Seattle Schools Board Special Meeting Mar 4, 2026

Thank you folks I know we are starting a little bit later than posted time but we would start with a land acknowledgement we would like to acknowledge that we are on ancestral lands and the traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish people.

For the record I will call the roll Vice President Briggs.

Director Lavallee.

Here.

Director Mizrahi.

Here.

Director Smith.

Here.

Director Song.

Here.

Director Rankin.

Here.

And this is President Topp.

We also have representatives Masoodi, Mangelson, and Yoon with us today.

we have two portions of our meeting this evening the first is a budget and at the conclusion of the first session we'll move into goals and guardrails work so that tonight continues the board's conversation about our budget challenges and how we align our resources to support students and return the district to financial stability I know that we are all very keenly aware we are facing a structural deficit and that puts us on the pathway to insolvency unless we change course and our responsibility as a board is to change that course for the students who depend on our schools every single day so with that we have staff here to run us through a budget presentation there'll be I think some natural breaks through the presentation where we can have some discussion and then we will conclude with a larger discussion as well so with that I will pass it over to staff to be to have the conversation or begin the presentation

Thank you so much, President Topp.

Good afternoon to everyone.

I want to thank everyone for being here today.

As President Topp said, this district is facing some pretty significant financial hardships, but that doesn't mean that we make decisions just because of numbers.

We have to always make sure that we're keeping our children and our staff and our families front and center.

That does mean, sadly, we are going to have to make some difficult decisions, but the hope is that we're always making those decisions with the best thought of both all 50,000 children and 9,000 staff and each and every individual child and each and every individual staff.

So what I hope that you're going to see through my superintendency is this is going to be often.

We're going to share conversation around budget often.

This has to be a detailed but also engaging dialogue because the decisions that we make are going to impact folks.

I think those of you who know me in now, what, month two, day four, I'm pretty transparent and pretty kind of honest about these kinds of things.

These are gonna be difficult, but I think there is a really good and thoughtful way forward.

what I also want to preface something because as I think many of you know I've spent a lot of time in the community over the last month is that I think there's some kind of misunderstanding around budgets mainly because they make no sense so I really appreciate when folks are saying but Ben like how come everything's changing why is it on one day it's one way and one day it's another a totally legitimate question and so what I would say to the board and to the community is one of the reasons for that is that we have to make assumptions about decisions without actually knowing the facts.

So imagine here you are sitting and knowing that a bunch of people in Olympia are going to make a decision that you don't know the answer to.

So you've got to assume that you think you know what they're going to do.

So you've got to make a formula based on what you think they're going to do.

And then they might do something that you think about, or they might do something completely different.

It doesn't mean that the district lied to you.

It just means that they made an assumption that now turns out to not be true.

I think the district has not done a great job in explaining all of that and that's certainly my role as superintendent and all role as staff but I just want to posit that a lot of times what you'll see is assumptions one of the big assumptions and I know we have certainly friends listening at home and folks in the audience one of the big assumptions is going to be about how many students are going to be at your school next year I don't know.

But we have pretty good assumptions of why and decisions that we make.

But we do have to make sure that our systems allow for us to adjust and edit based on certain things.

We have some schools.

More kids are coming than we thought.

Some schools, less.

But that doesn't mean that the assumptions we make today in March are false.

It just means that they might not be accurate in a month, in two months, in three months.

And so I will try my absolute best to explain everything as clear as I can.

Certainly I'm here with two wonderful educators who care deeply about our students and our staff as well.

And they're going to walk through this.

And so I wanted to just kind of frame this because what we're sharing to you today on the first week in March is not going to be accurate in 20 seconds from now because something might change where Olympia might change or the number of students might change or there might be some change where everybody says I want to move to Seattle and we get 50,000 new kids.

Who knows?

So we've gotta make sure that we're as clear as we can today about the assumptions we make and then about the decisions we make.

So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Buddleman to talk about at least the first page on what are some of the assumptions that we're making.

Thank you.

Another assumption, another thing that's in flux is the reorganization discussions that transpired, I think, in this room on Friday.

I wasn't here for that.

But another thing that we're sort of juggling in this process is that we are starting this year with the school process.

So we've started working with school leaders in the last couple weeks with their gold book and their purple book to see what their allocations are based on our current assumptions.

They'll come back in a couple weeks after they met with their communities to put together what their budget is for the school year that's coming up in the fall.

But as Superintendent Schultner indicated, things are going to change between now and then.

But this will be, we'll have that starting point.

So tonight is mostly about the details of what we've given them in terms of the school staffing process.

And then it's a little bit lighter on details in terms of the Stanford Center process.

And we're still working on that.

There's some overlap and some things that play together with the school process and the Stanford Center process, but we're working on that actively as we speak.

I think we met three hours this morning on some of that, so to Ben's point about this is in process.

It is in process, but this is an update on the process.

And then as we're going through it, I brought a lot of pieces of paper of their detailed questions that Marnie and I and other staff are not able to answer in real time today, and we'll get back to you on those.

President Topp had sent 15 questions over the weekend.

We do have answers to those in memo form.

I thought I'd just add other questions so you'd get one memo from us with all the answers to all the questions.

And so we'll try and integrate some of the answers to President Topps' questions into this presentation as we go along.

But I want to make sure that other questions will get answered and get it back to the entire board if we can't answer the very detailed question tonight.

Oops.

Uh-oh.

So just the four things we're going to talk about is the legislature, the school process, and what we're doing there, some proposed savings and efficiencies outside of the school process, and then just an update on the timeline.

And I think Superintendent Sheldon, correct me if I'm wrong, you want this to be conversational in sorts, and staff from the back can come forward if we have questions, if they're more positioned to answer.

I appreciate that I might have a different way of doing things but I really believe that everybody should have time to feel comfortable with things like the budget and so certainly the board feel free to ask questions to engage you know my hope is that over the however long I get to work here is that we are creating an environment where these are conversations so that everybody leaves understanding what we're doing and feeling hopefully good, but at least understanding why we're making certain decisions.

So yes, and if staff comes up to have comments, that would be terrific.

Great.

so briefly the legislature is currently meeting they're finishing their work march 12th in the last few weeks there was an updated state revenue forecast which i think the way we would explain that is there was additional revenue that was unanticipated when the first forecast was made which made their problem a little bit less hard to solve so this is a new money just to give to K-12 Education or to other agencies of state government, but it just made the cuts they're needing to take a little less drastic for the next year's budget process.

To Ben's point about the assumptions, so that last bullet point, we've been making assumptions about what the legislature was going to do and if we look at the state or the House or the Senate version we came within about $100,000 of where they're at today so our assumptions on what the state budget was going to do were pretty good and are baked into what we're planning around next year's balanced budget plan so a few of the highlights there One of the things we hadn't anticipated was school districts like Seattle that don't have their own buses get some money from the state to account for bus depreciation from their vendors, and they're changing the bus depreciation schedule, which would be an impact of about a million dollars less for Seattle Public Schools.

Other schools that have their own buses would buy buses less frequently because they'd have less revenue coming in through the STARS formula.

So that's one thing we hadn't anticipated.

It's still active in Olympia and it's part of the legislative conversation.

Another thing we had not anticipated is this reduction in the BEST program, which is the beginning educator support team.

So Seattle Public Schools has $400,000 in this grant and it's two FTE that do support for first, second, third and fourth year educators consistent with the SEA agreement.

And so without that funding, the district would have to provide those supports in a different way.

It's just a line item in the budget that reduces that.

and I think we've talked at this table a couple of times at least around the sales tax.

So there was new in last year's budget, school districts were charged along with other entities except for hospitals, sales tax on temporary staffing services, the one that mainly impacts Seattle Public Schools and other K-12 services.

So for example, a psychiatrist that's not an employee of Seattle Public Schools that's doing work with our students, now we're being taxed, sales tax on that.

So this is a number that we've built $2 million into our budget deficit for next year.

Some of the reason that number's not as big as you might think it would be is because some of that's offset by safety net funding, So many of the kids who receive those supports, they were now taxed on, we get reimbursed by the state for some of that funding.

So the net impact of the state is bigger than that $2 million, but we're estimating about $2 million if that sales tax exemption is not overturned in the current legislative session.

Do you want to take questions now?

We're on the way.

So if we take questions along the way, let's be mindful that we have to get out of here by 9 and that we want to be fair to all board directors as well.

So we can try this and we'll see how it goes.

Director Rankin.

Sorry, I want a clarification.

You said that what our assumptions were is only about a difference of about $100,000, depending on what we actually think?

Correct.

Or on what we think is going to actually happen?

From what we predicted a few months ago.

What we predicted.

Okay.

Because this is, I mean, we, a lot of the most kind of devastating cuts or programs that we don't have, like transition to kindergarten and LEA are sources that are going to really impact other districts besides us in ways that are So the governor's initial budget kind of opened the door for a budget balanced on the backs of children and disabled people in Washington state in ways that I find pretty horrifying, and I just wanted to say that out loud.

The education budget, this is definitely the worst supplemental budget year I've seen in all of my 10-plus years.

The fact that they're entertaining these significant cuts in a supplemental budget year when typically it's like a time to come back and kind of finish up some things and even increase some funding when projections are different than anticipated is honestly quite shocking.

and so although I understand that like TK and LEA don't, that's not gonna show up for us, I'm still surprised that we're this close and one area I'm wondering in particular about is Medicaid reimbursement.

I know that there is movement to basically have this, previously districts can apply for Medicaid reimbursement for students that qualify for certain services in their schools and the state is gonna stop funding some of those things and basically say well the districts can just pay for themselves.

Well I don't know where that money's supposed to come from so I'm wondering what that impact is to us.

And then the sales tax exemption, am I understanding right that I thought it was more like $7 million.

The impact is not as much as we think because of safety net funding.

Does that mean we're using safety net funding to pay the tax?

This year we would be, yes.

Okay.

So safety net funding is supposed to be for children with disabilities who go above the formula to meet what's in their IEP.

And basically the legislature is, we're having to pay this additional tax that shouldn't have been applied to us in the first place out of money that's intended to provide additional services and support for students with disabilities.

We'd be sending the bill to OSPI for the kids that are eligible for safety net funding, and it would include sales tax.

Does it impact the level of safety net funding we can access?

No.

Not that I'm aware of.

Thank you so much, Director Rankin.

What I hope we see from that fourth bullet point is that the other changes net less than $100,000 up or down.

That's just that Kurt and the team knew what to anticipate.

It doesn't mean we only lost 100,000.

It just means that we've caked in knowing what we were going to lose or make because, again, the team, my pleasure, because they are quite good at their job.

The three things above that we highlight are the things that weren't caked in because these are new, right?

So now we have caked it in eventually, but one thing that I really appreciate about what Kurt is doing here is I love Seattle.

I've been here for like a month and four days and I love this place and one of the things is that people really feel empowered to advocate.

One of the things that I don't think the district has done strong enough is to tell our wonderful folks where to advocate.

The fact that we're paying $3 million in tax seems absurd for a government entity.

That is something we could go to Olympia and advocate for, and that would be $2 million back for us.

The idea that we have to lose a million bucks on bus appreciation is kind of ridiculous.

But these are the kinds of things we want to highlight for folks, because I don't want anybody to think, oh, man, you know, we're losing all this money, but we don't know why.

Well, we want to be really clear.

There's a sales tax issue, and there's a bus depreciation issue.

We're gonna deal with it, we will absorb it, but there are things that we do, and we wanna highlight this, because this is new, because, and it's not that we didn't anticipate, we don't know what the folks in Olympia are gonna do.

I think there's still time that maybe the sales tax thing is gonna be fixed and if that's the case that's two million dollars more in the budget which would be awesome but we want to be really honest to the community and say as of today this is where we are.

Yeah, the sales tax issue is absolutely fixable.

I think there's three different vehicles that it could be, but we advocated pretty hard knowing that that was going to impact us, and we're told, no, it won't impact you.

Last year.

And it did, but they can fix it.

And I've got the Medicaid question, and I'll get back to you on that.

I know that we've answered this question before, I just don't want to misspeak on it.

I think the statewide figure is about 3 point something million, which doesn't seem like very much, but a lot of it is probably ours, because for some districts, it actually costs so much for them to apply for the reimbursement that they don't even bother.

But that's, yeah, I'm wondering about that.

Thanks.

The next part of the agenda is around the school budget development.

So as I said, the school leaders have been coming down here the last week or week and a half, meeting in 2776 if anybody wants to join them.

Ben, join them on Monday morning bright and early to work through some of the the more complex budget challenges that some principals are managing and other staff.

I think most staff in this room are supporting that process in one way or another by going down and helping to support principals through some of these changes and figuring out the best way forward for kids, as Ben said.

So that's ongoing.

Principals then go back to their schools, work with their building leadership teams.

I'm looking to Marnie as a former principal.

to make sure that I've got the process right.

And then they come up with sort of their recommendations around how to have their actual budget for next year.

And as Ben said multiple times, and then things will change a little bit, so that'll be the point where they come forward to as their starting budget for the fall after they come back in a couple weeks and put it into the system.

Here's a chart that I think we'll spend some time on.

These are changes in the school type.

and this is average annual FTE, which is the way that districts are funded.

This is not headcount.

So headcount is the number of kids in a school.

Average annual FTE is the way the state counts them for funding purposes.

So as an example, if you have a kid who's half running start and half in the school, this counts them half that way and half with the running start way.

So it's a different number.

So you'll see these differences in headcount and AFTE.

and to Ben's original point about trying to be more clear about that, Marnie and I are joined at the hip on trying to provide better information on how, because her team works in headcount primarily because they're working on how many kids can go into this school, how many kids are in this classroom.

My team works on how much money are we gonna get to fund those kids in those classrooms and so coming soon there will be better information on how these two relate to each other and how they don't relate to each other.

a caveat there.

So you'll see here the biggest change.

Most of the school types remain relatively stable, a little growth in K-8, and then a significant decline in the non-traditional school enrollment is what's projected at this point in time for the 26-27 school year.

I do want to highlight what Kurt said again.

When you think of a school, you think of children.

How many chairs?

How many desks?

Makes sense, right?

All the lovely kids that need to learn.

But because funding doesn't work that way, sometimes these numbers feel wrong.

You say, wait a second, but I have 200 kids in front of me.

Why doesn't it seem like I have 200 kids for funding?

Well, it might be that you might have 200 kids, but 50 of them spend half their day somewhere else, and we're not getting funded for them.

Doesn't mean we don't love them.

Doesn't mean that we shouldn't support them.

But we have to be really clear about how funding works, because it's the funding, it's the dollars we get, is the dollars we spend.

as you've heard me say this over and over again, right now, the dollars we get is not what we spend.

What we spend is a lot more than we get.

And so we have to balance what we're getting and what we're spending.

So this AAFTE, which is, really is the funding mechanism.

And that's why later on when we talk about things like the funding mechanism and the model for classes, it's not class size, it's the funding mechanism for the class.

document is super important because this is the document we're going to use when we talk about the funding.

The good news is negative 0.5% is not great, but it is not significant when you look at a large district like Seattle in terms of huge changes.

I would love that.

My hope and my promise to this district is I'm trying very hard for that to all be black and it all be positive and I think we have a good shot at doing that soon but just know it's a negative 0.5, 256 kids.

And one other just distinction with this slide versus some of the other information that you probably see is this is from about this point in time last year to this point in time this year, and so it's not how many kids were in there in October, this is budget to budget.

So again, back to Ben's opening statement around all of this is fluid on some level.

I think Marnie was gonna talk a little bit about some of why the changes are showing up the way they are in K-8 and non-traditional schools.

Yeah, thanks for the question and thank you all for being here and for your attention to this such important work.

So if we look at actual kids, it's actually a reduction of about 12%.

So the AEFTE number reflects the, and there's reasons that we've just talked about, but there's a reduction of about 12% in students.

That's largely reflective of multilingual and international students are not coming here as much as they had due to the, we would assume, the political climate.

So if you look at a school like Seattle World School, we are having fewer students arriving.

We are also, the trending in general is that we have larger exiting 12th grade classes and smaller entering classes.

kindergarten classes and also we have offered more access to choice.

So some schools have lost some of their kids to other choice assignments.

So those are the three factors that have influenced that, the number of kids.

But it's actually more like, again, 12% change in the number of students in non-traditional schools.

Just to be clear, you are only talking about non-traditional schools?

Correct.

I wanted to make sure everybody did not hear that we are losing 12% of the entire district.

Correct.

Thank you.

Because that's how some of us might have heard it.

Shifting to other places in many cases, yes.

That's a quick clarifying question.

Just so we're clear, I'm going to now hold questions until the end of each agenda item.

So there's four agenda items.

We'll let the staff get through their presentation and then we'll go to questions.

But there's a quick clarifying question.

Thank you.

Based on the 12% and you said, because 26.6% is pretty significant change for nontraditional.

And then you said that's 12% of our, it says 26 and you were just saying 12.

and we can tag-team this.

Part of the difference is my numbers, and I'll call these my numbers because they're the funding numbers, are from last year's adopted.

Marnie's numbers are from October 1 of this year to the projected, and so there was probably some drop-off between February and October in those numbers to begin with, and then

but also I'm addressing headcount not AAFTE.

So the shift in AAFTE is different from the shift in headcount.

And do you both believe that the change is mostly due to international students or is there something else going on in other nontraditional schools?

So again, if I look at these individual schools, Bridges Center School, Home School, Interagency Middle College, Nova Seattle World School, I can see larger exiting senior classes and smaller entering ninth grade classes.

So that's part of it as well.

And then also I can see more students have gotten a choice seat at another school rather than going to one of these schools.

OK.

Thanks.

Thanks.

And did you want to talk about the choice, where we're at with the choice change?

Sure.

So we did see some significance.

So we completed open enrollment in the month of January, which means that we have really strong actual numbers for where our students are going.

So as of March 2nd, we have 870 students on wait lists.

That compares to about 2,000 at this time last year.

that breaks down grade band about 347 in K5, 156 in 6.8, and 367 in 9.12.

Of those, 725 are remaining on wait lists because they apply to a high demand school.

So that's across the district.

Of those 870, 145, they're kind of temporarily on wait lists because they were late applications.

they're being considered right now and we're constantly on a daily basis looking at all those applications.

We look at these numbers on the cadence of probably about three times a day to see what's shifting, make sure we're staying fresh, make sure we're keeping as accurate as possible and being reviewed for potential placement.

Why wait lists?

Because we do have a slight decline in enrollment overall but Families are telling us where they want to go to school.

So we have schools that have more requests than have capacity or availability of seats.

So that's why we have wait lists even though we don't have completely full schools across the board and or we might have a decline in our overall enrollment.

There are two kinds of things that this tells us that we need to work on.

The first is if we can tell as we can by the patterns of where the schools are that have wait lists, in some cases it's a programmatic preference.

STEM, dual language, in some cases K-8 opportunity.

So that tells us that we need to look at those opportunities that families tell us that they want.

We need to make more of those available.

In some cases it has to do with the capacity of the building itself.

and that tells us that we need to do more work on looking at our boundaries.

We need to be doing that and Director Rankin has talked about this a lot, we need to be doing this on a regular basis, looking at our enrollment, looking at our boundaries, making smart choices about where our students live, where they are, where they need to attend school.

So we kind of have two opportunities to really learn from this data.

We have it early on, which is really great.

We can get much more precise and much more refined in how we approach our schools.

So that's just kind of where we're at with wait lists.

But the positive news is that many, many more families have received the assignment to the school that they told us they preferred for their student.

Yeah, I really want, I mean, we need to take this win.

Last year, there were over 2,000 people on the wait list at this time, and now it's around 800 and change.

That happened because we actually believe in choice.

I know I've been here not that long, but I've been told by many, many parents that they feel like they ask to go to a school and then they stay on a wait list forever and then they walk the halls of that school and they say, wait a second, there's 14 empty classrooms.

How come I don't get to go to that school?

what we did this year was really make sure that if we could move you there we did.

And that's important because there is a side effect and we need to just be really clear about this.

If we as a district, as a board, as a superintendent believe in choice, a parent says I want my child to go to this school and we do it, that's awesome.

And we finally are listening to parents, not finally, we are listening to them strongly, we are caring about them even more, but there is an impact, which is the school that they're leaving from.

But if we believe in choice, This is what we do.

And we just then have to be honest that the places that had X amount of kids and now have less than X amount of kids, that's going to impact their budget.

But the really good news that you are seeing is that at this time last year, we had over 2,000 kids on the wait list, and now we have 800 and change.

And as you heard Marnie say, some of those were late to doing the process, which means actually we could probably sit more of them coming soon.

So that's a really good thing.

And I think that it's important that we see that, because it means we're doing what we said we were gonna do for the community, but we also have to be honest that there is then an impact, which is some schools are gonna have less kids and thus their budget's gonna be impacted.

Thank you so much.

And one more thing I want to add.

The vast majority of the students that are on wait lists do have an assignment in Seattle Public Schools.

they're either not gonna be here or they're on a wait list.

They actually do have an assignment.

We can anticipate that, and we've heard from families that have told us, if I don't get this choice, I've got another option in my back pocket, but most, and I tried to pin my team down to a percentage, but most, again, it's fluctuating numbers, but I would say over 90% of these families do have an assignment.

And again, we want Seattle Public Schools to be the place where you wanna be, where you wanna be with your student, and so we wanna make that possible.

So like I said we also have some work to do then right away in looking at both our boundaries, how are we using our buildings, how are we looking at where our students and families live and want to be and also looking at our program opportunities for our families.

This is just a graph sort of trying to show that, show the outliers which schools are growing in large part because of the more choice process and which schools are getting smaller that students are not choosing going forward.

And the other takeaway for me from this is there's a lot of schools in the middle there where not a lot is changing in terms of enrollment through this choice process, so it's kind of the schools at both ends of the spectrum, some that are losing fairly significant numbers and others who are gaining fairly significant numbers.

There may be one school missing on here, an astute eagle-eyed community member pointed out to me that there may be one missing.

If there is, I'll update this slide later.

but there may be only 105 there.

It wasn't intended to be read literally, but just sort of a luster kid.

But if there's a missing school, I'll add that.

And I don't think it's an outlier.

That's the natural break, President Topp.

Director Song.

Thank you for calling out with the outliers.

I am wondering how you came up with these projections for these schools.

In particular, I think my question is around Nathan Hale and Garfield, because those are pretty significant swings.

Why?

Will those, many of those students receive choice assignments to other high schools that they requested?

So I have been getting emails from staff members saying that the projections are inconsistent with what they see on their end.

So I just want to understand.

when you're coming up with the enrollment projections, say like with Nathan Hill and Garfield, how did you land at the number that you did?

Yeah, so I know the emails at least in one school that you're talking about.

One thing I will share that's really an important technical detail, but I think it bears stating here.

If you look in power school, you will see a higher number than the projection.

Power school, so when our superintendent talks about assumptions, power school is the assumption just based on sheer names of enrolled kids.

As we know, not all students show up.

So power school is always going to be a higher number.

And we find this often in August when our principals return to school and they look in power school and they kind of have a little moment because they're like, oh my gosh, I have so many students and we always have to remind them here's how many students are actually going to show up.

That is based on really the science of analysis, of show rates, analysis of really, and I have a ace team of PhDs that do this work that really look at those trends and get pretty refined at how they look at those show rates.

So that's what this is based on.

The person, I think one of the emails I saw referred to, hey, in power school it says this and the projection says this.

That's because the projection is anticipating how many actual kids are going to be counted on that when they come to school.

Yeah.

You're using unique show rates for individual schools.

So like looking historically at this school, what is the show rate?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, absolutely, and thank you for pointing that out.

We don't apply a single generic show rate.

We actually look at each school individually, we look at their pattern, and again, try to anticipate.

We could be very, we could be wrong, we make adjustments, that's why we do a June adjustment and then another fall adjustment.

But yeah, we calculate that for individual schools.

So I think one more kind of lingering thing that could, changed the numbers a little bit is HC.

So we have not closed that window yet, right?

And so what do we anticipate how HC assignments are going to impact some of these school projections?

Yeah, we also calculated for that.

So again, we anticipate of the students offered an HC seat at a cohort school, We're pretty confident that we know about how many will take that seat.

So that's what we use to do those projections as well.

We did that last year also when we maintained HC at second grade.

So we used that for Thurgood Marshall, Decatur, and Cascadia.

So we've been able to refine that formula as well.

So that's how we did it.

kind of knew where the students were who were identified.

We knew exactly what schools they were coming from.

We also know the rate at which they tend to select that.

But again, that's something we're checking consistently to make sure that we're on board with our projections.

are we anticipating doing a June adjustment?

I would say so, yes.

I think that the June adjustment, and I'm sorry if I've spoken to heresy here, but it's a much healthier time to do it than October.

And we hear this, and it's even probably feels too late to some, you know, to many people for whom, you know, they're working on budgets right now and you would love to know.

right now and I think during our earlier open enrollment I have to give kudos to the team, admissions and enrollment team.

They really hustle to do that open enrollment during January but we can really see the productive fruits of that particular labor which is we have much better data now.

So the difficult work of building those school budgets we hope will be much more effective because we have better numbers.

But June adjustment still means that we're able to do that work before we head out for the summer and are more prepared for the fall.

Last question.

So I think I heard you say that the enrollment is slightly down.

So is the data from school choice showing that we didn't get as many school choice requests as we did previously?

Like what did that tell us about what enrollment was going to go?

That's a really great question.

I will find out how many school choice applications we actually had.

I think they were about the same, but I will get more specific information.

Yeah.

Director Lavallee.

Yeah, in the very beginning of this open enrollment update slide, you shared a bunch of numbers that I was not quick enough to write down.

I would love if in the future those could be within this slide so that we could reference them if at all possible.

Because I'm just not quick enough to both listen and write that down all at the same time and contextualize it.

So that would be absolutely wonderful.

Well, I don't have to pass that.

We do have other specifics in this memo that we'll send back out to the board.

OK.

It would be great to have it in the presentation if at all possible, especially if we're referring to it so that we have that.

I'll give staff a pass because it was one of my late questions or one of the questions I asked after the budget presentation that it sounds like is addressed in the memo.

So that might be part of the issue.

Got it.

Thank you.

So within that as well, I know there was, in some of Director Song's questions as well, there was a report back from 2022, I believe, that the school district used to run of kind of where students are zoned for and where they're attending, so you would be able to look up pretty easily and get the information of there's a K-8 choice school, and here was the schools that they were zoned for, and some of that information, which we don't seem to be publishing since, and I believe it was about 2022. I'm kind of curious into why we aren't publishing that anymore, or if that data is still being looked at by your department.

as well as you were saying that you have a wonderful team working, showing some of this.

It would be great for us as the board as well as the public to be able to get more visibility into that process because right now we tend to have three bullet points on a thing and then a budget hitting with no understanding of where those numbers are coming from.

and if you do believe that they are very accurate, then I'd love to see a little bit more on that.

Sounds good.

Absolutely.

Thank you for that.

There's an executive summary enrollment report that is on the website.

I'll send you the link that I believe has all of the information you're requesting, but we could also make that much more visible and make sure that we push that out to you.

So we are maintaining that.

We used to publish an actual physical enrollment report.

I have several shelves of them in my office and I look at them often because they're amazing historical documents but I will make sure that I push that link out to you and then also make sure that we find a way to get that work that the enrollment team is doing more visible.

I will say one other thing that we're in the midst of in enrollment is we're actually going to be replacing our student assignment system which is an in-house system that we built because we had some very specific unique needs and parameters around choice and things like that.

but that's actually aging out of its Windows platform so we have to replace it.

We are currently building out the requirements for an RFP for a new system.

My goal is for that new system to be one that is much more transparent, much more available and visible and there are great products out there now that do what we've been trying to do and I think we were probably ahead of the game in terms of how we were building something for ourselves but there's well-vetted now platforms that can do this work and will make it much more visible to the public.

Okay, I do have one more question.

You were talking about waitlists being, actually I'm not sure you were talking about it, but waitlists get dissolved in the not too distant future.

Can we get information about from who's left on those waitlists if those schools are at capacity or if they are at 80% capacity or what amount of capacity that they're at so that we're aware that the waitlists are not holding kids back from options, holding families back from options that they want to participate in?

That's a great question.

I mean, a great suggestion.

So we'll make sure that, you know, maybe we have a chance to do an update.

That's the end of May, so maybe early May we can take a look at where we're at with waitlists and share that out with you.

Okay.

Worried that wait lists are going to be dissolved and kids that could have gotten placements in schools that are desirable to those families are going to be, you know, removed from that option.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Director Mizrahi.

So, yeah, well, there's two things.

Vivian's question about the number.

How about that?

OK, great.

I'm very curious about Vivian's question about the number of families that applied for choice, especially just given the earlier timeline.

Like, any time you change anything, it could have implications.

So was it the same number?

Was it more?

Was it less?

And how we think that will impact the future.

So that would just be interesting to know.

And then, similar to we were just talking about this, I'd love to dig in on the 830. First of all, it is amazing progress to go from 2000 to 830, and I think that it's wonderful that we are being more responsive to what people want and the choices that they have.

And within the 830, I would be curious, one, how many of those are on that wait list because of the 85% rule versus just schools that are just way over capacity?

And then also, what happens if there are, as I'm sure there would be, families who are now assigned to pick the biggest outlier, Cleveland, which I assume is at that number because it's overcapacity and there are people on the waitlist probably making a guess.

Maybe there aren't.

But if then there are families that say, never mind, we don't want to go to Cleveland or leave the district, then what is the process for getting folks who had applied for that, especially if those waitlists get dissolved?

What is the next step for those families?

Because obviously those are somewhat the people that we're hearing from, and mostly we're just pushing those folks to your office to find out where they are in the process, because I'm not gonna answer the individual questions about that, but it'd be great to know what the process is for them if spots open up.

Yeah, that's a great question, thank you.

And I will, and I just texted Val to see if she can tell me how many choice applications we got, and I'm sorry that I don't have that number.

So again, we're reviewing those waitlists daily, so prior to the time when they dissolve, those people that are on waitlists get moved and get offered those seats.

So after the waitlists are dissolved, one of the advantages to that is that if you are new to Seattle, if you have moved here, it used to be that you just did not have a hope of getting into any of those schools.

And so this means that if you do move to Seattle, you're not gonna be put on 55th place on a waitlist where you're never going to move.

But a family who still desires that assignment can then put in an appeal, a transfer appeal.

so that's the next step.

We meet weekly in a transfer appeal board so that's a very valid way for families to continue to request that assignment.

Okay, so looking at, well first of all I just want to say these are all questions that most of them i don't think are new but what i just want to appreciate that we're making time and space to have these questions and that past experience has been we ask them and then don't really see a reflection on how they might be different and this is really important and even though there's pain in budget seasons and people are confused when things change i just want to appreciate for us having this conversation and you both and Superintendent Schultner for acknowledging that we can't solve these longstanding problems without being able to talk about it.

And it may be confusing for folks who are used to budgets drop in February and then we don't talk about it again until June to have this and feel like things are changing a lot, which is uncomfortable and different, and it also is allowing us the opportunity to actually talk about what's going on in a way that we haven't done.

So thank you for this.

Similar to Director Song's question about the outliers being Nathan Hale and Garfield.

Garfield totally makes sense to me that a lot of students maybe opted towards Cleveland.

Nathan Hale, I don't understand.

I don't understand that and I would be really curious to know is there really that much of a difference between the incoming freshman class and the exiting senior class?

That's really notable, I guess.

In those, well, so the outliers of the increase totally makes sense.

They're all option schools and we've decided to allow more kids to them.

That's not mysterious at all.

in the outliers of decreasing, again, Hale and Garfield is interesting, but I'm really, really concerned about Interagency, World School, and Cascade, and maybe some other programs that are not designated here as outliers.

With Hale and Garfield, my wonder is about making sure that with a decline in enrollment, yes, there's displacement, yes, there's change, but my main concern is about making sure that we're sustaining access to required classes for students to be able to graduate and that they have some electives.

And I don't need you to answer that right now, but 139 is pretty significant.

for Nathan Hale as one of our somewhat smaller high schools, and I know last year at least there were some challenges with 10th grade history having enough capacity, and that's not a matter of student choice or preference, that's a matter of, we've got to provide access to graduation requirements at all of our high schools.

So that would be a question, maybe that's a master scheduling issue, I don't know, but that's just a question about, you know, I'm not gonna be one to say, we had this many FTE last year, so we have to have this many this year, but my concern is about student access.

So how are we?

I think the regional executive directors they're meeting with Ben on Friday or collecting that data from the schools that may have trouble putting together the master schedules and they're gonna work with the superintendent and Dr. Torres Morales and others to make sure that students do have those pathways.

So they're identifying those hotspots if there are some as you're describing.

And one thing I would say, again, this is all kind of general rule of thumb, but when you are scheduling a high school The magic number usually is around 400. So Director Rankin, your point is incredibly well taken, which is we always, no matter what school we have, must give the children what they need to graduate, to pass, to do whatever.

Now, I also want to make sure there's robust everything else.

That I can't necessarily always guarantee.

But as long as a high school's at 400 or plus, the math works out usually pretty well.

I don't know the number of Nathan Hale off the top of my head, but I think it's well above that.

But I will say, as was said, I'm actually spending time helping each school do their own scheduling.

I was a high school principal for 10 years, so I'm happy to do it.

But I don't want anybody to be too nervous.

Yes, that number 139 is large, and we want to figure out why.

But unless the number of a high school goes below 400, you should really be able to do the kind of basic expectations.

OK.

So then connected to that, the other outliers being interagency world school cascade.

page previous or maybe coming up says that there's no programmatic changes being made.

My concern with these schools as outliers is that they are not your typical 400 student school with typical classrooms.

These are unique programs and the loss of FTE for some of these schools could actually be a programmatic change.

We could make these programs no longer viable through a budget exercise in a way that is really deeply concerning to me.

It's a flaw in the WSS to begin with.

that we, you know, we always talk about we don't want to have one size fits all.

We have a contract with a teacher agreement that doesn't have, there's no MOU for Cascade.

I don't know about interagency if there's different requirements or protections in the bargain, but the bargain is generally for general education teachers and special education teachers at a comprehensive high school, and it kind of covers everybody, even if that's not really their job.

Same with the WSS.

The WSS says how many students you have, here's how many teachers you get, and that's it.

And it doesn't take into account specific programmatic needs.

And I am really concerned that some of these programs that are not just a personal preference, but literally a life-saving service to some students or the way that they can continue to attend school are being impacted by a budget process in a way that's not intentional, but it doesn't matter if we mean to do it or not.

So if we're going to say we're not making programmatic changes, Cascade Parent Partnership needs to be able to provide math and have a librarian.

Interagency needs to be able to have counseling support for students who have any host of things going on that they need additional support with that couldn't be met at their comprehensive school or perhaps were ejected from their comprehensive school.

I want to be really clear about, and we can't change everything overnight, but this is also things that we've been bringing up for a long time and haven't gotten any traction on.

So having this opportunity, we have to talk about it.

I don't think we should force any kid to be at a school where they don't feel safe or are not comfortable.

I am happy that we are moving things around to allow kids to go to other programs.

I'm also concerned that when we say option schools, we're including these other schools that are really actually completely different programs and models and it's not based on would you like to be with a STEM focus or this focus, it's based on do you have the counseling service and credit recovery needs and all these things that is much more of a unique need than a preference, and I'm concerned that we're treating them a little bit the same and going to make inadvertent program changes and make some of these things non-viable.

From a personal standpoint, my younger son is at Cascade right now, and had we not been able to do that halfway through seventh grade, he would have left SPS completely.

It was not going to work.

and having Cascade has allowed him to continue to engage in education and will allow him to successfully attend a high school.

And so I know that's just one story, but that's a pretty different thing from, I like a STEM focus or I'm interested in expeditionary learning.

Not to belittle those, that's great and we offer that, but when we're talking about the difference between access to education or no access to education, I'm worried that we're glossing over that a little bit.

And part of that is the WSS.

It already doesn't take into account for that, and it should.

The other thing that I sent, and superintendent, sorry if you didn't get a chance to read it yet, or sorry if whatever, but I sent you an email about AAFTE and that totally makes sense that if a student is part-time in Running Start, there's a different funding stream that pays for those students to be at Running Start.

It's paid for by the state for them to attend a college class.

Makes sense that we don't receive the funding for that student and that we only receive the funding for when they're in class.

For students with disabilities and students receiving multilingual services, they are always our students and yet our secondary formula adjusts for contact time in a way that I find extremely troubling and possibly in violation of FAPE.

So if a student and it also predetermines how much a student will be in a gen ed classroom in a way that I don't think is appropriate.

If a student is deemed to be resource level, we make assumptions in our funding and in our staffing that that student is going to be in a gen ed classroom 80% of the time and somewhere else 20% of the time.

They're still in our building.

They're not leaving the building.

we still receive a gen ed per pupil allocation for that student.

Where's that 20% going?

And when you get into the other models, it becomes 40% where we're assuming you're not going to be in gen ed, you're going to be somewhere else with someone else.

Where's that 40% that that student is generating as a gen ed student that is not going to provide FTE?

and this is a question I've been asking for more than four years.

So, you know, I will say that the special ed funding is bizarre, to say the very least.

And I think that the models that we use for our own budgeting are problematic.

I think I've been very transparent that I think we need to move away from the weighted student formula.

So I think I would answer your question in two ways.

One is, I will happily go through individual ways of how individual students with different designations are funded to show where the money goes.

But I think the better conversation is going to be about what new formulas are we going to come up with.

Because it's not like the money isn't there.

The money is definitely there.

It's just that it's being spent in different ways.

So it is sometimes appropriate to say, based on a student's designation there's a different funding formula and the reason for that is because a child might be let's say a 10 to 2 to 1 or a 6 to 1 or a 8 to 1 and those are different than let's say a student that's in general ed that's in a class of 25. So one of the things that I think this district has been really thoughtful about is by saying, are you taking into account equity?

Are you taking into account special needs?

Special needs, not capital S, capital N, but just the special needs of children.

because we actually have formulas that are doing that we are in fact increasing the funding when students have different designations.

The thing that I find is that it's not very transparent and I think that what we should do and I look forward to this is a of what I would call an ISS, an informational study session, where we should actually go through the funding formula.

That way, the kind of misunderstanding, because we haven't shared it, so no shade on anybody else, I think when you look at a number, you're like, wait a second, only 40%, where's the rest?

It's a great question.

Well, it's not really 40%, it's probably 2.2%.

240% because of the way that we're getting other funding and other things.

So I'll defer certainly to Kurt if he wants to go into detail, but my response would be, let us go through and really show where the money goes, and you have my word that we are going to be working on a completely different kind of formula moving forward.

Because one of the things that you'll hear from staff, and rightfully so, is wait a second.

Why is my number of teachers being impacted by one kid or two kids?

That doesn't really make sense.

And then there's this whole other thing about, you know, unless it's two FTE, i.e. teachers, differential, you don't get The way budgets should work is how many kids you got, what's the designation of the kid, what's the funding formula, and then do it by kid.

So if you have one less kid that isn't impacting a large number, it wouldn't impact probably $5,000 or $6,000.

And not to make light of this, I do want to say Because Kurt and Marnie and the whole team, these folks really do put kids first, and they really do put staff first.

Somebody came to me, which I really appreciate, and said, you know, Ben, my allotment, it was 297. If we had just been at 300, we would have gotten more.

I can't believe they put their thumb on the scale, just those three kids.

And I said, we're not that good.

There's no way in the world that somebody looked at that and said, oh, I'm going to adjust this, because we're not there.

We're just using formulas that are relatively antiquated, and we do need to change them, but we've got to use them as they are today, because we haven't changed them.

I don't know, Kurt, if you want to answer a little bit of it, but I want to share with the board later on that.

I just want to answer a little bit about the non-traditional schools.

There is no model for those.

It's different than the WSS spreadsheet.

It's just sort of static numbers that persist on a spreadsheet over time, which I think Ben was surprised to learn earlier this week.

So I'm looking at last year's versus this year's, and the only changes really are increasing the nine through 12 ratio from 31 to one.

at Center School and NOVA to 32 to 1. So this question about program, the staffing at the nontraditional schools is by and large remaining the same for next year.

I don't think that's True.

I know Cascade, because I've looked at the purple book, Cascade is 10 point something right now today for the K-8 in-person plus the virtual option, which that's a whole other thing.

I don't even think that should be part of the same school, but they're projected for like six next year.

They're not going to be able to do their program.

But that makes a programmatic decision then.

Well I mean I would love to get to the next slide so I just because that's your point is about that next slide so I'm happy to answer it but I want to make sure that So we have two more folks who have questions real fast before we go to Director Smith and then Director Lavallee if you have a shorter question or if you want then but first real fast what is LX what elementary school is LX?

It's the blue here it's the outlier blue

Oh, our engaged community member gave me a key earlier today.

Yeah, I need the key.

So let me find that.

Cascadia?

It's on the...

We're hearing from a reporter.

It's Cascadia.

Yeah, Cascadia.

Got it.

It's Cascadia.

And I also, if you're interested, we had 4,300 choice applications during that short open enrollment window.

That compares to 4,055 last year over the course of several months.

So it was a 4,300.

Oh, I thought you said 430.

No, no, no. 4,300.

Yeah, and more.

Yeah, thanks.

Okay, Director Smith.

So my first question was just going to be to ask for the key.

So that's taken care of.

And then I just wanted to comment that I think this meeting is really focused on the budget revenue and getting that balanced, which is there's definitely overlap, as Director Rankin has been pointing out.

But that is distinct from the allocation that I look forward to the ISS.

So yeah, not any discussion I can Pass on.

Director Lavallee.

My first thing is just thank you Director Rankin for mentioning the drops in some of these programs.

I would like to call out as well that for Interagency World School and Cascade K-12 they are a lot of word of mouth programs and not traditional in one building with a centralized location to the same extent as some of the other programs.

Something like World School people don't know about unless they're told about it.

So they don't know to apply necessarily.

So some of these schools don't, like interagency and World School students don't know about this same application window.

So it is an outlier within this.

And, you know, I do have concern about having it grouped in the exact same thing, tying into Director Rankin's questions as well.

My actual question is earlier, Director or Dr. Campbell, you said that we wanted to make there was that 15% restriction to get to 85% of capacity so that we could make sure that people that were coming in and moving into the area were able to get into some of those choice schools as well.

Within that, how much of the time does that get filled within the school year?

You know, are we seeing schools where that 15% gets added within one school year?

That's a great question.

I would need to sort of look historically.

I think just to be fair as well, in working with our capital department, their preference is that we don't get to 100% capacity.

Now that should not drive choice.

Sure, a bunch of our other schools are at 100% capacity as well.

It is something that happens to our neighborhood schools as well.

So I'd love to know if we're restricting 15%, is that 15% often filled or could we have a smaller percentage there?

Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I think, I will say, I'm working with the team to say, let's look at some of these neighborhood schools where we do have larger waitlists, and we know that, you know, students are, like, students, this is what we did last year, where we're seeing really large waitlists, and students and families are saying, we really want to go to this school.

We want to make that possible, so I think we do want to push on that.

So, I will keep track of that, and we will make sure that, yes.

But Jen, what would you prefer as a next step?

No, I just love the information about how you got to that 15% from a data-driven standpoint to find out how much each year people come in and look to go to those schools in the in-between timeframe.

Gotcha, okay.

You got it.

I will say that our waitlist situation last year and this year are vastly different as well how we've operated.

Okay, yep, but okay, I will get that.

Superintendent Shuldner.

I want to make sure.

This is awesome.

But to the point that was made earlier, we do want to get to the actual budget stuff.

And with that, I will just say there are a lot of questions and a lot of information from requests from staff.

So I think we'll just make sure that we have a feedback loop to the board with answers to the questions that have been asked, along with the memo.

So I do want to, I'm going to start with this slide and then I'll turn it over to Kurt.

So I really appreciate Director Rankin's question because this is a conversation we do have to have, not today, not now, but what is our definition of a program change, right?

Because From a superintendent's standpoint, I could read that and say, did we shut a school down or not?

If the answer is no, then that's not the definition of a program change, and so thus, when Kurt writes this slide and says no program changes are being proposed at this time in 26, 27, that is the one reading of the rule, right?

The idea is if we're gonna shut down a school, let's say, Franklin High School, which clearly we're not going to, so I'm using an example, is that if we were going to do that, then you, by law, by board policy, we need to bring that to you.

An interesting and more complicated question is, well, if there's 100 less kids at a school and then we follow whatever formula we use and that 100 kids less truly impacts the way that we are doing our education there, is that a program change?

Good question.

Our reading from a district standpoint would be no because our reading of a program change because of the scars and slings and arrows of last year is, hey, our definition of a program change is closing a school, closing a program, that's a change.

But I would urge the board to engage in conversation with me and others publicly and or certainly never break open meeting laws.

We should come with a an equal understanding of program change because all I want to do as your employee is follow the direction of the board.

But right now our definition is did we shut down a school or not?

Did we shut down a program or not?

A change That's our interpretation.

If the board's interpretation is different, then we can do that.

And I would certainly turn over to Kurt, your kind of understanding and reading of that.

It might be more robust than that, but at its most basic of level, we need to bring to the board, are we shutting down a school?

Are we shutting down a program?

That's where this is.

But if you have a different understanding, please let us know.

No, I think this slide is intended to gain clarity on that question, as you described.

The two years I've been here, the educational program resolution has been sort of broadly describing programs or changes, basically.

And then last year, the board changed what the superintendent had presented as the program resolution, educational program resolution.

So just an attempt for clarity on how the board wants to approach this question is why this is slide here today.

So one interpretation is programs are AP programs, IB programs, sort of the strict definition of programs.

Those are not being impacted with anything you're seeing yet today or you're seeing today.

Potentially in the future there would be a need for reduction resolution if some of those were impacted.

To Ben's point, different definition of program is up to the board and then we'd want to be responsive to that.

Next slide.

So we've talked about the school allocation.

I won't be laborless anymore.

Just want to highlight the third with the dollar sign there that as they're going through the purple pages and the books and all the things that they're working on, we're also integrating the city levy, the FEP levy funding into that process.

So it doesn't show up in the purple book.

There's other things that don't show up in the purple book.

that do support schools.

And there was questions around the FEP levy for 26-27.

So schools are acting, are working on integrating that funding into their school budget plans for next year currently.

Do you want to speak to this one, Superintendent?

Sure.

I love everybody that works in SPS.

And so I appreciate that sometimes when you make some changes to a model, the fear would be that this is going to cause folks to lose employment.

I want to be clear about language that we're using here.

Is that there are a couple of changes that we made to WSS and when we ran all of the numbers, what we're trying to make sure of is these specific changes that is not there's 300 less kids at your school, this is the change from 31 to 32, some of these other changes that are slight, is I don't want that to impact somebody actually being fired from SPS.

and the reason why I'm saying this language about losing employment, that doesn't mean that you might not have to go from one school to another school because you gotta go where the kids are.

But we are really committed this year, I wanna be very clear, this year is that some of the tweaks that we're making which will end up allowing us to save quite a lot of money is not gonna impact the headcount, the person losing employment with SPS, and I want to be clear, these changes we're going to go to that is different than if we are shutting something down or closing this or closing that, but we wanted to commit to really, I would say our union partners, but I mean more than that.

The people that spend their time helping and loving and supporting and educating our children.

We don't want to in this year have folks lose their employment because of changing from let's say 31 to 32. So we are working really hard to make sure that through attrition and displacement we're able to make this happen.

This is over a lot of folks' objections, and I appreciate that.

And yes, you have tasked me to saving a ton of money, but I want to make sure that we're saving a ton of money with humanity.

And I think there is ways of doing that that will still be painful, but possibly less painful.

So as we go through these processes, I will continuously talk about this because, again, changes that we have to make, we have to make.

That's different.

If we shut down a department, we're shutting down a department.

Those folks might possibly lose their employment.

But because we're tweaking the class formula, I don't want anybody to lose employment because of that.

And that's something that I care deeply about because, again, if folks want to do this work, I really want to support them through it.

I can't go into detail because there is no details yet because we haven't actually done the changes, but please know that that is the direction I have given the district.

Go to it.

So here's some detail on those changes that are being integrated into next year's model.

And I'll go through them really quickly, each of them, and give a little bit of the background on them.

And I expect there'll be a few questions on this.

So the district traditionally has held back about 25 FTE in its budget to mitigate different things that come up during the changes that happen in enrollment and other school processes.

This budget currently that we'd be presenting in next year reduces that by 15. So we would have to be tighter with our numbers going forward in order to realize the savings.

The district, the next one, the district has traditionally allocated career and technical education, FTE, differently than the typical basic education teacher.

There are schools for whom the student-teacher ratio was as low as 2, 3, 7, 15, the highest was 24. This is moving that to 32 to 1 for the CTE teachers who are allocated through the WSS model.

The district also has some other CTE teachers that are allocated by the CTE team to meet certain needs at certain schools.

Brian Day, who's the director of CTE, is working through all of those issues with the principals, primarily the high school principals and how this change will impact their programs, trying to make their programs tighter and more in line with the graduation pathways.

So I think Brian could talk about that for hours and hours and hours, and he's working very directly with the principals on this.

He's in the arena rooms every day working through these questions with the high school principals.

The next one is a simpler, just a funding shift.

So the district has allocated a 1.0 FTE to high schools and world school traditionally out of general funds.

We're shifting half of that, save half of that cost to the LAP program funding, the state LAP program funding and eliminating some work that emanated from the district office on that funding.

We don't have that figured out yet, but the plan is to take some money out of the strategic plan budget and reallocate it to schools in this way.

I should have started with that the WSS model is primarily just a reflection of the CBA.

The WSS model pushes about $650 million out to schools.

The things that are in the model, 90% of that is driven by CBA.

So these changes that are being proposed are within the constraints of the current CBA with SEA.

I just wanted to highlight that, that these are all changes that are within the current confines of the collective bargaining agreement.

Or the state rules and laws is the next one.

So aligning the K-3 with state funding, so the state gives districts additional funding to have small classes for K-3 education.

As long as you stay at or below 17 to one, as they calculate it, Seattle Public Schools has been slightly below that the last few years, so we looked at that a little more tightly and we looked at the non-high poverty schools first to make sure we weren't impacting the higher poverty schools and sort of tweak the numbers a little bit so we can get to that 17 to 1 and not be significantly below it for next year in terms of staffing.

So small tweak to the K-3 funding model there.

where instead of rounding up to the next point two, we're just rounding for ML and counselor FTE.

You'll see the potential savings there in terms of FTE savings.

And then there's two increases to class sizes, again, within the constraints of the collective bargaining agreement.

increasing the grades four, five staffing allocation model to 28 to one, and the six to 12 to 32 to one, as well as the CTE to that 32 to one.

Ben talked about the previous slide, and so people not losing employment, teachers impacted, or staff impacted by the changes you're seeing on this slide.

and so we're working through so schools have a lot of autonomy in how they develop their budgets so that process is happening right now and the HR team is working with them to see what the different, where people will be bumped out of their roles and things like that so what will happen in the end here to make sure that staff who are impacted by these are losing employment.

We've reserved about 35% of the potential savings at this point in time to mitigate those changes.

So there may be places where teacher A only has these credentials, there isn't a place for teacher A at a different school, teacher A stays at that school, teaches that same program because there isn't a place for him or her to go.

So let me try to frame this, because again, budgets get very weird, especially with K-12.

Kurt has an obligation to create a budget that doesn't show a deficit.

By law, he's got to do that.

So we've got to make sure that it gets to zero.

Now, a lot of times what happens is, let's say there's a vacancy.

So there's a salary, let's just call it $100,000.

If there's no person there, clearly we're not spending $100,000.

But it shows like we're spending $100,000.

And the problem is, if you show that you're spending $100,000, then the state says you're spending $100,000.

And if you do that, that counts against your budget.

And since we cannot be at anything less than zero, we have to make sure that if we are having vacancies, that we are really good about saying, well, actually, we don't need these vacancies.

We'll close them down.

This is how I'm trying to get us to a place where individual people, because of these changes, not other changes, wouldn't necessarily be losing their employment.

But because of the way school budgets work, If you show that you have something open, that is a knock against your budget.

So what we're trying to do here is get our funding formula to a place that it makes it so that there's a lot less vacancies that are showing up, that there's a lot less things that we're not actually doing.

And then it's only a million dollars on this slide, but the thing that we really will be working on moving forward is there's also a really big difference between general fund and grant funds.

grant funds are dollar in, dollar out by definition.

But the good news about grant funds is that if you put a salary on a grant fund, that doesn't count against your general fund.

So that way, if you move, it's still the same person, still getting the same dollars, and they're all green, right?

But the difference is that if it comes out of a general fund budget, that counts against us getting to that zero.

If it comes out of grants, doesn't count.

So what Kurt and the team has really tried to do is, are there people that can be paid out of grants legally that would then help us with this?

Are there jobs that are vacant that nobody's been in for a while?

Can we close those down and save those money?

And then with this, again, this is not actual class size caps.

This is allocation.

And for the CTE, for instance, there was, I think it was 30, there were 30 CTE FTEs that were being held at the district office.

So if we could just push those towards the schools, that's not us losing teachers in a classroom, it's just us changing the way that we're formulating it so that the money is now going into the schools.

I will say though, when we did run some of the CTE numbers, we saw class sizes of, what was the lowest one?

2.31?

Yeah.

So we had some small class sizes.

Let's just say that.

And so what we want to make sure of is we can't run classes of two kids.

We can't run classes of four kids.

But we want to make sure that kids have a robust education.

If we start to have classes of, let's say, 10 or 15, we're still going to do our thing.

But that's where the funding formula changes, not the cap size.

It's about how we use the money.

So I know this doesn't always make a lot of sense.

but the number I do want to highlight is that 35% reserve, that's our promise.

That's us saying, look, we could have said it's all gone and all of this is happening, but we do know that there are things like breakage.

We do know that there are things like, oh, we're $5 away from something.

We'll figure it out.

but we are estimating that we might need about 35% of breakage, meaning like, yeah, they really should have had the teacher.

They were off by three kids.

We'll give them the teacher.

We'll eat it.

And that's how we're getting to this number.

And again, there's a lot more slides to go through, but this is probably the slide that impacts the most people and the one that you're probably most interested to.

But Kurt.

Just want to clarify one thing.

I saw a face of shock over here.

The 30 FTE who are CTE teachers were allocated to schools, but outside of the model.

So in part, the reason that the 32 to 1 doesn't actually match what's happening in classrooms on average is because there are a number of things like that.

CTE, some music teachers, some others that are outside of this model that are allocated to schools.

Back to the question of why Cascadia is KZ.

I don't know the answer to either of those questions, why that is the case, but that is the current case.

Superintendent Schilder is adamant that we were going to change the model for next year.

So for the 27-28 school year.

And clean up some of that.

Perfect.

We'll just go kind of this way.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

So on this page, the 101, again, given that these adjustments are not going to result in anyone's loss of employment, is either attrition and then we won't fill it, or positions that have been vacant that we're just gonna say we don't have anymore, or a switch of the way it's allocated.

Okay.

Or an employee moving from one school to another.

Right.

You're the librarian here, Bad example.

You're a teacher here.

Your school's gotten smaller.

You don't need that many teachers.

Now you're a teacher at this other school.

But that still wouldn't result in the savings because we're still paying that person.

Exactly.

And a lot of this is making sense.

And some of what I'm going to ask is because of past experience.

And the way we're talking about it is different.

And I really appreciate that.

And I want to skip ahead right now to next year when we can actually talk about making a model that actually works to serve students.

I can't even remember if it was the last year or the year before, one of the savings that year trying to close a certain amount of deficit was to increase the secondary allocation by one.

The result of that was suddenly kids had less access to electives and we had classes of 40 kids and not enough desks.

Help me understand how this doesn't make that worse.

And I do understand, too, that there are some classes with two kids.

But if there's a CTE class with two kids and Ballard has an algebra class with 40 kids, that's not necessarily going to

Yeah.

No, it's true.

So just so you know, what I try to do with my days.

So I had asked to be sent every high school's master schedule, because I'm a dork.

That's kind of what I do.

That's why we hired you.

That is true.

It is true.

It is my job.

And so what we're seeing is, even now, things like an algebra class having lots and lots of kids, and then an elective with seven kids in it.

This change from 31 to 32, that has nothing to do with that.

What we have to do is start to have real conversations with high schools and everybody saying, you can't run a class of seven kids.

I mean I'm sorry and like it sucks and I love those classes but we've got to be really clear about what is important and what we need to do and how can we be solvent.

Do I want to get rid of any electives?

Of course not.

But if students are voting with their feet and you only have five kids signed up for the class, you probably shouldn't have that class.

And when you start to impact those things, you're not going to have 40 kids in your algebra one class or your biology class.

You're going to start to bring it down.

But this tweak from 31 to 32, that's not impacting it at all.

It's going to be having really thoughtful conversations with schools and principals about what kind of rules are they using to open up a class.

Okay, that's really helpful because I would say that's the similar conversation that we had the last time with an increase, and I understand that we're not actually talking about the number of kids in a classroom with one teacher, we're talking about adults to students in a building.

And different staff counts for different things with that, and that totally makes sense to me, and we had that conversation, and then the next fall we had classes with 40 kids.

And so my assumption is because the conversation didn't happen at that point, around master schedules and balancing and maybe saying, you know, we do need five sections of 10th grade history.

We don't need underwater basket weaving.

That's right.

And that's just, even though five people really want it, that's just, we're just not going to offer it this year.

And that's just...

That's right.

And that's why the district has to be more thoughtful and more supportive, especially...

Sorry, that's a joke of my dad's underwater basket weaving.

is that that's why we have to be more supportive of our high school principals, our counselors, to help figure out how can we say, here are some rules of the road that we work with.

I was talking to somebody yesterday, and they looked at the schedule, and they were like, oh my god, we have to get rid of music.

And I said, don't touch music.

Let's say there's another way.

And then of course we found that there were some other classes that were electives, people wanted it, but only seven people wanted it.

And so this is where we have to make some hard decisions that I spoke about at the beginning.

These aren't gonna be easy, they're not gonna be great, but it's a lot better than getting rid of a music program.

You don't have to do that.

But I will say, if there is some wonderful, historic, amazing program that your school has loved for a generation, and you have five kids in it, you are gonna have to start thinking about shutting it down.

Okay, and then related but slightly different, Jen and I were at your visit to two elementary schools the other day and so, and then actually Vivian and I were talking on the phone about the intent of the legislature with the 17 to one and right now what we're seeing is pretty reasonable well-supported K-3 and then you go into a fourth grade classroom and it is wall-to-wall kids and desks.

And a lot of, you know, probably varies by people's ability to classroom manage and how many students are in the class, but a lot of sitting and waiting for kids in fourth and fifth grade.

And as Vivi and I were talking about, we don't think it was the legislature's intent with that reduction that you just, to push stuff down to the K3 and sacrifice the 4-5.

It's supposed to be additional resources to decrease those class sizes.

So is there something similar going on that we can balance?

Because that's a different factor of how many classrooms we can have in an elementary.

So how do we, I mean, literally there was almost no, one classroom we were in, there was almost no room to walk around the desks in a fourth grade classroom.

Yeah, I mean, and thank you to all of the board directors who have been visiting schools with me, because I think when you see it with your own eyes, it's really, really helpful.

What we are seeing, or what I am seeing on school number 38 now, or whatever it is, is that there are some schools where fourth and fifth grade are pretty heavy, It's mainly because it's breakage.

Because there's a lot of other schools where in fact the fourth and fifth grade have 12 kids in it.

And so this is why also when we start to go through school choice and we start to balance numbers, you're going to start to see.

So for instance, because we don't departmentalize fourth and fifth grade, one of the schools that we went to had one fourth grade class.

And they had one fourth grade class of like 30 and change.

but, that's because you can't break the 30 into two classes of 14 or whatever.

That would be 28, I know the math.

And so they're deciding to keep that one large class.

However, that's about do they have enough kids in the fourth grade at all?

So I wouldn't say it's anomalous, but it is what you are seeing at some, and then the exact reverse is happening at others.

And that's a decision that the schools are making that we need to help support them with.

and that's where things like- It's got to do with boundary change and- Who knows, right?

It could be boundary changes, it could be choice, it could be just the way that that one year happened.

Like it's just, and that's why to show, so I was just at a school, I was at Sacajawea.

Wonderful school, talking to the parents.

One of the things that school does is they do splits.

So they do a third, fourth, or second, third.

Another school that we went to that had all those fourth graders, they didn't do a split.

They could have, but that was a decision that they're making.

So I don't think that the legislation is the reason why four and five are totally bananas.

I think a lot of it has to do with how we as a district have our kids.

And that's where we need to help those schools to balance them out.

Thank you for asking that question, Liza.

I do think that there are kind of, I don't know if they're like real rules, but directions given to principals when they're developing their budget, that because we're trying to chase that K-3 ratio, that that does put Principals in a position where they have to make their four make weird decisions around four or five and I would just say like I Think we've all observed it that it there's you know Joe and my kids school There's a situation where because they were told you have to have the k3 ratio We've got a very large fourth grade class and a very small very small other grade class and it's complex because the language part so I think that You know, these are kind of like general staff assignment rules, but I think we really need to work with principals on their dynamic situation.

A hundred percent.

Absolutely.

My question is, so why was it originally in the WSS we had a lower ratio for CTE for high school?

What was the genesis of that?

Do we know?

I don't think we, I don't know.

No.

Okay.

We will definitely look into it, and I will rarely say this anymore, but way before my time.

But I think we should know, because I want to know what the history is.

I will share that as a high school principal that was explained at times because of specific equipment.

So that if you were going to have a cad lab at that time that was kind of the big thing that you could only have this many workstations or that's how many was allocated.

But that was sort of the received wisdom was that it was because if you were working with tools or other kinds of things that it was prohibitive around the amount of equipment or the safety of the equipment.

Please keep going, Superintendent.

Next section.

Yeah, go to it, Kurt.

So this is less solid at this point in terms of specifics, but just if you looked at the previous slide, the total savings, if all that came together in that way, is around $9.5 million, and that's the basis for schools, schools, sports, is about a billion dollars, so nine and a half million out of a billion.

Central Office, we're targeting about three times as much as a percentage, between eight and 15 million out of 300 million.

So we talked about some of this already, Ben talked about some of the vacancies that have persisted, so eliminating some of those as part of the balancing the budget process, we met this morning about that.

I think that'll be within that four to five million dollar range by the time all is said and done.

and then we're continuing to look for additional budget reductions or changes at central office between four and 10 million.

Again, we're starting with the school process that's underway, and now we're attacking the central office process.

The restructuring, reorganizing, John Stanford Center is a part of that, so when we get some more clarity on how the district will be organized, that'll be an input into reductions and changes at the district office.

Some of the ideas that we've come forward with that we're starting to estimate the numbers around are the district initiate some professional development at schools and then some of that is during the school day when we have to pay for substitute teachers for those teachers who are getting professional development.

Is there a different way to do that so that we're not incurring substitute costs?

Could we do that in a different way with those teachers is one question that the professional development team is looking into.

There's only about $600,000 of the $1.3 billion budget that's on travel, but making sure that everything that's necessary is still funded, but things that are optional are not funded.

Similarly, with consulting contracts, there are a few things the district has done.

ERS did all the work on the diagnostic that was funded by outside funding.

but there are some other things like that that happen at Seattle Public Schools, so eliminating or eliminating those.

Self-help, an example of that is we sell computers.

When they're at end of life, we get some money for that, we use that to do other things.

Can we use some of that to help balance the budget next year and do those other things with different monies?

Inter-district reimbursement, kids who come to the Seattle Public Schools for different purposes.

You can get reimbursement from the other school districts for some of the costs you've incurred, so being more efficient in our process around that.

Culinary services changes, just thinking about the way we serve kids and what we serve kids, and is there a more efficient way to do that?

Marnie and her team have been leaning into that heavily to try and figure out if there's a better way to do food service.

It's a significant operation, and so trying to find some efficiencies there.

the furlough days for the non-represented staff would persist in this scenario.

And then I alluded to earlier, there was a budget that was supporting of the old strategic plan, and it was about $7 million, $3 million of it was title funding, $3 million of it was lap funding, and about $1.5 million was general fund.

and so reorienting that whole budget in different ways and trying to save that general fund savings to be more in line with the current direction of Seattle Public Schools.

So these are just sort of the ideas that are happening right now.

We're actively working through the details of all of that and we'll bring that forward when the time is right.

and just to just bring you into our days, cabinet was in a room, I think three floors directly above this and we went through line by line Do you need it?

Yes or no?

Let's cut.

And so we're at right now around 8 million to 15 million.

We do think we're gonna probably add to it, but I do wanna highlight what Kurt said.

When you look at a percentage of the money we're saving from Central versus schools, it's almost a three for one ratio.

And I only say that because that's what's right.

If we're gonna cut, where do you cut first?

You cut Central, that's the deal.

And it probably should be around two and a half to three times as much as a hit for Central than it is for schools.

Schools should always come last, doesn't mean that they never get hit, but the fact is that right now we're running at around a 2.5 to 3% a 300% ratio in terms of the hit to central is three times what the hit is to schools.

And that's the right thing.

And so, you know, though it pains me to continue furlough days, because that means I don't get paid my full salary, that is the price that we have to pay.

My hope is that in a couple of years, when we get to zero, we get rid of those and I can get my full salary.

But more importantly, that everybody else gets to get their full salary.

but I do want to highlight this because we actually are taking a hit for the team and that's the right thing to do.

I don't want anybody to pat us on the back and say thanks.

I just want to highlight that if folks understand that we are actually taking a hit because it is the right thing to do and I thank everybody who is taking the hit and that ratio of three to one, two and a half to one is the right ratio and I am very appreciative of central office understanding that and I'm certainly appreciative of the cabinet for literally making cuts just today and these cuts will continue and we will be more detailed once we can flesh them out but the reason why they're not as completely fleshed out is We need to make sure we understand exactly which roles, which optional contracts.

It's a little bit different because there's no formula for this.

The formula is, do you need it?

Formulas for schools is, how many students do you have?

How many programs?

Things like that.

and then the next thing just is on a separate slide because there wasn't room on the first slide and it's a little bit different anyway and so this is just negotiating different arrangements with our bus vendors to capture some volume pricing discounts and then looking into more routing efficiencies for next year.

About 3.5 million I think Marnie is what we're estimating on that at this time.

This is just sort of the summary slide of where we're at.

You'll see we've sorted it as we have previously into one-time solutions, so you'd expect a bar coming forward at some point in the spring around the capital interest, the rainy day fund, This third thing there is a different thing.

So there's a federal program.

If you do geothermal, solar type things in buildings, you get what they call a tax credit.

We don't pay taxes, so it's not a tax credit, but we get a check for doing those things.

If we document it in a certain way, send in the paperwork, we're anticipating potentially $5 million next year that we could apply to the budget one time for next year from that program.

We've talked about this before, the Interfund loan was not utilized, so the assumption in the original $87 million was we'd have to pay that back.

This year we won't because we didn't use it, so it's another way of looking at we're saving that money towards the balanced budget.

And then we're trying to get more ahead of, I think Director Mizrahi and Superintendent Scholdner were asking at the last meeting, where do we think we're gonna land at the end of the year?

Today the answer is between 10 and $20 million.

Again, lots of variables in play.

There's a couple big bargaining sessions that will happen between now and the end of the year.

And so I just want to foreshadow that we're anticipating that we'll have some of the money we use to balance this year's budget available to balance next year's budget.

doesn't mean we won't spend our fund balance this year, so that's the next thing.

We will continue to eat into the fund balance, but going forward, the plan is not to do that anymore, to rebuild that rainy day fund.

And then the last part of this is just summarizing the ongoing changes that we have previewed here.

And so here's the good news.

The good news is we were about 100 million in the hole.

We now think through one month of really hard work and trying to put kids and staff first, but knowing that we don't want to be insolvent and be taken over by the state, we think we're pretty close.

My hope had been to be about negative 50. I think we've actually done a little bit better than that.

It looks like we might be around negative 20-ish, but things can break different ways.

If we get the two million because of the taxes, great.

If we have a couple of more enrolled kids, terrific.

If a roof falls, that's a different story, right?

And so we've got to make sure that we are really transparent and honest about this stuff.

But the good news is if all things are going right, we're going to probably dip anywhere between, I don't know, I'd say 10 to 20, maybe 25 into the fund balance.

It's not our hope, right?

But the good news is the changes we've done in the last month are relatively sustainable for now, with the hope that if we redo some of the large ticket things moving forward, we can actually get to zero.

I never want to promise that we would get to zero this year.

That is just not true.

I don't think we will.

but the fact is that through all of these changes, we are saving really significant money.

I always joke the only time I'm ever conservative is when I do school budgets.

My politics are a little bit different.

But if we're conservative and we're looking at about $63, $65 million on about an $87 million problem, that's about $22 million.

For us to only dip into the fund balance by $22 million would be a huge win.

Again, we're still down 100 million as of today.

But we're hoping that if we can do these changes, we're only down about 22, 25. But again, that's not sustainable.

Because if we continue to do that, we go bankrupt.

So we can't promise or continue to do other things.

But I think I really want to commend Kurt, Marty, everybody on central office and really thank you to the staffs and the kids and the community, because these are cuts, right?

I'm not trying to sugarcoat it, but I think we're in a pretty good shape.

We will see.

We will see.

But relatively okay.

But don't take my word for it.

Kurt?

What he said.

There you go.

All right.

and then just here's a preview so we'll continue to update the board as we get more information and then hopefully have the formal public meeting on the proposed budget in July and then approval in August.

That's a little different timeline than we did the last couple years.

It was June, July and we're hoping for July and August from the board this year to give us a little more time to give you full information.

All right, questions as Director Song.

I have a question about the Interfund Loan.

So does this mean that we're just done with it?

It's not reflected in the 27-28 projections?

we had built into this year paying back 16 million which we're not going to pay back and that was part of the 87 million.

So that will save that 16 of the 87 in the balancing of the budget.

We won't project anything in paying back for the 26, 27 year because we don't have anything to pay back.

Does that answer your question?

This is going to sunset after the 26.

We'll give it back to the fund but it won't impact the budget.

But even though we didn't use it, are we paying?

Do we have to make an assumption around interest?

We earned interest on it when it sat in the general fund.

We'll give that interest back to the capital fund.

We're required to do that.

But it was interest we wouldn't have earned otherwise because it would have been over there.

So the net of this is really zero.

I guess I'm a little confused there's other things that in this presentation were like it felt like that's a capital thing so why is it like the bus depreciation like why is that it's part of the stars formula and I have not interrogated completely the stars formula since this change but it's part of the stars formula

Yeah, it says on the STARS formula in a PDF that you need an advanced degree to understand that.

Yeah, and I have too, but I haven't taken the time to study it.

Other questions from directors?

Sorry, on the bus question, I mean, is it meaningful that they're not our buses, right?

So it's not our capital.

They belong to another organization, but it still hits us as part of the STARS formula.

They write us a check.

They write us a check for this.

Yeah, they don't belong to us.

And it'll be a smaller check if they change the depreciation schedule.

Director Mizorahi.

I was trying to find in the previous meeting, what is our current projected fund balance for the end of this year?

So whatever the projected is for the end of this year, then maybe another 20, 25 that comes out of it.

So our trend has been reduced by about 31 in the last three years.

With these reductions, we're anticipating it reducing by less than 31.

I guess my question would be, is that something you're saying that that's not sustainable, Ben.

Is that something that we can't do that for another year, right?

So we have to get to a point where we're sort of putting ourselves on a trajectory where that 27, 28 budget really has to not be dipping into the .

That's the bottom line.

That's right.

When I, getting here a month and four days ago, I wanted to be really kind of as transparent as possible.

There was no way that we would have enough time to actually balance the budget in one year.

But I think we've made really good progress that next year we really have to because we can't go and continue to dip.

But the good news is we're making good progress.

The bad news is we're still negative and we can't really be negative for two years in a row because we ain't got the money in the bank.

Unless Microsoft wants to just give us billions of dollars, I'm just saying.

And there is a legislative session intervening in there, too, so that...

Cut.

Which could cut multiple ways.

Right, either way.

Right, so this is why, yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of variables at play.

So we have wrapped up the budget portion.

I think Dr. Buddleman, Dr. Campbell, for the presentation.

We will continue, I think, some of the conversation in our new finance and audit committee, which is very exciting.

I think some of this also, some of the enrollment stuff hits in the operations committee.

But we're going to transition gears.

We'll take a, is five minute break good enough?

So we'll be back.

Joe would like a little bit more.

So we'll take a 10-minute break.

We'll be back at 6.55, where we can go through and have our conversation kind of continuing from our retreat about our goals and guardrails, because today was supposed to be a progress monitoring session, but from our conversation at our retreat, I don't want to steal Superintendent Schultner's thunder here, but- Steal it away.

some of the changes that we discussed and we wanted to move forward with.

So we're just reviewing that, making sure and getting an update there.

So with that, I will see folks back at 6.55.

All right, we're gonna shorten our break.

just returning we're gonna start now instead of later because we had to be out of here by 730 yes that's why we're starting we're not having the full 10 minutes we got it we're done for the evening I'll be quick okay All right, we'll pass it straight over to you, Superintendent Schuldner.

Well, thank you.

Well, good evening, everyone.

I think this is on.

I really want to thank everybody for a really wonderful and robust conversation about budgets.

As you saw, one of the things that Kurt said was that we will try to do these updates a lot more.

And similarly, I really appreciate the conversation around goals and guardrails and really progress monitoring.

One of the things that boards really always do, which I love, is really try to keep a pulse on how the district's doing but we thought it was appropriate for us to have this conversation because we had a wonderful retreat when I first got here which I really appreciated and it was certainly a public meeting but you know it was in a library of a school and we kind of had a great conversation but I'm not sure that everybody got to see it or hear about it and we also have been really want to be open about what is happening around kind of goals and guardrails.

So I want to start.

Let's see, is this working?

Okay, let's see.

All right, magic.

Okay, so.

Here we go.

The first thing I want to do and I want to be really clear about this is I want to thank the board and I want to thank the community.

You have done so much work around goals, around guardrails, around trying to make the public understand what we're doing as a school district.

even when I was in Lansing, even when I was in Hunter, when I was a professor, the work that was happening here was really special and I think that we have been, we meaning SPS, have been maligned a little bit around those conversations.

And I do want to thank everybody because if you have community and board working together around what we want to hold ourselves accountable to, that's really, really helpful.

But I want to also say I think there's always a chance to have a conversation around ways to make them better.

and to tweak them to live in the moment.

The reason why the Constitution is such a great document is it has the ability to make amendments.

It has the ability to make changes.

But we still keep the undergrowth, the undergirding of the document because the document is so good.

So here we go.

What am I appreciative for?

It was a commitment to student outcomes.

leadership wanted to raise academic rigor, a clear focus on equity, and strong accountability for superintendent.

I'm one of those crazy superintendents that actually likes strong accountability because that is your job is to hold me accountable to doing my job.

So really, thank you so much for this.

Now, background on goals and guardrails.

And of course, the board knows this really well, but this is really for the community too.

Why should we have goals in the first place?

If we don't know what we're reaching for, how do we know if we've reached them?

But it's also about holding me and the district accountable to making sure we know what we are valuing.

What do we want to do?

Where are our goals?

And I want to thank the board, of course, for the goals that we currently have because I think they're really good and really thoughtful goals.

But I think we need to have a conversation about tweaking them so that they're even more robust than they are today.

And then the second, of course, is why have guardrails?

Guardrails, the theory, and it's a very smart theory, is, hey, what are our non-negotiables?

What are the things that we really care about that you as superintendent, that you as the district do?

And this comes out of some really thoughtful work that's been around for really generations about saying the board should tell the leader, these are the things you really can't do, or these are the things we really care about you doing, and we want to be really supportive of being clear about that.

Now, in the business world, a lot of that is, hey, try not to break the law.

Hey, you know, use the money thoughtfully.

In the school world, it's really saying you got to put kids first.

You got to make sure that teachers are taken care of and schools are taken care of.

Again, that's the background on goals and guardrails.

But now that we're here and it's 2026, I think there's some conversation we should have about rethinking.

And again, we've had some of these conversations before.

So here are our district goals.

We all know them.

We love them.

These are our district goals.

Maybe we don't love them, but it's okay.

So second grade literacy.

Why?

Well, because literacy is super important, right?

And the idea was we want to get it early, so we want to make sure that we hold kids accountable and really the adults accountable to doing the work.

Terrific.

sixth grade math.

Why?

Well, we care about math too, but we're not necessarily going to only do kind of younger kids.

We want to make sure that we understand about sixth grade math.

And then the last one, life ready, which I kind of refer to as grad plus.

Well, great.

We don't care just about kids graduating from high school.

We certainly care about them doing well in the world and maybe getting college credits and things like that.

Great.

So that's our current world.

That's where we are now.

And then on the right-hand side, certainly I don't have to read them, but we've got district guardrails that are really saying, you know, the superintendent will not allow this, the superintendent will not allow this.

And these are all good and important things.

As we move forward, I think there's some thoughtful tweaks and really just questions that I want to bring to the board because it's now a perfect opportunity to think really critically about what we believe, we collectively believe is right for this district.

So here's the current performance of the state of SPS.

Across schools, and now I've gone to at least a third of the schools, if not more, We have deeply committed educators.

The teachers are working hard.

The staff is working hard.

The principals are working hard.

Everybody is really doing a good job.

We have robust staffing.

We have a lot of adults.

We have a lot of people, a lot of volunteers, parents, teachers, administrators, you name it.

They're there.

There's a strong appreciation for having leadership.

We have curriculum.

Principals really want alignment and clarity.

And there's also kind of a lot of interest around things like enrollment and attendance.

And so the question, of course, is, is this translating into outcomes?

So I've gone to more than a third of the schools.

I've seen this.

And of course, what's the most important question?

Well, is it working?

Well, the good answer is yes.

In the aggregate, and I want to be clear here, in the aggregate, SPS is among the highest performing school systems on the entire West Coast.

And we should be really proud about that.

I don't think we get enough credit, not that we need the credit, but I don't think we get enough credit for being really one of the highest performing districts in the West Coast.

and here's the data, a little small, I apologize, but just know that number two, that's us.

So when you look at all of these school districts, Bellevue, Everett, Portland, Oregon, San Diego, Long Beach, San Francisco, San Jose, Renton, Tacoma, Kent, Sacramento, Fresno, Highline, Federal Way, that's around here, right?

Sorry, I'm new.

Oakland, you know, those are cities.

And guess what?

We're number two.

I mean, we're coming for you, Bellevue.

But like, we're number two.

That's amazing.

And we should be really proud.

And that's ELA.

And guess what?

That's math.

We are number two on the West Coast.

When you look at any of the big school districts in California, in Oregon, in Washington, that's us.

And we should be really, really proud of that.

However, that is not true when you look at different groups of students.

That is the graph that should scare us.

You can drive a truck through that.

The top lines and the bottom lines.

And so these are the significant gaps that exist in third grade literacy, race, poverty, multilingual status.

Top, bottom, drive a truck through.

To put it in perspective, though we are higher than most, we drop down from second to fifth on looking at third grade literacy for low income students.

And if you remember, it was before my time, but Dr. Hart from the Council of Great City Schools and I think the ERS folks had said that if you look at poverty is a pretty good indicator of how you're serving populations that have not been served well.

And if you look at this, we are not number two, we're number five.

And you know who we're below?

LA, San Diego, Long Beach.

So when we look at us as a district, we have to care about this.

and I highlight this because when we talk about what are the goals we want as a district, we want to be really clear about where we already are rocking it out and where we are not and making sure that you as a board hold me accountable as a superintendent to make some changes for our kids.

Again, you can drive a truck through this.

This is now math.

So English, Math.

Gap.

Gap.

I like visuals.

And we're, again, number five.

One, two, three, four, five.

Yes.

Okay.

So ELA, we're fifth when you look at low income.

Math, we are fifth.

I'm only using low income because the data is pretty clean.

I can get access to it.

The truth is also when you look at race, when you look at ELL, when you look at other things, we are middle of the pack.

I'm happy to share whatever data you want.

I only have a half an hour, so I don't want to go too deep.

But really, what is this saying to us?

This is saying, as a district, we are doing really, really well in the aggregate.

Top two, right?

I mean, you look at all the big districts in California, all the big districts in Washington and Oregon, we are number two.

And I mean, I clearly need to go visit Bellevue.

But we are really doing well, but we're not necessarily for the kids So if our true north, as you've heard me say a lot, is how can we be the best urban school district in America, what does that require?

Rigor, we need to have higher expectations of kids, we need to close gaps, have equitable outcomes, but here's the other thing.

If you look at the goals, I'm getting there, they're only academic.

You should ask more of me.

The board, the community, wants more than just literacy in second grade, math in sixth grade, graduation plus.

Now again, I started off my slide by saying it's amazing work this board did.

I'm not knocking this at all I am thankful that you did this because you needed to because you needed to say to the community you know what we care about board as a board we care about these things but I am saying it's time to ask for more and when I say that what have I heard from the community I've heard attendance I've heard don't go bankrupt I've heard families need to trust us and care about us and want to be here and I've heard safety so again this is a presentation I'm not saying anything that like we are going to make this change I just think in a public setting because it's important for all of us to have this dialogue is if we are rethinking how we're moving forward for us to truly be the best urban school district in America, it might behoove us to talk about things like attendance.

It might behoove us to talk about budget solvency, safety, family trust.

So, some other things about the grad plus metric that I want to highlight, and this is a little bit new data, which is awesome, is that if you just look at four-year graduation, it's dropped, which is not okay, and we will change that, but it's at about 86.14%.

And then if you look at the current way that we were looking at grad plus, it was only 84.83%.

So there's not even a 2% differential between just regular graduation and our kind of life-ready indicator.

If we believe that we care about rigor, about students rising to higher expectations, we gotta ask for more.

And so here, again, I don't wanna confuse anybody, these are just thoughts.

What might a real grad plus goal look like?

not taking an AP class, but passing the test.

Not taking an IB test, but passing the test.

Not just doing the kind of, yeah, I took an advanced class, but it really was a remedial for college, but I was on a college camp.

It's awesome.

but is that really grad plus?

And so if you run these numbers, we're only at around 59%.

So rather than saying we're at 84 or something percent, if we really want to have these kind of high bars, it'll drop us down to about 59%.

Now, one of the things that I do also want to point out is that when you go back, I won't go all the way, is if you remember our goals, our second grade goals, there was, and again, I want to thank the board.

The reason why second grade goals made sense was because you wanted to get there early.

Absolutely.

You wanted to hold people accountable to making sure that we got to getting the goals early.

The problem is that right now, for second grade, the only thing you can use is MAP.

MAP is not really a good way to talk about really kind of high standards, especially for Washington and for all of you wonderful HC or applying HC families.

You saw that MAP scores change even after a kid took the test.

Why?

Because there's these national samples and there's these percentile shifts and things change.

How weird is it to know that your kid on one test might be one percentile, but because of a reshuffling, it changes?

That's bizarro.

SBA doesn't work that way, right?

And so one of the things that I'm just highlighting for the conversation is maybe we want to think about using something like SBA as one of the goals and for us to do that we might want to think about going to third grade rather than second grade.

Same thing with guardrails.

I love guardrails because it's helping you tell me what you want me to do.

The problem is the history, and again, I thank the board for doing this, the history of guardrails was the CEO shall not.

the superintendent shall not, which makes perfect sense.

The CEO shall not steal money.

The CEO shall not break the law.

That makes great sense.

But the way that the current ones are written is it's hard to prove a negative.

I appreciate why we did it and why they exist, but I would offer that it's possible that we could think about saying instead of the superintendent shall not, the district led by the superintendent shall work towards offering equitable, work towards promoting.

Why do I say that?

Because I want to prove to you that we are doing that.

The issue with the superintendent shall not, well, I'm not perfect.

There are going to be times where maybe things happen and it's also about an interpretation of, well, did this thing not do it or did do it?

so again I'm not saying we have to do this I'm throwing it out there because I think it's a little bit of a new world and not to say like I'm great or I can just say that I know I am different as a superintendent and I want to be held accountable to being able to prove to you what I can do and what we can do and so again this is just my kind of sharing with you, sharing with the community where I'm coming from, and so these are some questions for the conversation.

And again, happy to remain the way it is, happy to use what we have already, but in some respects I think it would be awesome, which is crazy for me to say, but like, hold me accountable to more.

but I do want to be thoughtful about the way that the goals are written currently which I think don't take into consideration our actual situation today.

So, things to think about.

second to third grade for literacy rather than second using third because of the SBA stuff.

Is a 10 point gain really accurate when we're already number two in the whole West Coast and for us to do 10 points would be way, I mean, nobody, we would be so far out of the world.

Now, you want me to do it?

I will do my best.

but I think it misses where we're not the best already which is on things like closing the gap and equity and things like that.

And I would hate to say, well, you know what we're already number two but we but the board says we have to do this ten point and then we do all this stuff and it doesn't actually necessarily close the gap which is where we're not you know top in the in the West Coast and I would say actually in the country and then what would it look like to actually increase rigor for graduates rather than just that kind of grad plus could we make it even more rigorous what that looks like and then again because I'm asking for more work.

What could we think about with non-academic goals?

Is there a way to say safety and security, absences, attendance, extracurricular participation, budgets?

I'm not trying to put words in the mouth of the board.

I'm just saying that these are some thoughts that are possible that happen in other districts as well.

So again, it's important because I want to be very thoughtful that on the calendar, before I became the superintendent, today was supposed to be a progress monitoring conversation.

I didn't feel comfortable having that progress monitoring conversation because I didn't feel comfortable with what we were supposed to be monitoring yet because we hadn't had this conversation.

So with that, I want to kind of turn it over to President Topp and certainly look forward to the conversation.

And I'm going to preface the conversation with a question right towards you, because I think we sort of had this conversation already at our retreat.

We had this presentation.

We went through a lot of these questions.

And I think my understanding was that we essentially directed you to come back in one to two months with new goals and guardrails.

Is that a correct understanding?

As long as the board is good with that I wanted to make sure because it was on the calendar I didn't want to take it off to look like we were hiding anything I figured what a great conversation to have but it is definitely my understanding that we had this conversation there were some thoughts about this I'd love I'm happy to hear more and then my hope is in the next you know a month or two to present a kind of a draft I didn't want necessarily the public to go well where did this come from and so

Yes and I appreciate that and I think that needed to happen today.

I also want to acknowledge that we'll likely see an update from you at another progress monitoring because we have a calendar of progress monitoring on our schedule.

We will be out of here at 7.30 so I'm going to open it up for discussion but we're going to have 10 minutes of discussion and then we're going to wrap it up.

So be mindful, start with Director Mizrahi.

I don't even know how that got up.

I think it was up from before.

But I do have, I'll just say.

You were the first one.

That's what happens when you have it up before the presentation even starts.

No, I'll just say the same thing that I said at the retreat, because not a lot of people were there.

One is that I hope that as you're going through the process I'm looking, first of all, very supportive of what you're saying and I think it's great for you to come in and present new ideas for goals and I like the idea of it being beyond just the academic goals, but really to go back and look at all that great engagement that we did and I think all that data should still be there.

I think we built those goals around what we heard through, I don't know, Liza, what, 30, 40 sessions or whatever that we did with folks, a lot of community feedback and really good engagement and I think that that information should still be there and I think will be very instructive for you to go back and look at that.

Absolutely.

And then the second thing is also just very supportive of the rewording of the guardrails just in a way that is more like plain language for people to understand.

Yeah.

Director Song.

I am very supportive of us adjusting the gap closing targets so even just looking at this table of data when we are looking at the sixth grade math performance something that kind of popped out to me is that for I think this is for FRL students right so LA made a good gain from 20 to 29 percent but we went the opposite direction.

But if I look at the data for all of our students that is not at all what you would see.

So I think we really do need to have some goals around gap closing.

I have long felt kind of like to be kind of honest kind of like meh about our life readiness goal because it doesn't comport with what feedback I'm getting from parents which is my child graduated top of her class but when she showed up to college she was not ready and so that's a problem and so I look forward to us developing a goal that actually does make sure that our students are ready for college and again thanks for sharing this information because I was kind of alarmed to see how low the percentage of our students who are passing IB tests that's really concerning especially when I think about which schools have IB programs and then finally I love the idea of the non-academic goals because I also think it's a great way for stakeholders beyond our school district to get engaged and supportive of our goals.

So these are things like extracurricular participation that's like a fantastic way for us to engage kind of our broader community and safety and security certainly.

So thank you.

Director Smith.

I want to say I want all of these things so I think there's that leads to my only concern is kind of like how do we whittle down to picking a manageable number and I think I think Joe you were referring to all of the data and engagement that's available so yeah I mean I've already looked at some of it I'm gonna immerse myself in the data and you know again this is why I love these conversations is all

I'll present a draft we'll get some feedback but I appreciate sometimes I like my staff know sometimes I just forget to eat so like I know that sometimes I'm asking too much of myself but I think that they all are great and we will start to rank them yeah Director Lavallee Do you sleep?

Very little

My only small ask and obviously we all talked about this during previous our board retreat as well and this is where pretty much unanimously came out as very interested in redoing these because none of us were completely in love with them but I'd love to see students with IEPs shown on this data as well just as as an element of I did have that ask in a previous progress monitoring session and it's now been added in the appendixes and it's been wonderful and disheartening to see how our rates are for those students.

Absolutely.

So thank you so much and please sleep sometime.

Thank you.

Director Rankin.

Don't sleep.

Get everything perfect.

So I am very interested in revisiting the goals.

I want to be totally frank that I don't think any of us were 100% satisfied.

That was kind of what we could get.

And certainly is not the.

When we engage with community, the kind of unifying message that came out of all these different places and was again reinforced during the search firm about what do you want in a superintendent, very much aligned what the Seattle community envisions is a public school system where every student, regardless of race, neighborhood, home language, ability, or income, thrives in a high quality public school.

That's what they want and they want students to graduate from that being ready to take on whatever it is they want to do next.

That is certainly not reflected in a second grade reading score.

a sixth grade math score, or how many classes do you take?

We had the same thing.

If they don't pass it, how do we know that they're ready?

And so multiple things are true at the same time.

Some of this stuff is hard to quantify.

When we only have guaranteed access to students until they graduate, we could try, but we can't necessarily go out and ask five years post-graduation.

and get a, you know, I mean, yeah, we could try, and it's probably possible in some ways, but did your education adequately prepare you, yes or no?

Are you doing what you wanted?

And so we struggled a lot in making these goals.

Ideally, a school district should have one.

to prepare students to have good lives.

That's it.

I do kind of hesitate.

I actually, I think the idea of being the best school district in the urban school district in the country is kind of exciting, but that's very subjective.

And so if we mean best, meaning we're number one in all of these things, we could do that and still leave a whole lot of students behind.

And if we mean best by we have all of these options for all of these kids who are going to be pretty successful.

Anyway, that's also not really best.

So I think that's like a fun thing for you to say and something that I think when you're out there, people want to get engaged on, but for me as a board member and us as a board, being responsible for representing what our community wants, I never heard anybody say, what I want from Seattle Public Schools is for it to be the best urban school district in the country.

I think in a lot of ways, Seattle doesn't even think of itself as an urban school district, which is a whole other thing.

But what they want is a great place for kids to have their lives improved.

and so I am totally with you that our current goals really don't reflect that.

I am really opposed though to operational goals.

I think if we have those, they should exist beneath the outcome goal because we don't exist here like having a balanced budget is a necessary component to us improving outcomes for children.

But we could have a balanced budget and super happy parents and we could have attendance improve and not change anything on that gap.

And so for me the top line outcome goal for us as a board needs to, going to a budget goal or something else is actually for me a lowering of standards.

is saying, like, doesn't really matter that much if kids are successful or not or if the trajectory for these students change because, look, our transportation is really working out.

That, to me, is a lowering of standards.

And there are also so many different ways that we already see and evaluate.

We already expect you to pass a balanced budget.

That's an annual requirement.

So setting a goal to do that is, we already do that, and it's our job to make sure that the budget you present to us aligns with what we're trying to do for kids.

Which if all we're trying to do is pass a balanced budget, we're done.

But we're trying to do much more than that.

I don't know if that's just a, I'm not sure.

but so goals yes and I'm interested in talking about how we would measure that more and again we struggled to get is kind of a meaningful way to indicate that.

I think the successful completion is a good one.

But the most important thing is that all children can be successful.

That's really what people want, is knowing that when you leave public schools, you're ready to have a good life as an adult.

The guardrail is, that is, So the guardrail things I understand.

So going from constraints to commitments in a system where the state is already telling us here's all the things you need to do.

Our representation of what is important to our community is in, while you're doing all those things, don't do these things.

I'm nervous about adding more like, also do these things, and also have these commitments and good intentions.

We all have really good intentions.

How would we actually monitor whether or not those intentions are having impact?

so that's my question about the guardrails and I would also just offer that we already have 0010 and 0030 in our governing policies which are essentially a vision statement and a value statement that we should think about looking back into those things that we already have about how they could do these things.

All right Vice President Briggs you have two minutes

I want to talk quick.

First of all, I really just have to say that I think it's bonkers that you can have a 65% proficiency rate and be the number one school.

I just needed to say that.

Whatever, that's not my main point.

I think what, obviously I'm very supportive of you proceeding, as I said at the retreat, but something that I learned early on in my tenure as a school board member was about a school district in Texas that set one goal of having every single student graduate with an associate's degree.

Obviously this was a smaller district.

But that goal, required them to reverse engineer all the way back to pre-K.

And I just really latched on to that because I think that the danger, and this is kind of getting a little bit into Liza's point about having operational goals, is that if we spread ourselves really thin, we have all these different goals, then we're not gonna actually accomplish them.

so I really loved the idea of setting some like really high pie in the sky goal and I think you could make a pretty good argument that having all of our students graduate hypothetically with an associate's degree is like a great start out of the gate from high school and that can't happen if all these other things haven't been cascaded through the entire system and that's kind of how I feel about the operational goals too, it's sort of like these things will necessarily have to occur in order for us to reach these academic goals.

And so I just worry a little bit about losing focus to Liza's point.

But I fully support you coming back to us with a new vision.

Director Smith.

I'll try to be quick here.

So just on the topic of, are the operational goals all of the non-academic ones?

Because I do want to push back on that a little bit, at least for extracurricular participation.

The post-grad success is really hard to measure, but I think, and this is just an example, but I'm pretty sure there's research that shows participation in extracurriculars leads to more success after graduation.

So that's an example of something that we could use as a proxy for that future success.

And I think it also aligns with we want our students to be enriched beyond just academic achievement.

And I also want to say that the guardrail is being framed as the baseline of this is the starting point for everything.

and then the goals are like what we're striving for.

I think that that's a good distinction that kind of loosens us up from the negative versus positive statements.

I strongly agree with you Director Smith on both of your points that you made.

We are going to wrap up now, since we have two minutes.

So thank you, Superintendent Schuldner.

Thank you for continuing our conversation that we really started at the retreat on goals and guardrails.

But our next board meeting is on March 11. We will talk about superintendent evaluation, we'll talk about board self-evaluation, and then in April we will start student presentations at our board meetings as well.

So as there is no further business on the agenda, the meeting stands adjourned at 728. Thank you, everyone.