kids there are per grade level and all this stuff.

So that's almost no difference.

Anyway, so I don't know if you have comparisons on those gen ed fundings and where the biggest impact is.

One thing I would note, assuming I understand this methodology, is this breakout in the gen ed side is not so much a function of the model, it's actual choices individual buildings made, whether to have classroom teachers or interventionists or the model determines the staffing, then choices are made at the school level.

So that's something we just need to think about.

So within the WSS, a school could decide, we're going to put all of our additional, we're going to reduce K through 2 class sizes, and we're going to have three additional teachers.

And based on kind of the history of the building and the physical configuration of the building, there are constraints that they face.

So what how do we get the ratios for students, but is it a classroom teacher?

I believe this is just how it landed, not how our model works.

Got it.

Well, I mean, the model prescribes some things and it gives flexibility on others.

And so this is the way it all works out at the end is this configuration.

Yeah.

0.5, whatever.

So what I take from that is that the model as it's prescribed is not necessarily creating the best conditions for adding differentiated support for low-income students.

and then buildings make some decisions within that.

I'm not sure the model is creating constraints, but I think we need to go deeper into, so how is it utilized?

Maybe we want to be more prescriptive in the model if we have a unified strategy, and I'm getting to the edge of my skis on my expertise on this subject, but, oh.

I might just say one thing on that.

which is that I hope that actually the strategic plan and this planning process actually answers this question.

That you will articulate out a theory for how we're going to move the needle in higher need schools and then work backward from that.

Two lessons from research here.

One is that you will likely end up in a place where one size isn't gonna fit all, where you're actually gonna want to have some flexibility to make some of the trade-offs and decisions based on individual school circumstances.

So I don't know that at the end of the day the right answer is going to be that every single school has exactly some plus two here, plus one here, and so on and so on.

Well, yeah, and I would argue that that's what actually we have now, and it's not serving us.

We say, here's the WSS, here's the weighted staffing standard, this is how teachers are allocated to the buildings, and there's a very tiny portion of that that is flexible at the building level.

But it still is essentially, you got this many kids, you get this many grown-ups.

It is one size fits all, and it's actually kind of one size fits none, because it's not based on what children actually need.

The other thing that we know from research, what actually moves the needle, strong school leadership, great Tier 1 instruction, extended time, individual attention.

Right now, I think folks are focused on high-dosage tutoring.

Three of those things aren't actually about more headcount.

They're about overall effectiveness and maybe some of the headcount drives some of that, but it's about strong service delivery first.

So it is important to be thinking about how much here.

We're going to talk in a second a little bit about how well also.

And strategic abandonment.

Stop doing the things that are not yielding the outcomes.

I'm going to go back to Director Clark here.

Thank you.

So I found the data around like that you shared about how our per pupil funding currently doesn't match our labor market.

um and you may have just answered my question in the last point that you made but i'm wondering like um and the need for us to secure more resources as a solution to that rather than like change our teacher salary or um but um is I guess what I'm curious about, because I know that many in our community value the homogeneity of our schools and having smaller schools, and is there research showing, I guess, that staffing smaller schools differently or adding staff could help change the outcomes that we're seeing, or as I think you were just talking about, it's more about the configuration of the staff in those buildings and the quality, I guess, the strong delivery of services.

to the students there.

Maybe I'd approach it by saying this, that...

small, very small grade level elementaries have particular challenges.

One of the things we understand from research is the importance of grade level teaming, of content based teaming.

When you are the only third grade teacher, only or one of two third grade, however it is, or you're teaching multiple grades, It can be really challenging to be part of, I mean, you're a team of one, it's not really a team.

A team of two isn't really a team.

And so you're missing an opportunity to be able to plan together, to be able to regroup students in some cases.

A really important part of elementary service delivery often, and maybe this will come out in the plan, is strong special subjects and opportunities for enrichment.

When you've got itinerant folks, folks spread out across three schools, really hard for that to be a part of those that enrichment activities to be part of a vibrant school culture.

if you're focused on special education inclusion, serving students with IPs in ways that make the most sense for them, it can be very challenging when you only have 18 kids in a grade level, 16 kids in a grade level.

Your options are very limited for how you're gonna serve them.

So if you are going to resource schools commensurate with that vision, Our analysis is you're going to likely need to reconfigure resources in your smallest schools in very significant ways, in ways that actually don't align with the revenue that Seattle is getting now.

And you would need to make very tough trade-offs to be able to provide the envisioned experience across the full portfolio of schools.

Yeah, Director Rankin's gonna facilitate the conversation here moving forward.

Just having, yeah.

So yeah, Director Sarju, and then unless Brandon has a question, I'm inclined to move this on to the next section after Director Sarju.

No, I'm good at the moment.

Okay, great.

Okay, so I think I need to clarify something Director Clark said.

what I thought I heard you say is that families in our district love homogeneity.

And I'm not...

No, that's not what I said.

Did I hear that or...?

No, I said some families in our district value smaller schools and like a different, like homogeneity meaning like the offering of different programs and school sizes.

Oh, okay.

So I interpret homogeneity differently.

I think Jonathan used the word heterogeneity, which is different.

Because, and I wanted to give you an opportunity to change that.

Because homogeneity, we have segregated schools.

that have disparate outcomes which creates homogeneity.

I misspoke.

I wrote down heterogeneity and I said the wrong word.

Thank you.

I wanted you to be able to correct the record and you did.

Thank you.

And you did.

Director Mizrahi, did you have something else to add here or is your hand still up?

No, no, I do.

Thank you.

And I know we want to move on, but just a little bit of a stack on your question, Director Rankin.

So this idea of how we spend the extra resources that we give.

So, I mean, so one, it seems like, and maybe I'm wrong, but we don't have a control group where we can say, oh, we didn't give We didn't spend more at this low income school or we don't have like a pilot where we said, oh, and at this low income school we spent 80% more just to see what would happen.

So, I mean, one thing is that like it may be, correct me if I'm wrong, that what we're doing is working because we don't know what it would look like if we weren't spending 40% more.

It's just not working enough to move the needle as much as we all So it may be that it's also just a question of more funding is needed and not necessarily how it's being spent.

But then on this point about how that money is allocated once it goes to the buildings and hopefully presuming that there is more of it too.

I'm wondering if in those schools that were outliers on that chart where you have lower income schools that are that are achieving better results if there are any consistencies to tease out as the superintendent and staff develop strategies to meet the goals where we say oh this is a thing that was really working at these schools and this is how they use that staffing to achieve x y and z that then we can scale out to other schools so I'm I don't know if we dug in on that level but I'm very curious to hear if there were consistencies between the schools that are outperforming.

I know we want to move forward here.

I will just say that that analytic would be where this leaves off and that would pick up.

And I'll just add to that, that that would be where our progress monitoring becomes so important, because we want to hear, hey superintendent, what are your strategies to address whatever the goal is, whatever the guardrail is, whatever the interim is, and for the superintendent to be able to demonstrate to us whether or not the strategies being invested in have made a difference.

and right now we're in a place where outcomes for students have been really stagnant for decades and we have very unclear descriptions of what the strategies actually are and have been other than just good instructional practice, generally.

But I expect us to be seeing more in the coming iterations of progress monitoring.

I think we've been pretty clear that we expect more specifics and that the strategic plan, these things are all kind of coming together.

We should be able to see year over year, we decided to do X.

and that made our budget look different in this way that we approved and that's improved outcomes or that's changed outcomes or that's not working anymore and we're going to try something different.

But our budget has been largely unchanged in the last three, four, five, seven years and our outcomes haven't changed either and we keep approving it.

I'm so excited about this lever but we have to pull it.

And I'll go back to you.

Make sure you can introduce yourself.

I'm going to keep us moving forward to the next set of topics.

My name is Robert Agnew.

I'm a manager at Education Resource Strategies.

And the first topic that I'll be going through over with you all is connected to this first district guardrail that's referencing access to rigorous coursework.

As you all are very well aware, research consistently shows the positive outcomes between taking advanced courses in high school, college admissions, academic performance, and long-term success.

You'll see this in the overall report, but the way that we look at this particular guardrail looks at things like enrollment rates in advanced courses, like advanced placements, international baccalaureate, dual enrollment by different subgroups.

It looks at student success in those courses, not just looking at whether or not students are enrolling, but what's the type of success that they're experiencing in those courses and beyond, as well as enrollment rates in courses even before high school at the middle school level, for example, knowing that The trajectory prior to high school is really critical.

It was a critical path in terms of thinking about what it means at the high school level as well.

We also know that this has been a focal point of the district.

This is a snapshot analysis and so it doesn't necessarily capture the progress that's been made on some of these things and we know that there has been progress for example on access to advanced coursework over time.

In looking at this snapshot data and in looking at access to all advanced courses, so what this particular slide is including are all advanced placement courses, international baccalaureate and dual enrollment, is we see that certain subgroups enroll in advanced courses less frequently.

So we see that the average overall for all students here is 64%.

We see that there are some students and some subgroups in particular that are below that overall district average.

I think the work is to think about why and what may be contributing to these different gaps.

One of the ways that we think about what could contribute to those gaps are these three factors that we have listed here.

One, incoming student performance.

So whether or not a student is proficient impacts whether or not they are enrolling in an advanced course, for example.

And each one of these factors also has different levers.

So if that is the contributing factor, the action comes down to, okay, what can this district do to ensure that students are experiencing success prior to enrolling in these courses so that they can access this rigorous coursework.

A second factor comes down to whether or not those courses are available in schools.

So are high schools in Seattle offering advanced courses for students to be able to enroll in?

And again, the action here, if this is the factor, comes down to ensuring that there's equitable access to advanced coursework across schools.

and this third factor comes down to whether or not students are enrolling in them so if you have a set of students that are proficient attending schools where these courses are offered they may not be enrolling and that one's a little bit more of a vexing challenge you know it exists the students proficient like why are they not accessing those coursework and it takes additional conversations with students and other stakeholders to really understand what's going on there is to what specific actions the district could consider if that is one of the contributing factors.

So, gosh, I want to name that this is probably the most complex slide that we've got for you this evening in terms of what's listed here.

And for that reason, I'm going to go a little bit, I'll take my time to unpack this with each other in terms of what this data on this slide is telling us.

And to set the stage, we are now focused on one type of advanced coursework.

So this slide in particular focuses on advanced placement or AP.

You'll see in the broader report that we do something similar for all different types of advanced courses.

And to set the stage, the thing that we see across the top with that line is about 56% of proficient students are enrolling in advanced coursework on average across the district.

That's that top level bar.

AP.

AP, thank you.

I want to point out that that bottom line, so we have a couple of racial groups, we have a continent.

So it's a little, for me, it's a little discombobulating when, because we have black, Hispanic, what does that mean?

We have Asian, which doesn't actually, doesn't actually It doesn't allow for the identification of the marginalized groups in that category.

For example, Pacific Islander.

Like, Pacific Islander students in our district are not doing well.

And by throwing them in that Asian category, and you did not do that.

You didn't throw them in there.

Our district allows for this to happen.

We are not able to identify that those kids are actually not doing well and provide targeted resources to assist them.

So I'm not asking you to change anything, but I'm saying when something like that is presented, it gives a false impression.

it gives a false impression.

To look at Asian, oh they're doing great.

Well no, PI, Vietnamese, Laosia, like they're not doing great by the data.

So I think it's important to maybe articulate how sometimes these categories don't allow for discovery and targeted solutions to those kids who really need something more.

Yeah, I'm so glad you bring this up because it's a really important point that I actually glossed over a little bit transitioning from the first slide into this particular slide.

And one other question.

Do I not see Native American on here?

They're not on here.

Oh, that fancy acronym that we have?

Okay.

So one of the things that I want to note out is there's different cuts of the data we do that leads to really small sample sizes in certain things.

So to be clear, those groups were part of our broader analysis.

Once we start to cut by AP, by different subgroups, by proficiency, the number starts to be a little bit too small and doesn't fit best practice for reporting out.

Thank you for saying that.

That's what I want people to do.

Yeah, and so those student groups in particular were a part of the broader analysis.

In this particular view, there wasn't the sufficient sample size for us to be able to report it out in that way, but it's not as if they were excluded from the analysis.

Thank you.

Thank you for asking.

So I had started to say if our overall district average is that 56%, using black students as one particular example, we see a gap of about 26 percentage points.

So I'm comparing that 30% on the far left in that dark blue to that 56%.

And then one of the things that we can do is look at those three different categories.

So proficiency, the access to the courses, whether or not the courses are offered and whether or not students are enrolled.

And for black students in particular, we see about half of that gap is whether or not those students have the incoming proficiency.

A quarter of it is whether or not they're attending a school where those advanced placement courses are offered.

And a quarter of it is about whether or not the students are attending or they are proficient and whether or not they're enrolling in those particular courses.

So we see across these different groups, this chart breaks down what those three particular factors are.

And again, each one of those factors has different actions associated with them.

As I push us forward, that last slide focused on high school, but want to be clear that access to advanced coursework in high school starts much earlier before high school.

And what we're showing on this slide is the types of courses that students are enrolling, both in middle school and high school, and you could argue that sometimes this begins even earlier in the elementary school level.

and we see the majority of students are enrolling in that standard track.

Those are the black percentage point figures that you have on this particular slide.

You see a subset of students enrolling in that advanced track.

Those are the red figures there that would set them up to take courses.

And again, we bring this up to say If the goal is to ensure access to advanced courses at the high school level, that journey begins before high school.

And it's important to unpack what factors may be contributing to enrollment rates before high school as well.

You heard me speak to these factors along the way.

The things that I'll call out here include ensuring that students are ready to take those courses and really focusing on proficiency and what that could look like.

It's factors around ensuring that there's equitable course offerings or setting the stage for what the district wants to be true in terms of those advanced course offerings.

It also starts with ensuring that staff and teachers have access to high quality instructional materials to ensure that they are equipped with what they need to ensure that students can be successful overall.

I'll proceed into this next block of slides as well and then can pause for questions after.

So we shift into a set of slides that talks about access to teachers.

And one of the things that research is incredibly clear about is the importance of teachers and student success.

And we know that there is an explicit guardrail on ensuring that students have access to high quality teaching.

One way that we think about access to high quality teaching is to look at the distribution of teachers who have fewer than three years of teaching experience and those that are in their early career.

To be clear, this is not to say that all early career teachers are not delivering high quality instruction, but research talks about the improvement that teachers make over time in their careers.

So this metric where we look at teacher experience can help us understand the experiences that students have and ultimately the different types of supports that the district can offer and provide to schools and to staff.

One of the things we're carrying forward from the earlier set of slides is this notion of different types of schools and school need.

So we're also looking at lower poverty concentrations of schools and higher poverty concentrations of schools.

And one of the things that we observe is that there are more teachers with fewer than three years of experience in the highest poverty concentration of schools.

So for example, on average about 22% of teachers at elementary schools or K-8s have fewer than three years of experience as compared to 10% on average at schools in the lowest poverty concentration.

That trend persists at the middle school and high school, the secondary level as well.

One way that we look at this is from transitioning from the school level is to student groups and again cutting this by different groups and what this means from a student experience and one of the things that we observe is that black students, students that are experiencing poverty or multi-language learners or ELL students are often in schools that on average have a higher percentage of teachers who are novice and again defining that as with fewer than three years of teaching experience.

and as we think about what that means, again from the student experience that we see that across these different student groups, one of the things we look at as well is Thinking about instructional support and one metric that we look at as we think about instructional support is a district's investment in resources like coaches and I again want to be clear that instructional coaches are one piece of the instructional support pie.

So this is a subset of the broader analysis and one of the things that we, and research here is also really clear that talks about the importance of coaching that can drive instructional improvement, teacher retention, and student achievement.

What research talks about from a best practice standpoint is ratios of about between 15 to 22 teachers per coach.

What this chart shows on average is how many teachers there are per instructional coach in the district.

We know that on practice and how coaches are assigned, their actual caseloads could be lower than this.

But this ratio helps us understand that total investment in instructional coaches.

One of the things that we see in Seattle is that coaches in Seattle on average have a larger number of teachers to support.

Almost double.

That's that 41 figure that we see here.

So on average those instructional coaches in the district, again on average across the district support 41. Though we know in practice that could be very different if you were to look at that at an individual school level.

But again this gets at the overall investment.

and just to echo my point from earlier, you know, coaches are one piece of this instructional support investment that a district can make.

We know that there's other positions in schools and the district that are supporting teachers' development and instructional support, so it's important to think about those all together and whether or not that full investment is sufficient to support teachers to be successful in their classrooms overall.

And in sum, you know, the things that this comes back to are a couple of things that this come back to around that investment, again, in instructional coaches and the support.

It comes back to how can the district support teachers, especially in their early career, especially what you all were talking about in terms of what research talks about in the retention of early career teachers as well.

So those points are highlighted here and I'll pause for any additional questions or comments that folks have.

So this is Director Rankin.

I am going to be our facilitator for the rest of this.

We have about, on the agenda to keep us on track, we wanted to move to the budget at 615. So if there's, you know, three or four minutes of questions for this one, and then we'll move to the next one and give 15 minutes again for that.

I don't see any hand raised, but I'm just going to pause for a second and see if anyone has questions.

Alright, I actually have one quick question, which is the instructional coaches, is that something that would be considered a central office cost?

Because most schools don't have their own instructional coach, I don't think.

I believe that was in the school level analysis here.

I do have an anecdote.

As I've been visiting schools, and this has been a past strategy that was part of the last strategic plan, is instructional coaches.

And I've asked each principal, what would move the needle?

And this is a school that was one of the outliers on our chart of poverty versus ELA outcomes.

Interesting.

And said,

and this is largely an artifact of the last strategic plan is the coach and the coaches made all the difference.

At least that was one principal's view.

So that was dedicated to that school?

Right.

Okay.

I'm wondering, mostly in terms of our cost, I think it's really easy to say, oh, central office is bloated or, oh, this...

So I wanted to be clear about what's included in a central office...

And there's how we budget it.

Service and what's a school service.

And how you analyze that are two different things.

Okay, so instructional coaches would be a school.

So what we're picking up here are those instructional coaches that are at the school level.

Okay.

There's a variety of other positions, whether it's folks in, like, the teacher leadership cadre.

We know there's demonstration teachers or curriculum specialists.

So there's other folks beyond those that are at schools and could even be budgeted centrally that are also providing those supports out.

Okay.

And in the last strategic plan, I believe that was a central office cost that we assigned to part of the priority school kind of concept, and there are still kind of some artifacts of that in the system.

That seems like a good opportunity to look at more.

All right, Rob, go ahead.

Thanks.

Thank you.

And I'm going to transition things back to Dr. Kingsman.

All right, I want to talk about principals and school leaders.

As many of us know, principals are the second most important factor in driving student outcomes because they directly shape the conditions for teaching and learning across an entire school.

And so what we know is that effective principals create an environment where teaching can thrive, making leadership a critical driver of student success.

So in this section, we're going to talk a little bit about some of the things we learned.

I want to reference a metric that's really helpful to sort of benchmark possible levels of support for your principals around span of control.

And so that's the ratio of principals to principal supervisors.

And so it helps us, again, similar to what Rob was just sharing around the coaches, it helps us to sort of understand what levels of support are there.

I do want to say a caveat regarding what you're seeing here.

We looked at what was on paper as to who was assigned to who.

And so this does not reflect some of the additional principal coaches that you have at your central office level that could be impacting or that could or would sort of bring this ratio down some.

And what we do know is that because these spans are controller a little wide, we know that the work that's happening in central office is to make some adjustments.

So, you know, one principal supervisor might have quite a few.

They've been moving some people behind the scenes, so I want you to take that into account to what you're seeing on the screen.

But still, in Seattle, your principal supervisors or regional executive directors have larger spans of control than other peer districts.

Across the regions within Seattle, there are significant variation in terms of span of control.

and I know, like I said, they are mindful of some of the wide ranges and they try to sort of balance out the needs across your regional executive directors.

On the next slide, we show a table that shows the demographics of each region.

Again, we looked at your regions.

So for each of the regions, what are the total numbers of schools?

What's the enrollment?

What's the free and reduced lunch, et cetera?

We wanted to kind of have an understanding of all the various characteristics across your region.

And so best practice suggests that principal supervisors support no more than 12 schools, yet many of your regional executive directors see significantly more.

And so this is a challenge.

And so the one thing I want to say, especially here in Seattle, you have quite a few novice principals.

And novice principals, just like novice teachers, need support.

you have a lot of need, student need.

And so what that means in the combination of those needs in that school building, the types of support that's also needed for the principal and for the administrators in that building also drives a tight connection to some of those student-based needs.

And so also the other thing I also want you all to think about is that When you have a lot of school autonomy and you have a lot of novice principals, you need to provide even greater levels of support.

And so having differentiated support for principals based on experience and need is going to be really critical as you're starting to think about how do you provide differentiated support, tailored guidance, and development opportunities for your leaders.

And so on the screen you'll see we think it's going to be critical to be able to think about how does the support or services for your principals, how does that change?

How can you really tailor that support but based off a differentiated need?

We think that there are opportunities for you all to consider making some adjustments in terms of those spans of control and also clarifying additional roles.

This last key insight is around the work around your central office.

We know that effective coordination across central office departments is essential to making sure that schools feel supported and that you've got staff who also feel supported.

And without it, critical functions may be duplicated or potentially missed entirely.

So you want to have tight coordination, collaboration, and a shared vision across your departments.

Otherwise, it can lead to fragmentation and challenges around coherence.

and so one of the things that we did as you saw earlier on is we asked your principals to kind of give us some feedback in terms of how things are going with the central office and so feedback from principals and staff suggests that in Seattle that the coordination and coherence is currently inconsistent.

And so, for example, you can see on the screen only 51% of principals in Seattle agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that central office departments coordinate effectively to support their schools.

Now, in this data, there was a lot of, in the full report, you can get some additional information here.

But we did hear some consistent themes.

We also, they also sort of highlighted some of the areas that were also some strengths as well, some sort of bright spots in terms of how they feel supported by various departments.

But we think that there's an opportunity to be able to address coherence and collaboration across the central office.

One of the other things I just want to share is around professional learning.

There's a lot of professional learning that happens around the district.

There are many departments in central office that provide professional learning to schools.

However, this is a good example of some of that fragmentation, I think, that people are feeling.

Because it requires tight coordination and I think that schools are finding that this is an area where they're feeling like there's a lack of coherence and clarity and there's a lot of duplication and confusion.

So one of the things that you can see on the screen is an example where multiple central office departments are providing professional development and some of the responsibilities around professional learning.

Note, this table is not intended to be an exhaustive list, so this is just a snapshot similar to what Rob was showing around the instructional coaches.

He said, look, this part of the pie of providing support to teachers, well, this is part of the pie of professional learning that is being provided to schools and across central office.

So we think it just sort of helps to kind of as an illustrative example, a real example of sort of that coordination risks and some of the challenges around some of the things in central office.

So some of the things I just want to sort of highlight, we think that there's some opportunities around clarifying ownership and accountability and service across all of the departments, really trying to zone in and think about where are there opportunities for better coherence, better coordination across departments, especially those services that are tightly connected with schools and supporting staff.

We think that there are bright spots.

We heard a lot of positive things around certain departments, how they provide services or how they provide a one-stop shop, you know, a tight connection to here's who you call when you have X problem, etc.

And so there are some good examples, I think, that we can look to to think about and expand across central office.

Okay, before we get into sort of looking ahead, I'm gonna pause here to see if there are any questions regarding this section on central office and leadership support.

I don't see any hands.

Anybody online have anything to ask before we move on?

Alright, okay, great.

I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this other than to say we are using this information to help with the development of the strategic plan.

Tonight we focused on the comprehensive resource picture.

It's serving as a critical, critical foundation for helping us to understand What are the priorities this district needs to focus in on?

What does the data say and what are the strategies that you all should be considering?

You saw throughout this report some potential strategies.

I want to hone in on this little graphic because I think it helps to create a visual image of what we're trying to strive towards.

Your goals and guardrails, like I said, have helped us to really zone in on particular areas.

This data is helping us to figure out what are the priorities that the plan should have.

And connected to each priority, what are metrics, which I know there's been some work done on metrics, but what are the metrics and the initiatives and the investments that need to be made for each priority.

Many of the things is a little bit of foreshadowing.

Each of those key insights we believe are a priority or should be a priority in the strategic plan, so a little foreshadowing.

And we've been working closely with the administration and the team to really think about what are some of the strategies around this work that need to be invested in in the next version of the strategic plan.

You can see here the key insight the goal or the guardrail that it's aligned to and those potential strategies.

Again, it's a little bit of foreshadowing.

We are trying to work through all the details of what those strategies should be.

But for each of the major areas, funding levels, the student experience as well as the last piece that I did around system level support and coherence.

These are some of the things that we are seriously helping the district and the administration contemplate for the next level of the strategic plan.

And with that, I think I have concluded our analysis for tonight.

We'd love to take any additional questions that you may have, if time permits.

But thank you for the opportunity to be able to share lots and lots of work.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I really cannot express how It took some pushing to get this to happen and I'm really glad that it did and they're probably not watching but a huge thank you to Alliance for Education for providing the resources for us to be able to do this because this is a, you know, we have everybody here is working to do the business of running the district and adding on a project of this scale means that They have, you know, we don't have the capacity.

And so, but this is exposing, bringing to light so many things that some of us already know and feel every day.

And I just, I'm so, I'm really grateful.

And thanks to all staff for working with these folks.

And I think we have the potential for some really good things to come out of this if we stay focused on it.

So, yeah, just thanks for this work.

I mean, it's pretty eye-opening.

Well, not even eye-opening because so many of us have known this for so long, but it is, I would say, really helpful to have it, like, on paper.

I guess my request would be so that, like, we remain focused on this.

Whenever we receive budget updates and considerations for changes that need to be made.

I just want to make sure since this was such an extensive project that any time a recommendation is brought forth, I think that it would be super helpful to have it linked back to how it's being responsive to this document.

So that's part number one.

And then part number two, it would be really interesting to me to see within this document, where are there opportunities that are exclusively under the board's purview versus where opportunities that will take negotiation with some of our labor partners versus what are the opportunities for cost savings that are exclusively under the superintendent's purview.

I think that if we look at all of these things wholesale, It's very clear to see the package and how we can make these changes but when rubber meets the road and if y'all bring a contentious proposition whether it be bell times, other types of things It would be really good to start the conversation from a place of understanding, like, what are things that we can make decisions on?

What are things that y'all could potentially do without our support, right?

And then what are things that would take negotiation?

I'm just thinking that we're going to have a very, very new board coming in a couple of weeks, quite frankly.

And so the more setup that you can do around what are kind of the guardrails in this discussion, not necessarily the guardrails that we're setting up for the district, I think would be helpful.

So we'd love to hear a little bit about are some of those requests possible and how do you see them potentially intertwining with our conversations going forward so that we don't lose sight of all of this really good work that's been done.

Thank you, Director Hersey.

That will be a great segue to the next discussion topic.

Lit.

I'm happy to wait.

What I, I think something that's important about what you, I mean, something that I'm keying into about what you just said, Brandon, was, you know, that what I appreciate about this is it gives us a foundation of fact.

So nobody is like, let's talk about bell times because we're a little bored and it'd be fun to shake things up.

It's connected to a real need to analyze our practices and decide if it's leading towards what we want for students or not.

So to kind of piggyback on what you said, the importance of identifying whose wheelhouse is it under?

no matter what, starting from a place of fact and engaging our community around what the problem is that we're trying to solve is really, really important and something that was a gigantic miss in 2024 that we jumped to, say the royal we, because it wasn't, anyway, jumped to a solution and didn't engage the community appropriately on what the problem was and why we were seeking a solution.

And so that's going to be really critical in keeping us all focused in the right direction and really bringing our community back into the conversation and saying, hey, here's how this affects you.

Here's the reality of what's going on.

What do we as a community want to do about it?

So I think that's really important.

Yeah, I mean, just trying to tie this up a little bit, and I appreciate the fact that it's a segue, Fred, so I'm excited to hear in the next section how we can be responsive to some of these things.

I just feel nervous that we're going to have a new superintendent, a very new board, and we're going to be bringing back a lot of the conversations I'm assuming that we've had before.

And so really setting up the conversation in a way, to Director Rankin's point, where we're We're starting from known facts instead of an assumption of where we are trying to head and what the onus for some of these propositions will be.

In order for them to be successful is going to be very, very important because I would imagine that there's going to be a lot of opportunity for dissent and division depending on what the outcomes of all of these new changes will be.

So I really think that it would be incredibly important to figure out how we are going to utilize this as a basis point, considering that this is something that the community has been asking for, this is something that the board has been asking for, and we have a very clear a very clear resource at our hands or rather in our hands and there have also just been times where you know we've had audits and things done and they've just sat in drawers because folks didn't like the outcome of what they were so that's just my that's my concern yes director sarju

Y'all probably think I'm crazy.

Well, I am.

I'll just, for the record.

There's a lot of undertones here that you're probably like, what is going on?

It's okay.

You'll eventually figure it out.

One of the things that I'm thinking about, and I'm looking at Mr. Eric over there, because as I think about the concept of a strategic plan versus a strategic focus, I have asked, and I can't, I'm not gonna butcher your last name, so I'm gonna call you Mr. Eric, even though I can Mr. Eric, we've had an engaging conversation because I feel like what often happens with strategic plans is there's something really sexy about doing a strategic plan and then it just literally sits somewhere and then towards the end of it somebody picks it back up and they're like, oh my god, did we do what we say we're gonna do?

So I personally don't like participating in strategic planning.

And recently had the opportunity to participate in a similar process called strategic focus, which does result in a document that makes goals and plans and how you measure whether you're getting to where you want to be, interim measures, all of that.

And so when I think about your work with us, I'm curious what you're leaning as the experts in doing this work writ large.

Like, you all are doing incredible work nationwide, right?

You are the experts from the ground in what is really working for schools and what isn't.

And so as we, and I've been really vocal about, we should not be making a strategic plan that we hand to a new employee and say, here you go.

Well, too bad for you that you weren't hired.

This is what you're gonna have to stick to.

That's not actually, I don't think it's best practice.

I don't think it's professional.

And I don't think it sets a new leader up for success to be handed something.

that somebody else has already decided with little opportunity to influence or change it.

So to sum it up, what are your thoughts around, and a strategic focus is not a strategic plan abandonment.

What it allows you to do is have a more open, journey to get to where you want to go, rather than creating this thing, sending it to the printer to put it on glossy paper, presenting it to the community, and then the two-week news cycle goes away.

And nobody ever looks at the strategic plan again until we're almost done.

That's been the habit of this district.

And if we look at the last strategic plan, what really did we accomplish?

We still are failing black boys.

We're still failing black boys.

And there doesn't seem, up until recently, to be an appetite to do anything about that.

So what is your idea around, given just the huge transition that we're in,

If I could say one thing, and please would like to hear from our URS partners.

We've been very clear, and I think with the board as well, is calling this a draft, that we wanted to be clear, and that's why it was great that we started with this fact gathering, because that's a resource for the incoming administration.

These priorities and initiatives I think we expect the incoming superintendent and their team to make it their own.

But otherwise what would have happened is we could have had an incoming administration start with all this, that the first thing they have to do is figure out, well, where are we?

So we're really cognizant of trying to create a resource that is gonna assist with that transition, not constrain that transition.

So I think that's what we're trying to do.

Please expand on that, based on your expertise and experience elsewhere.

Sure.

I see as the lead for ERS around strategic planning, I see this as strategic management, and that the plan serves as a living document that is constantly and is integrated throughout the system.

So it's not just one plan, it serves more like a framework for the work over time, and your departments should have their own I'll use the word plan for right now, but they should have their own document that aligns to the master document and your schools should have their own plan and that plan should then align up too.

So it should be a cascaded, a very connected piece of tool that is used and it should throughout the year be used and referenced so that it is a living a living thing.

And the outcomes of which are monitored by the board on a regular basis.

so we're trying to get there we're gonna try to get there but it is a paradigm shift in terms of thinking so I love your word strategic focus but the word that I use is more like strategic management and the plan is part of that strategic management or framework but we're trying to help build that infrastructure here and it is you know it's a transition it's a transition the other thing I just want to say is that I think what I heard from the board is that you wanted to have an understanding of where the major investments are to support the work of those goals and guardrails.

And you wanted to have an understanding of what that looks like for 24-25 or 25-26, whichever one you want to consider year one, that that still has to happen regardless of who's sitting in the chair.

So our goal is to be able to provide that information to the board and to the administration so we're all working from one place and to have that insight.

So just a little bit of feedback and context on that.

I could talk for hours.

Yeah, thank you.

And that's a great reframe.

I think we get caught up in words.

And at the end of the day, a strategic plan is nothing.

if you're not using it to drive results.

And oftentimes, that's what happens with strategic plans, is they just get set to the side.

And it is up to the board to monitor.

And when things aren't happening, it's up to the board to do something about it, whether it's popular or not.

We have been in a state where there's been resistance to make the hard decisions.

And I think it was you, Jonathan, who was talking about that our building status and our resources and everything just isn't...

It doesn't match.

We can't make this work.

It's like a round peg through a square hole or whatever the analogy is.

And so for me, while I never could have articulated it the way you did, which is why I'm ecstatic that you exist, This is what some of us have been saying to the tune of gaslighting.

You know, that we don't know what we're talking about.

That what we're saying is not true.

And this document, which is objective, which we didn't pay for.

The Alliance of Education paid for this.

So there isn't any connection to Seattle Public Schools or the board trying to commandeer you all to create something that we want to hear versus something that is true.

So all that to say, I'm like you, Dr. King-Smith.

We're from the same family.

We could talk about certain things all day.

But I'm appreciative of this work.

and how you put it together and try to make it digestible.

Because when you look at scatter plots, I'll never understand what I'm looking at, but your explanation helps me understand what I need to know.

And that's important in this work.

Our families, you know, should be able to understand this too, because it's about their kids.

And it matters for them.

particularly for those whose children are not benefiting from this system, who are actually being harmed by this system.

So, much appreciation for the work that you've done.

I don't want to cut us off quickly, but I know we've got to move on to the rest of our agenda.

I would like to express, again, gratitude to the team, gratitude to the Alliance for Education that helped us fund this.

I also want to note, I said at the top that it was great to have a team come in with a methodology.

One thing the URS team was really flexible about was adapting their methodology to all the policy-based governance work that you have worked very hard on, so that's why you see goals and guardrails throughout this, and that's been invaluable, and as we're looking at initiatives and strategies, making sure that we're tying back to the progress monitoring methodology that we're trying to build forward, and this team has been great in adapting to something that not every district does this way, so that's been really helpful, and I just can't thank you all enough.

All right, thank you.

I'm going to give us a two-minute...

Okay, sorry, it's been an assisted five-minute break.

So we'll come back at 6.33.

but I do want to be mindful of everyone's time and the reasonable

All right, our next topic this evening is the 26-27 budget.

When one cycle begins, another ends.

When one ends, another begins.

I don't know.

It's always budget development time.

It's an ongoing project.

This last discussion stole a lot of the thunder in my introduction because you all made points about how we need things to be different, how we think about the budget, how we develop the budget.

It wasn't lost on us.

that as the board adopted the current fiscal year budget, that you had your own innovation.

Usually votes are yes or no.

This time around it was yes, but with a lot of qualifications.

And so we had a third answer.

And so we want to address the concerns that folks had with the process for the current budget.

We want to address many of the points you just heard about.

chiefly the unsustainable school operations.

We really need to start working.

We want to make sure that what you do adopt demonstrates a link to this developing strategic plan.

And we really want to flip the script that we talked about at the board retreat over the summer before that budget vote came that people weren't seeing the linkages necessarily to the plan and I think we were just very frank, well you have to have a plan and then the budget is how you fund it, not that we because adopting a budget is kind of non-negotiable.

We've been working backwards from a budget to try to fund mostly the status quo with some changes because of our financial situation.

So we really need to do this in a different order and we're working hard and we appreciate the Board creating an ad hoc budget committee.

So this is not something that's going to get completely reformed in one year, but you start by starting and we can make progress for the coming fiscal year budget.

And so I will turn it over to Dr. Buddleman.

Thank you.

I want to start with repeating a few of the things that Superintendent Podesta and Directors Hersey and Sarju said.

The objectives here tonight are just do a quick review of last year's process.

We had a retreat where we got some feedback and that provide the foundation for the process for this year.

But the main objective is to start to build that roadmap for how to connect the investments that show up in the budget to the work of the strategic plan and informed, as Angela said, by the foundation that's being laid with this analysis that they've done.

Just want to echo what Fred said that the setup was perfect from Director Hersey in the conversation earlier to start to talk about how to get towards a better result in terms of the budget reflecting the strategic direction of Seattle Public Schools.

Last year, as Superintendent Podesta alluded to, there was some tension around the budget as we were bringing it forward and the lack of clarity of how it connected to the strategic plan.

I think as Superintendent Podesta just said that there was lack of clarity in the strategic plan on how it would and what the investments were that should be in the budget.

So really excited, as many of the directors have stated, to have more clarity in that strategic plan with the help of our ERS partners so over the long term we can start to make those investments more clear for the community, for the board, and for schools to build that confidence in that the district is building towards something as it makes budget decisions.

Long-term financial issues also remain unresolved at this point, so some of those difficult decisions that directors were talking about earlier in the presentation will be on the docket for this year and going forward in order to make those investments in the strategic plan that we all think are necessary and I think there is incremental progress being made, not just through the fact that we're addressing this issue right now, but there have been more intentional conversations around how does the budget reflect the strategic direction of the school district.

These were my reflections on the conversation we had at the summer retreat and I'm interested if board members had other reflections on last year's process that would help inform next year in the years going forward.

Hearing none.

One of the...

Is that your name sideways?

Okay.

One of the outcomes of the summer retreat that was partially about the budget was the board's ad hoc budget committee that's been formed.

Here's just a summary of what the objectives of that group are.

It's being chaired by Director Clark.

Director Clark, don't want to put you on the spot here, but I want to give you an opportunity to say anything you'd like about the work of that group and how it's moving forward.

Thanks, Dr. Bodleman.

Well, I think really the group developed in part to the discussion at our June board retreat that you mentioned.

And I've been characterizing, I think, our goals in kind of two buckets around both making recommendations to the board around and supporting short-term changes to our 2026-2027 budget, and also recommendations around long-term changes, including developing a budget timeline process that will help us have more insight, board-level priorities to help guide future discussions and development, from the board, a recommendation around the need for additional analysis of our finances.

We talked about a forensic audit at our June retreat and just how can we improve transparency and public engagement on the budget as well.

Thank you.

Thanks, Dr. Badaman.

This slide just shows the timeline.

There's been interest from the board on the timing of decisions and when the board's engagement happens.

Director Hersey mentioned that earlier about what is it within the board's purview?

What is it within the superintendent's purview in terms of budget decisions?

And when does that happen?

And when does that information come forward?

And how is the community involved in that conversation?

So I just want to there's a graphic here that talks about that.

One of the things as ERS stated many times and we're all aware of most of the spending of sale public schools is in the schools and so I have a sort of a graphic here showing how that school budgeting process takes place there's a lot of different pieces to that beginning with enrollment projections the staffing model is a part of that how the open enrollment factors into that.

Is there an opportunity to bring more stability to the system by having that open enrollment schedule changed in some ways?

I know that Dr. Campbell and Superintendent Podesta are going to share more about that in the next presentation.

But just getting more clarity on how the board wants to receive this information, when you want to receive this information, at what level.

So we're working with the Board Budget Ad Hoc Committee on exploring some of that information.

So just wanted to show that this is a complex process.

It's underway right now.

The Weighted Staffing Standards Committee has begun meeting last week, I think was our first meeting, to sketch out what their work should be for the coming year.

The group last year and this year has been very eager to start to lean into the strategic direction of the Seattle Public Schools when it's defined as to what the right investments will be.

So we're doing some things now to sort of set the stage for that, trying to bring some more stability to some of the office and assistant principal staffing, if that's possible, given the financial constraints.

Some other things we're doing is looking at how discretionary funds are allotted to the different levels of schools and if there's some changes that should be made there in response to ERS's findings and the draft strategic direction for the district.

So work is ongoing.

The strategic plan is going to be important to inform this work for the long-term changes that need to be made.

in the way school allocations are made.

And along with that, as you were all discussing, the portfolio of schools is a part of that conversation as well.

This is a graphic, again, to Director Hersey's point about what the board's involvement is and what that looks like.

You'll see the board's budget ad hoc committee is intending to meet through December.

in January the board's budget ad hoc committee is signaling to the superintendent that they're expecting some options from the superintendent on how to to balance the budget and move towards a more financial sustainable model going forward so anticipating bringing forward to the board some of those options in January slide later in the presentation we'll talk about some of what those options may look like largely informed by the strategic plan or strategic direction of the of the district and then you'll see the board's action in June July August timeframe depending on how that plays out for this year Don't want to belabor this but just wanted to remind board members of last year's process and some of the changes that were made and some of the things that did not get changed so just this is not new information just wanted to have that included in this to remind folks that it's still a 1.35 billion dollar budget last year the budget was 104 million dollar deficit was what the original projection was and much of that gap was closed through one-time solutions extending that loan being one of them and utilizing some fund balances in addition to some investments from the legislature and the levy cap being changed.

Dr. Sarge has a question.

When you say that, and I already know this, but to have the statement be that and then nothing following is confusing for me.

So we had one-time solutions to close the last budget deficit, which means, correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I understand that is what we have those one-time solutions, but we still now still have a structural deficit.

Is that correct?

That's correct.

So we have in fact not solved for the budget deficit.

We have not solved it for the long term, no.

Thank you.

We kicked the can one more year without making any hard changes.

Well, I mean, yes, that's functionally true, but we can't continue in that direction.

We haven't made the really hard changes yet, yes.

So good segue here that the district is anticipating the deficit to continue and is working to stabilize the system through structural changes and increased resources.

working with the community task force that's been meeting for the last few months sharing some of the strategic plan draft work with them and getting their feedback on how that could inform the investments or the budget for Seattle Public Schools going forward.

this again is not new news but the projection is for an 87 million dollar budget gap for next year's budget process is what the equivalent of the 104 million from last year would be there's been a lot of questions around what that really means to folks from the community from the board from staff internal and so the next few slides aren't sort of the the main focus of this presentation but their initial attempt at trying to be more clear about what that gap really looks means for Seattle Public Schools and other school districts and honestly government agencies and how budgeting happens at government agencies.

Do you have a question?

I see a hand up so I wanted to ask you Dr. Buddleman do you want us to go to questions as we have them or would you prefer they hold?

All right Director Clark I see your hand.

Actually, sorry, I think I'll wait until after you go through these explanations in case you might answer my question.

Sorry about that interruption.

Perfect, no problem.

you all are just either did your homework in advance and are really facilitating this or it's great so I asked President Topp at a different meeting earlier this week what is it that we should focus on for the board and we didn't get time to catch up on that but I think we've hit the mark at least partially so far so thank you for the affirmation So the question around what does that structural deficit mean?

In short, it means that we expect to bring more money, we expect to spend more money than we bring in over time.

So I'm going to be a little more specific about what that means.

But if we expect the family to have $100,000 in income for next year and they're going to spend $110,000, they've got a $10,000 deficit in their family's budget.

specific to Seattle Public Schools from the 22-23 year, the number we were talking about that we had estimated in the spring of the previous year was about a $101 million gap.

So we had anticipated this much in revenue.

We had planned for this amount of expenses and the difference was that $101 million.

We did not go into the red by $101 million because stuff happened throughout the year.

Some of those things that happened was enrollment was higher than was originally anticipated in the budget the previous spring.

There was some unanticipated one-time resources that came in.

There was safety net funding that was higher than anticipated or had been in previous years.

The legislature made some investments that were unanticipated.

They were for that year.

Interest rates were higher than we anticipated 15 months prior as we were putting the budget together.

There were a number of things that resulted in more revenue.

And then there was also a number of things that resulted in lower expenses.

So there was a hiring freeze which stalled some of the hiring and some of the staffing that would normally take place.

There were some vacant positions that had happened just because it was difficult to fill positions.

There was some remaining federal money that was for specific purposes that still was going through the system.

All those things added up to about half of that $101 million deficit.

So for that year, Seattle Public Schools did not end up losing the originally anticipated $101 million if everything had gone according to plan.

If we had gotten the exact amount of money we anticipated and spent the amount of money that we had planned.

So that's sort of a standard way of doing government or public budgeting.

do not just estimate what you're going to do.

Here's what you think you're going to do and you should plan for it as if you're going to.

So the result of that was a $40 million hit to the fund balance.

So the fund balance is like the district's savings account.

And so that fund balance went down approximately $40 million in that year because it didn't go down $101 million, it went down $40 million instead.

So there were changes that happened as well along the way.

A simpler way to look at this is we've been using that savings account to fill that budget gap on top of the reductions that have been made.

And there have been reductions that have been made that have impacted schools that have impacted district office services all along the way.

but the fact of the matter is the savings account is being depleted as we don't make those really difficult decisions and change the trajectory of the budget for the long term so summary there actual results enrollment have been a little bit better than anticipated legislatures provide a little more funding than would have been anticipated and the district has been using some savings to cover the shortfalls Sort of a fun way of looking at this, and I alluded to that.

Maybe it's not fun because the family's in a deficit position, but a different or simpler way of thinking about it is that family that had $100,000 in income coming in, but had $110,000 once they added up their mortgage, all the costs associated with running their family.

They were anticipating a $10,000 hit to their savings account.

Things happened throughout the year.

Somebody won the lottery.

They chose not to go on vacation, so their hit to the savings account was only about $6,400 instead.

So just a different way of looking at it that might be more relatable for folks who aren't thinking about fund balances and reserves and rainy day reserve funds.

I see Director Clark's hand is back up.

I think the way that you characterize it is that we've projected this, that we're going to spend more than we bring in, but that Our projections are higher than what we actually end up...

Like we're bringing in more than we thought we would.

And so our overspending is less.

the last few years.

This is such a weird way to talk about it.

Yeah, the loss has been less, yes.

Yeah, and so I guess I'm just curious, like, if you look at 2022, oh wait, this graph is confusing me now, so I'm not going to look at it, and I'm sorry, I didn't sleep last night, and so thank you for bearing with me, but how do we what do we is there a bit like do we use our enrollment as like numbers as the base building block for our budgets or I'm thinking about like revenue forecasting that the city does which is slightly different but they create different scenarios like baseline optimistic and pessimistic and obviously it's not apples to oranges but it would just help me understand is enrollment the fundamental building block that we use?

And if so, is it possible to develop different scenarios of our budget based on if we come over enrollment or under, like over our projection or under our projection?

Enrollment is the main building block for building the budget.

Makeup of the students is also an important part of the conversation.

But yes, enrollment is the main building block.

That's the main way that the school districts are funded.

Okay, so since we do project that and then we do a final count, well, and then we do an end count, but is there a way Potentially, if we wanted to change how we're budgeting, like just theoretically, would it be possible to create different scenarios based on our enrollment projections?

We do create those.

The board does need to approve a budget in that August, July time period.

one of again thank you to board members for feeding the next conversation but part of the way we adjust to what actually happened is through the staffing adjustment process so the primary investment of Seattle Public Schools is in staffing at schools and so if enrollment is up the model tries to move resources to the place where those needs are most acute and so there's a a refining of the budget that goes on throughout the year not just in school staffing but in through everything so if conditions change we respond but the board does need to approve a budget in that July August time frame I hear your question and I think it's a great topic for the ad hoc committee to think about how we might bring some of those scenarios to the board, but there will need to be a budget that's approved at the beginning of each year.

Thank you.

Mr. Buddleman, do I understand correctly?

So we build that budget with some slack in it.

So for the previous fiscal year, our October enrollment was higher than our projection.

And so we were able to anticipate additional funding.

We build a budget envelope that accounts for that level of uncertainty.

and then we spent all that and so we had another approximately 250 more kids than we projected and rode into the budget and so then we did fall adjustments and my recollection is we ended up maybe a little bit slightly in the red you know a couple tens of thousands of dollars because we allocated all that revenue to add to do a net add of staffing in schools there of course the enrollment varies from you know some schools lose and some schools gain but overall we gain staff not a huge number relative to how many staff we have but the budget that you adopt considers that there's that much uncertainty so if it comes in a little higher that's already inside the envelope of the budget that you adopted.

right that's why we don't come back and say oh we need to change the budget because we have an extra 300 kids or we're down 300 kids because there's that range is kind of built into the adopted budget

and part of the stress that Seattle Public Schools has felt recently and I think many other school districts is those margins are getting pretty close right now.

So as resources are getting more scarce there isn't as much slack in the budget to take care of things that go the opposite direction.

So unanticipated something happens or enrollment goes down in a different way.

There isn't

Anything left to sort of absorb that slack in the way that the budgets are constructed I met with a superintendent of one of our neighboring districts whose enrollment was a little bit below their forecast They'd come up with a plan for how and what that would lead to a staffing change of nine school nine school-based staff and had covered how they were going to address six of those reductions and but not the other three.

and this is a district that's in binding conditions so they're really tight on the margin in terms of there's always a certain amount of uncertainty but when you're getting down to nine people and how are we going to cover this it becomes, it is really stressful as these are real people, these are real students and these decisions get pretty challenging the tighter it gets.

Well, and, you know, enrollment or revenue is tied to enrollment, but as we know, we are not fully funded.

You know, our deficit is due to the cost.

We spend more than we receive.

And so increasing enrollment also increases expenditures because students are purposed to serve.

They're not just dollar signs.

So it costs money to serve those additional students as well.

and I was going to ask something else but it just completely left my mind so I will just turn it back to you

I'm sure it would sort of transition us to the next thing.

So you've seen this multiple times before.

We just want to reinforce the strategic plan is what hopefully going forward to Director Sarju's point, it's not sitting on the shelf, but it's actually informing the investments of Seattle Public Schools going forward.

And so I would expect the board to hold the superintendent and the staff accountable to making sure that that's happening.

And I think, Director Rankin, that's been your point all along, has proved to us that the budget reflects the priorities of the district.

That's exactly it.

And actually this does bring me back to what I was going to ask, is also our, I think, when we're thinking about budget deficit, there's depending on who you're having the conversation with and in what way you're having the conversation with there's the assumption that everything is being spent exactly as we would like it to and we just need a little bit more money and and I think you know it's a both and we do need increased funding and I don't think I mean accepting things the way they are says that we are happy with the student experience and student outcomes in all scenarios and want to continue spending in that way and for me that is a hard no and that's really where I've been trying to to push is you know if you have a budget deficit you can either increase revenue or change your spending in our case our student outcomes and student experience are not where we want them to be and so I think a change in our spending is not negative there are things that we want to improve on and align more and as ERS was talking about that doesn't necessarily mean just throwing more people in the building it means you know let go of the things that are holding us back from doing more effective things for students and, you know, I mean, empower educators to be the professionals that they are and spend more time doing the things that matter than, you know, jumping through a bunch of various hoops or whatnot.

But so this list of issues slash opportunities, there's nothing on here that is new to us.

in the last five years.

And I kind of, I was saying to somebody, I have to figure out different ways to say the same thing because I feel a little bit, I mean, it's, you know, the definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.

I feel like since I got on the board, I've been saying, you know, we can't just think about more or less on these individual items.

We need to think about, like, are these the line items that even make sense?

Is this serving us?

Is this serving our students?

And in a lot of cases the answer is no.

And the wholesale changes that have to happen, people get concerned about disruption and change.

There's no way to do significant change in support of students without making changes.

So we have a lot of demands for change and then no but not like that, no but don't touch that, no but we like this and we can't get to change without being willing to make changes.

So nibbling around the edges, we are long beyond where that can help us in the current financial state and the current enrollment state.

and that's just the reality of a large district.

District enrollment fluctuates all the time.

We have to be willing to lean in and really, really center students and the wellbeing of the district as a whole and I know we all have like trauma from going around in some of these things and having them but just be squashed, but just because we don't like these, having to think about these things is not going to make them go away.

So however we, the board, can work together to support, you know, and again I feel like I'm just repeating what I said two years ago, we have to bring people in early and often and help people understand the why when we talk about these changes.

the high school lunch is a great example I think we're at a point now where the conversation is happening at the right level I know the superintendent is meeting a lot with principals I know I've met with students other directors have met with students we're talking to the people impacted about making this change that should have happened before the change but we're in the right spot now that's the same with transportation if we say hey we're gonna go to three tiers what do you think about it I mean that's disaster but if we are willing to go to people and I say we but I actually mean staff go out to the community and help them understand the constraints and help them understand what we want to do for students and why it requires trade-offs they will want to get involved in coming up with the solutions

I think our strategic advisory task force is starting to that.

That obviously has to be more broad.

Following up on the last discussion, ERS was clear, hey, this strategy is not your budget balancing.

But the discussions we've had with them, that was another area, well, this is not a surprise.

They raised the same questions from a benchmarking perspective, well this is where you spend a lot more than other districts, so that's good.

That all affirms that we were looking in the right places in terms of where expenditures exceed our funding and exceed what some of our peer districts do.

I don't think even in times when money was a little bit less tight at Seattle Public Schools in the time I've been here, we haven't articulated a strategy, said, well, if we just had another $300 million, we would have solved all the performance, been able to be successful in achieving all the goals that we laid out and that's where, again, we need a plan and the budget funds the plan and we need to have metrics built into it so we at least have, and it'll be a projection that we estimate if we make this investment this is what's going to happen and then progress monitoring should help us determine is it happening, are we getting the return on investment that we thought we were.

That's a lot of conversations, this is a very tough list of problems to solve, and the clock is ticking, and there's a lot going on right now, and so none of this- And the state revenue forecast is not good.

Yeah, no, money's tied all over, and this is a pretty long, tough list, and so, you know, how much, how deep we can go into every one of these subjects and what's the sequence is going to be a challenge, given then all the leadership changes and other things we have going on.

This is going to be a very eventful year.

The bright spot I think in this is having at least the draft strategic plan.

The work that's going on right now is trying to identify the most critical and most important strategies and initiatives and so the district can start to move towards investing in those and abandoning those that aren't as critical or have not produced results.

that's the work you're going to hear more about from ERS once the strategic plan is in its final draft form and that hasn't been a part of the budget the last number of years because there wasn't that guide to be more specific about what those investments are, which theoretically would make the conversations with the community more helpful.

If we do these things, here's what we can do in exchange for that thing.

And if we do save $10 million on this thing, we can take a little bit of that and invest it in this other thing.

We've still got a deficit, but here's some of the things that we'll do to move the district forward as we're trying to get to long-term stability.

I think that's the end.

That brings us to the end of the presentation.

I want to give people a chance to ask questions but also be mindful that we are running about 10 minutes behind our agenda.

So just, you know, does anybody have any further questions for Dr. Buddleman before we move on to our next topic?

all right thank you very much now I believe we are going to the superintendent question mark or we're having a little bit of a changing of the guard here.

I think my colleagues are going to be joined by Dr. Campbell and Dr. Torres Morales to talk about staffing adjustments.

This is Director Manu.

This is more of a process discussion since we're close to finalizing our October enrollment projections and again we're trying to align resources.

We talked about this earlier, this meeting is all about resources and the reason we do staffing adjustments is to make sure that we have resources where the students actually are and it's challenging but we I think it's the right thing to do.

Resources are scarce.

We need to make sure that we have them where they're needed.

And so I will turn it over to the team.

Good evening, directors and community members that are here with us.

I'm Marnie Asplin Campbell, Assistant Superintendent of School Operations.

I'm glad to be here with you tonight.

I just want to talk first and foremost about the sort of governing principles that should be familiar, our guardrails, which I'm going to focus on geographic equity and resource allocation, which are relevant to this conversation in that, as Superintendent Podesta said, we're thinking about how to make sure that our resources are going where our students are.

We want to make sure that we are providing as much as possible, the high standards, rigorous programming, high quality teaching and supports that we can.

As we've just discussed, we don't think that that's necessarily in place.

Some of our formulas need adjustment, but we do have to take a look at where enrollment is and make those adjustments as needed.

And we wanna make sure then that we're heeding to those guardrails.

The other thing I want to share with you is one of our draft priorities that we've been working on.

It's a strategic priority that has to do with equipping schools with the resources to meet student needs.

And this is something that has gone through a lot of thinking through a number of people and what is striking to me is that our school leaders felt like this was one that they really wanted to focus on.

This is they very much feel and all of our staff feel that this is really critical.

We're all here to meet student needs and none of us wants to do that without the right resources.

And how we built that strategy out to describe it a little bit more is what we've again just been talking about building towards sustainability, ensure schools receive the consistent Equitable resources required to provide high quality instruction.

Student supports and supportive learning environments connected to our district vision for student success.

So those things are really framing this process of staffing adjustment.

It's just our way of making sure that we are responding to shifts and fluctuations and providing those resources that our students need.

And I will turn this over to Director Manu.

Good evening, directors.

For the record, my name is Val Manu, director of enrollment, and so I think we talked about this in August, our timeline, and so wanted just to share with you where we are in that cycle.

It takes about eight months from when we project in February all the way through September, and we go through some quality checks once we establish the initial projections.

Now, our projections are assumptions based on historical data, and ratios that we project for February.

And that is adopted and sent up to the budget office that goes through the WSS process.

Now during that time, school choice is happening.

We have new enrollment that's opened up for the following school year.

So we do a first quality check in June to see how those tumbled and to see what that new growth would look like or any other trends that we are seeing.

This past June we did an expansion of choice as well as we delayed the decentralization of the HCC process.

So we had to readjust our budgets or our enrollment for that.

And so we made a lot of adjustments back in June so that we can level set that enrollment.

We are now in that final phase of the final quality check, which is September.

And so September is a little bit different because now we need to see the whites of the eyes of our students and who is actually showing up, who said that they were going to be assigned and planned to be assigned.

We are now counting official enrollment.

So we have a day one count where Everybody needs to show up or they get dropped, for example.

So we're tracking and monitoring those activities that the school is producing through our systems that we capture.

Day four is when we pull that report on the fifth day, and that includes everybody plus our Running Start students, who have showed up and that includes our kindergarten and so we track that information to help set us for our October 1 projections to that final October count.

We also want to note that during the September and October activities We look at historical attendance during that timeframe because we know that when we pull on the fifth day, there's still activities that are going on, right?

And so students that weren't there in day one or four, for example, are now being reinstated.

They're showing up.

So there's this constant activity and we recognize that.

So we look at that attendance year after year in the past.

to understand that growth because we can see that those students are being reinstated that weren't there in that initial run when we looked at that snapshot back on day four.

So all this to say is that we are coming in with our final September projections towards October 1 headcount and we are anticipating that.

You can go to the next slide.

and we're anticipating just below our spring projections of 48,963 students.

It's just a slight dip, but we are seeing some notable highlights as far as our kindergarten cohort.

It is up from our spring projections, which is the first time in half a decade that we're seeing our kindergarten strong.

and so that's going to definitely increase our birth decay ratio from a 53% flat rate year over year for the last four years, finally an increase in our birth decay ratio.

So it's stabilizing which is a good indicator that we're turning the corner as far as more stabilization.

So from last year to this year we're seeing about a 0.6% decline, about 277 students.

But overall we have seen great stabilization and feeling really confident about these numbers.

Good evening board directors, Dr. Rocky Torres Morales, associate superintendent.

I'm going to talk us through a little bit of the next steps based off of the numbers that Director Manu just shared with us.

So currently our budget office has been reviewing the enrollment data that was provided to them, running it into our model which is the weighted staffing standards model.

Tomorrow there will be a staff review of the enrollment budget data to identify adjustments that may be needed in the schools.

Couple things I wanna highlight.

We've heard clearly from community the desire for us to have a deep conversation on the rule of plus or minus two FTE in doing the adjustments.

So I wanna be clear that that will be part of the conversation we're having tomorrow.

One of the things to consider that we've been talking about is what that impact really has on a school that's large versus a school that's small.

And while it may be easy for a larger school to absorb that impact, it is, is something that we need to look at, especially for some of our smaller schools.

So that will be part of the conversation.

We are also meeting with all of our school leaders on Friday morning.

So we're gonna come to some decisions tomorrow evening.

Friday morning, first thing, we're gonna be meeting with school leaders and reviewing some of that information.

Regional Executive Directors will then be meeting with their schools until September 30th to talk to the impacts of any adjustments that may occur to see what is actually feasible.

So we're not just living on a spreadsheet, we're getting into the conversations on what does this mean at your school in terms of schedules, vacancies, possibilities or not.

And then the final adjustments are gonna be communicated on October the 1st.

And with that, I wanna turn it back over to Dr. Campbell.

Thank you.

Are there any questions so far?

I have a question, but do any other directors have questions first?

Okay, great.

With the 2-FTE, so this has been around for a little while, and it has been an issue for a little while, and it also started when our, you know, we've had a decline in enrollment since then, so all of the impacts of these things just get more when there's fewer students, especially when there's fewer students at a building.

I don't know, I mean my advocacy has been in the past that any additional staff warranted is assigned and that taken away is only if it impacts more than two FTE.

but a little bit of difference.

But I know that that has budgetary implications.

At the time when this was first insta- and again this wasn't a board thing, this is a purely operational staff choice.

The kind of response that it was to was to prevent disruption.

And so Some people thought that while we don't want to have to have classes Rearranged even if it means adding staff and that's disruptive and my Statement at the time was well.

That's not really up to you to decide if that feels disruptive or not to people in the building because most people would prefer that they not have 37 kids in a kindergarten class The flip side of that though is if a teacher gets added some kids will be moved to the new class and they will lose the teacher that they thought was their teacher, and that's always going to come with complaints.

So I guess that I don't know what conversation you're talking about having tomorrow, but my request would just be to be, we just always have to be really clear about what the trade-offs are.

And I would even say, you know, when it comes, if we shouldn't be making, or central office shouldn't be making the decision about additional warranted staff being too disruptive.

But if a building says, actually, we're good and we don't want it, that should be up to them.

They should be able to have that option.

Say, you qualify for this many more staff.

Do you want that or are you guys good?

And let the building make that determination rather than us.

yeah just so those are all i think i think people are thinking oh more staff is always good it's important for families to understand that if a kindergarten classroom gets added some kids are going to go to the new teacher for some people that's going to be really exciting for some people they're going to say but i love miss so and so and i you know we started the year with them and how dare you move me away from my teacher so it's it's there's always going to be some disruption, and I've always, disruption's not necessarily bad.

But that's just, I think, a reality that people kind of don't think about until it happens.

Well, and that's what the yellow box is meant to convey.

How's this going to work in your building?

These also, the staffing adjustment, you know, the changes come at particular grade levels, so it's, you know, there needs, it's helpful to have some threshold because the model would say, well, you need 0.2.

and so at least let's start with a full FTE probably.

There could be exceptions.

There's typically mitigation funding to address what you have.

Are there places where we need to do more ads than polls in our crude and then it's really hard at the secondary level to redo the schedule, to fit those resources.

So that's why this is as much art as science, as the model says, hey, this is how, if we had done this while writing the budget, we would spit it out, but then you have to look at actually real circumstances on each building, and that's why there's that consultation.

Well, and something else that I don't know, maybe you're about to share, but the reason the October 1 is important is because that's when the state expects a headcount, and that's what they fund districts on.

Correct.

So I've gotten, you know, some emails saying, oh, you know, can you move the October count?

Can you do this?

That's a state requirement, and that is, we have actually some advocacy happening at the WASDA level to support legislation to provide even allocation of funding.

Instead, there's a couple periods of time during, you all know this, but a couple periods of time in the year where districts receive their funding from the state, it's not spread out evenly and it happens in these kind of chunks.

And so districts have to balance what the enrollment count is, where students are, their own expenses, and when the money actually becomes available from the state to expend.

So some things are within our control, some things are fixed at the state level.

Thank you.

Director Hersey.

yeah so i just had a quick question i think that you were right on the money and i could not agree more with um the fact that like we need to let schools make those decisions my question or at least my noticing comes in when what I think a large portion of what we experience is actually the schools making decisions and then the families not necessarily agreeing with that decision and then doubling back to us.

And then the problem starts to get really murky from there.

I just want to know, is that off?

Is that like...

from y'all's perspective, and by y'all I mean senior staff, is that off in any way?

And then if my perspective is correct, how do we avoid that?

Because that is, at least from the experiences that I've had around school-based decisions versus district-based decisions, a lot of what I have experienced over the past few years, maybe not necessarily in the last six months or so, but specifically around things like Choosing to spend school resources on a teacher Versus utilizing them on something else I think there's a lot of misinformation That gets spun up around whose decision actually is it And then by the time it arrives to us It's so murky that we try to insert ourselves And then the chain of decision making gets disrupted So I would just like to hear a little bit of a response on Is that accurate from y'all's perspective?

And if so, how can we mitigate for that?

Thank you for that.

One thing I want to say when we talk about disruptive, just Dr. Buddleman pulled data for the last two years, if we had done all of the adjustments at 1.0 or above, we would have been pulling and or adding at 70 plus schools.

So we're also talking about the scale of that.

So fortunately, all our data this year looks much, much better in terms of we did a more substantial adjustment in June, which we think we will continue to do.

So the numbers are much, much smaller.

So when we talk about disruption, it's not just about the individual school, but it's about almost all of our elementaries and K-8s potentially having some sort of up or down and bearing in mind that the way the formula works, it could be two or three kids that are pushing them up into that other level.

So those are the kinds of things we also look at.

As to that question about decision making, I think that's a great question, I don't think you're wrong.

I think that sometimes there are things going on within a school that it's decision making about who's going to teach what split grade class or not or who's the right person to do that.

There's some nuance to that as well.

And certainly that doesn't always sit well with everybody.

But I don't know if Dr. Torres Morales wants to speak to that as well.

I think it's partly the structure that we're currently operating in around how we do the budgeting, and so it's a bigger conversation that I think we all need to sit with and think about.

How do we want to do this moving forward?

This is what we have now, and we know that it does come with some issues, and there are certain things that are 100% up at the school's discretion when it comes to the budget, and then there's other things that are at our discretion as to what we're gonna allocate.

So, given the parameters we have at the moment, that's why the conversations between September 26th and September 30th are gonna be important for the central office team to engage with school communities in those conversations, so that when we do say, yes, here you go, here's a teacher, or whatever that decision ends up being, that it actually lands well.

We know how this has gone in the past, but in general, that does help mitigate some of that concern.

Okay, that makes sense to me.

I'm excited for that conversation, so if we can figure out a time to have that at a different intersection, I have a different line of questioning that I'll send you an email, but thank you.

Director Sarju?

One of the reoccurring challenges I have experienced over the last four years as a result of the October shuffle, whatever you want to call it, is parents often feel blindsided and then because of the emotion around feeling blindsided, the communication from the district has exacerbated the feelings and emotions.

And what I mean by that is parents have articulated things that staff have said that, in my opinion, don't actually help.

It just adds fuel to a fire that's already burning.

And so my reason for making this point is that when we have to communicate hard decisions, It's important how we communicate that and how I think parents, when they feel listened to, valued, respected, even in the midst of the decision not ultimately being what they would have liked the decision to be, they can settle with it.

But historically, that's not how it's worked here.

Parents have felt really disrespected and marginalized.

And so this is something we do every year.

And it's up to the adults in the central office to figure out, so we know we're going to have to do this, right?

How can we best set parents up with an expectation that this may be the case?

Like Liza was pointing out, if it really is a fact that a new kindergarten teacher needs to be added, what is the way in which families can be engaged and feel heard?

Like, most reasonable people don't expect that everything's going to go their way.

I'm going to repeat that.

Most reasonable people do not expect that everything's going to go their way.

But when they feel heard and seen and respected, they can handle the decision, even if it's not what they want.

So how do we get to that?

Because most of the emails we get, it's clear.

They were dismissed.

They didn't feel heard.

They didn't feel seen.

and so therefore they're more animated, they're more amped up, they're like the district doesn't care about students at our school, right, because we didn't get any kind of response or communication.

So I guess thinking going into this, like we can learn from the past, but the behavior has to be different, right, on the other side of this.

So how can we set, this is this week, is there a way in which there could be a communication that goes out to families that says, hey, we're about to embark on this process and we're letting you know.

I'm not trying to wordsmith an email here, but It gets parents ready, and yes, some parents may feel anxious about it, and that's just the way it is, it just, people feel anxious, but at least they don't feel blindsided.

I think part of this is feeling blindsided.

Well, and for us, this is what happens every October, but for some families, this is the first time they've been, they're like, what is this?

What is happening?

I'll ask Dr. Torres-Morales and his colleagues to expand on this, but I think from my perspective we need to support buildings as much as possible, hoping.

This isn't the whole district that makes adjustments.

It's usually a select number of schools and those impacts are felt at the school.

So a district communication to community...

Right, no, and that's why I think we need to help buildings because it's going to be felt differently and it'll be a non-issue for the majority of schools.

So I don't know that the subject is that fascinating that everybody wants to hear about it because it's probably not going to happen to them, but the ones that do feel it deeply and then, you know, when you have as many people involved, those communications can be inconsistent, so I think we need to help with that, what can we do to help building level communications to school leaders and Rocky or Barney if you have anything to add.

No, I would just say that we do have, to that point, we have a draft letter already ready in the pipeline so hopefully that will end up taking shape and then I think to your point, Director Sarju, we haven't been great at this as a system before, and so it is gonna be new for us.

Superintendent Podesta's point is valid in that, alright, so what are we gonna do?

Are we sending this to everyone?

Are we just sending it to the impacted schools?

So that's some nuance that we have to work through.

We are meeting with the leaders first thing Friday, so it'll be really good to get their feedback on that, because we could easily hear from some, like, yeah, if you send that to my community, it's gonna...

and make them get super anxious for something they don't have to even worry about.

And then to Director Rankin's point, this is new every year because it is new every year.

It happens at different schools every year.

It happens at different grades every year.

So there's some families that have been in our system that have never had this experience and there's others that have had it multiple times, multiple years, and multiple grades.

And so there is a way to get through the communication cadence on this to help.

with this, and I think the bigger question also becomes as we continue, not next year, but in the next few years, is this the way we wanna do the budget and staffing process, knowing that the XO were shuffles often complicated?

Well, that was gonna be my last question, is my assumption and experience is that having Many schools with under 350 kids, as you said, Dr. Campbell, the difference of two or three children can suddenly mean a whole FTE.

I imagine that our high number of under enrolled schools exacerbates that.

Is that

when we were talking about potential school, I won't even say it, but last fall.

I don't want that to sound bite out there.

It will not be ever said again.

Yeah.

No, I mean, that was one of the things is that it's more volatile, you know.

And that's a choice that we have made.

Correct.

And we don't have to make it.

Just correct.

And that also gets back to this threshold.

Given the variability in school sizes saying it's two, just for that reason alone, we need to be more flexible in that.

We'll point out, we made adjustments last October, we made adjustments in June, and there are winners and losers in that process, so we hear from a couple of schools, but I don't think those last two adjustments, like all hell broke loose.

No, and I really, really super appreciate that we, I think June adjustments are something that board members and community members have asked for.

They were there in some form and then they went away.

So I know that it is appreciated that we did more adjustments in June instead of waiting to make them all in October and I think that's going to just make this all smoother and it's just a little more people focused and I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

So speaking of that, and looking forward to 26-27, as we are just launching our 25-26 school year, we are looking at open enrollment as we have discussed previously, so I just wanted to bring that back to everyone's awareness that we will be moving it back a month, so starting in January rather than in February, and adapting that process.

So again, our June adjustment, what we learned from that, kind of benefits of that this fall is that we're seeing far fewer schools that need those adjustments overall.

That's a good thing.

It's also a tribute to the great work of our enrollment team and our HR team and budget team for continuing to strive to get better with our methodologies, get better with our processes and communication.

Just some of the benefits of moving that open enrollment and making some adjustments so that we have more finality and more certainty sooner.

Families will know their 26, 27 assignments earlier, which is something we've heard that it is really valuable to families.

We always have to bear in mind that not all families know exactly where they're going to be living or even if they're going to be in Seattle early on, so we always have to make space for our families that are just not able to know that, but for our families that are here and know they're going to be here, that's something that's important.

Our initial projections will be in place before budget and staffing.

They always have been, but projections will be more informed prior to that budget and staffing.

That's something we heard loud and clear last spring, that we build those budgets with a little bit more of a concrete knowledge of some choice behavior and choice patterns so that we can really honor that.

and the next bullet says continued opportunities for family choice.

We recognize that that is something that's very valuable, so we want to meld together those opportunities along with building in some systems and structures that will allow for some more stability and accuracy.

And just to let you know, families will be informed of this updated timeline early and often.

Again, we're just coming through the start of the school year, but starting in October, we will let people know that that is coming.

We'll let them know frequently.

We don't want anyone to be left behind.

So we both want to move forward with some haste, but also with care for all of our families as we make some adjustments in that timeline.

So that is our final formal component of this update.

Thank you.

We are 10 minutes past our scheduled time and I would like to get us out by 8 o'clock.

And I appreciate everyone's flexibility.

I don't see any more questions.

So I will just say thank you.

I do really want to thank the team.

Everybody's worked really hard and it's good that our enrollment is looking strong, particularly with kindergarteners.

That's so exciting.

That's really awesome.

Turns out people want to attend their neighborhood public school, it turns out.

Well, I also think the enrollment team or others are trying to lean in with our preschool partners to make sure that we're making connections that can help lead pre-K into our system.

Well, and I think some of the things that we're just talking about, just being responsive and helping people understand that, yes, these shifts sometimes happen, but we've gotten it in hand, we're going to support you, we're going to allow buildings to make decisions as much as possible.

The more consistent we are with those things, even if they're not what we would choose to have happen, I think that just lets more people know that they can count on Seattle Public Schools, and that will lead to I think knowing what you can rely on thank you

So at the last meeting we discussed schedule changes at high schools really revolving around offering two lunches at all two lunch periods in the schedule at all comprehensive high schools and we wanted to give you an update on how that transition is going.

Just a reminder, we talked about the rationale that did come from the Central Office, why we felt this was important.

We really wanted to maximize instructional minutes.

We wanted to make sure we were honoring our labor contracts and that students and staff had, that students could get access to food and that staff had access to a duty-free lunch.

and we wanted to make sure that we can offer the right level of supervision by not trying to supervise all the students in one single period.

And so I think we still believe in those factors and that those are important.

What we heard loud and clear from students is, hey, what you didn't factor in is what this means to us and the changes that it means to us.

So hear you loud and clear.

I will say I think these are discussions we've had for a long time.

We've moved school schedules and added, gone to one to two, one what over the years, and those were, there was less feedback about those, so I think we may have under, when we said, hey, this is a major change, given our history with this, I'm not sure we anticipated it as a major change, given how much we've done this.

One thing we do know, just asking culinary services for numbers, because there's a question, is there a problem with access to lunch?

I'm not saying this indicates that necessarily, but Our history, when we go from two to one lunches, the amount of lunches that the district serves reduced from rates of 22% to 48% across schools.

Cleveland, a school that went from one to two this year, were serving 31% more lunches than we did last year.

So that doesn't necessarily mean need, but that is a fairly established pattern that we serve more lunches if there are multiple lunch periods.

because I do think that there's some self-selection going on, that if you know it's going to be a long line, maybe you'll do something else.

And again, that's us serving lunches.

People have access to other things.

But it's just a data point that there is some there there about access to food.

I'm not using that as a proxy for actual need, but we do see a lot more participation in our lunch service if there are multiple lunches.

But there are many factors to consider.

This is a long list of things.

We heard that students said we should factor in more.

We're hearing them loud and clear.

We're trying to see how we can address this as we make this transition.

I really appreciate, I wrote directors earlier this week, but we had a really constructive discussion with school leaders from comprehensive high schools.

talked about this and many other issues so that's something we're committing to do on a regular basis.

I think Rainey is here and Brian Banser here who helped facilitate that discussion and really appreciate their partnership in this.

I want to be clear in case there's any ambiguity that this was a decision that was made centrally that we're working with school leaders on.

I do appreciate their partnership in saying we can do anything you ask us to, but we need clarity on what it is.

So we're trying to achieve that clarity, we're trying to address as many problems as we can, and then we're trying to tee up a much bigger discussion about the high school day, which is we'll make the school lunch, it's a very important issue.

There are many important issues baked into this conversation, so Dr. Torres Morales can walk through this a bit more.

Thank you.

Thank you, Superintendent Podesta.

I think the only piece I would add before we start getting more into the presentation is, in response to this, we've done a lot of conversations with different communities, meaning with our students, as Superintendent Podesta was noting, specifically with the comprehensive leaders, we brought them into space a couple times at this point, up to and including today, so that they'd have a preview of this presentation before we present it to the community and be able to ask questions and raise some concerns as well.

So currently this is the status of the lunch schedule.

So I just want to let this sit up there for a moment so people can see.

We do have some schools that are already on the two lunch schedule.

You'll also notice that all of our schools are ready to transition to the two lunch schedule.

The ones who have yet to do so are planning to do so on October the 6th.

And so I just want to let that sit just for a minute so people can get a visual.

And then I want to talk a little bit about some of the mitigations that some of our schools have done.

One of the things that we keep hitting on is that each of our schools are their own school and their own community, so it's not a one size fits all solution.

So we've had leaders and their communities approach this situation in many different ways.

and so some of the mitigations that we've seen is that some schools have brought forward an advisory time with their staff and agreed to do that and they're making it adjacent to their lunch so they can extend the lunch period in a way that there's advisory right next to lunch and so kids are able to do different clubs, those sort of things.

Some of the schools are doing the club meetings at multiple times.

Some have done flexible lunch periods and selected certain days of the week for that.

And others have gone to a leveled or like interest type collaboration for social emotional development during lunch.

So to Superintendent Podesta's point, this was the work of our leaders.

Did it get outside the box?

Is this necessarily going to hit on all the issues we've been talking about?

Probably not exactly, but did it give a lot of flexibility in there to mitigate some of the things we're hearing from the students?

Absolutely.

And so related to this, some of the next steps are the plan as of now is moving forward with the October 6th implementation.

We are going to continue the engagement with the high school principals.

We're starting to get those cadenced out now because as we started those conversations, what we landed at was this is bigger than just the high school lunch.

This has to do with credits.

periods, what transcripts are looking like, a geographic equity guardrail that we currently have that we need to get in alignment with.

There's also going to be continued meetings monthly with student leaders across the district.

Those are currently getting scheduled.

Deputy Chief Ferrick-Gersey is assisting me with those.

I'll be the lead in those meetings.

Superintendent Podesta will be attending at times.

and Eric will be helping running logistics but those are getting scheduled as we speak with high school leaders across the system originally this was a comprehensive high school issue so it was with the comprehensive high schools but we will be pulling all the high schools in so even the alternatives will be part of these conversations and then the last part is we are getting, our superintendent is going to convene a task force to examine the high school day more broadly, but I don't want to steal his thunder, so I'll let him talk about that.

Well, I might say it a little different.

The superintendent will convene a task force following the excellent advice from Director Rankin.

To give credit where credit is due.

Thank you, Director Rankin.

So I will go through a little bit of what we're going to be looking at.

So some of the goals are going to be looking at how do we expand equitable access to the credit learning opportunities?

How do we protect time for clubs and extracurricular activities to support whole child development?

A review of the start and end times in the bell schedule?

Explore innovative scheduling options.

What are our options around zero period, eight period, advisories, project-based, those sort of things.

Make sure that we align with our guardrail on geographic and resource equity.

Incorporate stakeholder feedback with a clear crosswalk to existing advisory input.

And so the membership, it'll be a diverse representation, including students, families, educators, counselors, school leaders, central office staff, and our broader labor partners.

And some of the analysis areas that we're really thinking about are the course tweaking and sequence.

I think one of the things that we all hear, especially, I think you all know, I also help oversee our Department of Highly Capable, we often hear about the math sequence.

It's a big topic.

I was just in a listening session last week and it was one of the main topics and I think it will continue to be.

So let's talk about it, especially while we have the platform.

Let's talk about this and get some clarity for the system.

The number of periods our schools are offering, the credit accumulation, the credit potential.

Also the IB or AP pathway, what are we doing, how and why, transportations, facilities, staffing and budget, and then some legal, regulatory and bargaining considerations.

One of the things we know is that some of these topics have been talked about in the past and addressed, so we're not starting from zero, but we also want to recognize that this is a different group of students, a different time post-COVID.

So we do have some groundwork documents that we can of course reference, but also want to be clear this is new work.

This is not a dust-off, a task force, or something that may have happened in the past.

While we are being ambitious, we are looking to have this, the recommendations come forward by the spring.

And when people ask why, part of that is when you think about principals and school leaders, they need to start working on schedules.

And so the sooner we can have the recommendations out that set some parameters for schools, the sooner they can start working on those schedules with their staff and their communities.

I'm going to pause for questions.

Yeah, and we're going to try to wrap it up in the next eight minutes.

I see Director Misrahi.

Go ahead.

Yeah, so I have two main questions.

Well, one is just a small point and then a question.

So on the small point, I don't think it's helpful right now to relitigate why the decision was made or how we got here.

But you did mention one thing that I want to just...

I want to just clarify that when you talk about honoring the CBA it was at least my understanding from the conversation that there was nothing that this wasn't like a union issue this wasn't something that was being brought up because there was a violation of the CBA necessarily before so obviously this is the change from one to two lunches allowable under the CBA the CBA, but it's not like that had to happen under the CBA.

Is that incorrect?

No, that's true.

And then we've talked about other kind of compliance issues around this.

I think we do want to make sure that our labor partners have access to a duty free lunch, but not, I mean the contract is critically important, but also we think that with regard to the issues of students being able to contact teachers and get support from teachers in what's supposed to be time for teachers.

That's a discussion we need to keep having.

We just think it makes sense that for everyone to be at their best, people actually need a break.

And so I'm not suggesting that our labor partners raise this as an issue.

It's just in our thinking about it, we just wanted to make sure that that's something that schedules allowed for and we weren't doing double duty with our staff.

But no, this was not raised in the context of the labor issue.

It was just a consideration we had about what kind of schedule do we think makes sense.

Okay, yeah, that's helpful.

Okay, so then my second question, right, question part of the question is, so I've not been shy about the fact that I'm frustrated with the process of how this was rolled out and that I feel like it was a violation of the guardrail that we have about engagement prior to a major decision happening.

And I think that this task force is a good way to to get that engagement before any other major decisions occur.

I guess my question is, can we schedule in times for the board to be updated?

Because I don't want to end up in a position where we get to the spring major decisions need to be made.

And we're sort of in this time crunch once again, where we say, well, it's too late to go back and do the engagement.

We didn't quite do it, but now we have to make this decision.

And I feel like we're on a lot of issues sometimes put in the position where the process has not occurred as we would like it, but the timing doesn't allow us to do anything differently.

So I would just like to know if there's a plan in this task force and work plan that where the board can ensure that this is actually occurring.

Absolutely.

I think many of the issues embedded in here are really significant.

They tie to our strategic plan as well.

They tie to your third grade life ready goal.

So this won't work if we don't keep and everyone informed along the way.

There are big budget implications.

We've talked about school start and end times for every year for the past four or five years.

That's embedded in this.

So yeah, this is a pretty serious topic.

So we won't just unwrap it like a Christmas gift in April.

People need to hear about it along the way.

Okay, that's helpful.

I have one last question on this.

So I don't need to know like I don't need to see all the details of like this high school is doing this and this high school is doing that and you mentioned all sorts of different ways that schools are mitigating the impact of clubs and social time like the advisory connection or you know maybe it's a longer lunch on Wednesdays or whatever Will those solutions be communicated out to students?

I mean, obviously they'll get their schedules, but will the intention behind that be communicated of like, this is how we're trying to make sure you still have clubs, is that you can do it on Wednesdays or you can do it during this advisory block or whatever?

Will that be made clear to these students?

Yeah, that's partly what's going on at the moment and why the majority of the schools are not until lunch or waiting until October because they're taking that time to engage with students and have these conversations and with staff as well around getting schedules approved and engaging in those conversations.

So that's what's currently occurring.

To add to that, I met with, and Eric was kind enough to join me, I met with student leadership from Ingram and from Hale during the school day at Ingram.

It was the student leadership class, ASB, it's a class, and at Hale I think some kids missed another class.

student leadership, and at both those schools, and I would assume other schools, but I wouldn't guarantee it, the students themselves, they were part of this decision at the building level.

And that's what, although the rollout of this obviously was not what we would like, I feel like what's happening now is the appropriate place for these conversations.

The superintendent and principals are talking about challenges and solutions, and then at the building level, the principals are engaging and including the students in, you know, how to figure this out, what makes sense for their own school.

Director Top?

Yeah, I would just like to echo sort of what Director Nizarahi said.

I think, you know, we all saw a very difficult role out here and I appreciate this charter being put together with this task force to convene and really evaluate the high school day and how that connects with our goal of college and career readiness that I would just want to echo sort of Joe's point, Director Mizrahi's point, excuse me, along the way of seeing some of those points, seeing the progress in that engagement of the task force along the way, because don't want to be put in a place where we come to the spring and we haven't done the proper engagement.

We've got all these changes and we're back in the same position that we were here in this point.

So I just leaned over to the superintendent.

Previous superintendent task force, it is typical to have either a board liaison where President Topp and the superintendent could decide on or appoint a board member to be, typically it's a non-voting member, but they're on behalf of the board to just observe and and do exactly what both of you just said, just like, are things going well?

Is this productive?

Are we reaching the things we have?

And then that person can bring updates as a liaison to the rest of the board.

That's one possibility.

Another possibility is just regular written updates or even verbal updates from the dais from the superintendent.

But so just the liaison thing is, I'll just put that out there for you, President Topp, to talk about and think about if that's something that we want to do.

I appreciate that.

I think that's a great idea, and looking to fellow board directors, you know, to let me know now if that is something you'd be interested in serving as, let me know.

All right, I'm going to go to Director Sarju, and then I'm going to get us out of here, unless there's anything else.

I don't have a question, but I would like to give a praise.

So, oftentimes, Particularly in our culture, there's this expectation of perfection.

And when we as humans make mistakes, there's very little room or grace for forgiveness or course correcting.

And with this particular issue, it wasn't to the magnitude of a spectacular wipeout, but it was a small wipeout.

And in any kind of wipeout, if you use a sports analogy, it's what happens after.

How do you get back up?

What do you do to analyze what went wrong and how in the future things can go more smoothly?

and I think with this situation, what our central office staff showed was real leadership.

First, acknowledging that there was a problem, that it didn't go well, figuring out why it didn't go well, and then on down the line, figuring out what the next steps were.

In my opinion, this is how This model of leadership is how it should always go.

And this is one of the first times in my sitting here as a board director that I've seen this kind of pivot and level and depth and breadth of analysis and actually trying to get to the right solution.

I'm not speaking on behalf of any other board member.

I don't expect perfection.

But I do expect solidly good enough.

Right?

We're never gonna get to perfection, but we can be solidly good.

And so my praise for you, Dr. Rocky and Superintendent Podesta, is that you acted quickly.

You didn't just sit on it, you didn't say, oh, those parents and those students, those little privileged, you know, little rotten raisins or whatever there are.

No, you actually stopped acknowledged that, oh my gosh, this was not, this was a mistake.

It didn't go as planned.

Now what are we gonna do about it?

And so my request is, I have no idea if any future superintendent might be on the call, but if you are, you need to be listening and you need to be watching.

And my statement to you, Superintendent Podesta, is in your short time as superintendent, you are really modeling what leadership looks like.

And so, I, we often in these roles, we get a lot of criticism, we get a lot of, you know, oh, I almost got a FCC violation.

We get a lot of slapping.

And very rarely do board directors or even parents acknowledge when something good has happened.

And so that's my commitment in the last few weeks on the board is to actually catch somebody doing good and say something about it.

Particularly when it's actually providing a visual leadership that we actually want to have as foundational to our district.

So I thank you for that.

Thank you, those are really, I really appreciate that.

Well that seems a good note to end on as any.

So, there being no further business to come before the board, this meeting stands adjourned at 8.04 p.m., thank you very much.

Thank you all, good night.