Seattle City Council Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans & Education Committee 3/13/19

Good morning.

Today is Wednesday, March 13th.

Thank you, Roxanna.

Today is Wednesday, March 13th, 2019, and it is 9.34 a.m.

This is our regularly scheduled meeting of the Gender, Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans, and Education Committee.

I'm Council Member Lorena Gonzalez, chair of this committee, and joining me at the table is my colleague, Council Member Johnson.

Thank you for being here.

Good morning.

There are two items on today's agenda.

First, we will have an initial discussion with the Department of Education and Early Learning on the 2018 Families Education Preschool and Promise Implementation and Evaluation Plan, a levy package that was graciously passed by Seattle voters in November 2018. Following discussion of the levy's implementation plan, we will hear from the Seattle Police Department as they present data on shots fired and their response to gun violence across the city.

So, as usual, we will begin with our public comment period.

Each speaker will have up to two minutes to provide the committee with their feedback, public comment on matters that are on the agenda.

We have three individuals that have signed up for public comment.

Again, each individual will get two minutes.

At the end of the two minutes, I will ask you to conclude your remarks so that we can continue to move through.

the list of public comment speakers.

So the first person is Alex Zimmerman followed by Jenny Frankel.

Is that correct?

Okay.

And then we'll hear from Rosie Raimondo, Charun Soop.

Hi.

It's working?

Microphone working?

Yeah.

Hi, my name Alex Zimmerman.

Is camera not working?

Yes, confused me a little bit.

Yeah, my name is Alexey Mironov and I want to speak about policemen.

And I spoke, come to this chamber and spoke a hundred times about this.

A couple of points, what is absolutely critical to make police department better in exactly under investigation of U.S. court.

Yes.

Number one, we cannot open a public comment to Police commissioner is idiotic situation.

We have a conflict situation.

We have a criminal situation with police department.

If we cannot speak in public comment and police commissioner, what is this, guys?

Is this America or is this a Gestapo or KGB?

That's number one.

Number two, never, and I live in the city for 30 years, never, I repeat, never I hear the chief of police have Q&A.

And exactly right now, we have six year of investigation, U.S. court, if we don't have one Q&A from police, chief, how is this possible?

It's supposed to be every month.

People supposed to be controlled.

You as employee, we pay you, we supposed to be controlled.

I and another 700,000 people is employer.

It's number one.

It's not surprise me.

So Seattle right now from East Coast to West Coast recognize that Lumberoo unfascist city in America.

It's not surprise me because council right now is a pure criminal.

We are late open public meeting act and constitutional law five times.

It's not believable.

We have a criminal counsel in this attorney who violate law five times, never happened before in human history.

If we cannot talking in public comment.

And police commissioner, we never can give Oscar to director or chief of police.

Who we are?

We are a fascist city, and I call this many times, stop Seattle fascism.

All right, our next speaker is Jenny, followed by Rosie.

And I apologize that you have to sit through that, but thank you for being here.

Thanks.

Hi, Council Member Johnson and Gonzalez.

My name is Jenny Frankel and I work with Seattle Neighborhood Group.

I support an initiative called Rainier Beach, a beautiful safe place for youth.

And I'm here on behalf of my team, comprised of both community partners, including Rainier Beach Action Coalition, Boys and Girls Club of King County, And then also agency partners, including the Seattle Police Department.

First born out of the Byrne Criminal Justice Grant in 2013, and then we've been sustained by the City of Seattle since 2016, we use a place-based non-arrest approach to reduce youth violence in the Rainier Beach neighborhood.

Since 2015, we have had several non-arrest interventions fully in place.

Some of these include Safe Passage, Rainier Beach Corner Greeters, so on and so forth.

I am here today to speak to the Shots Fired presentation that you will be hearing later today.

We're concerned that the headlining chart in the presentation where it shows Rainier Beach is leading the city in numbers of shots fired overshadows the chart where it breaks down where those numbers are coming from and the trends that we see.

It shows a steady decrease in shots fired in Rainier Beach following 2015, and we want you to take notice of that.

This is consistent with a 30% decrease of violent crime among youth and young adults in the Rainier Beach neighborhood since our interventions have been in place.

As you review the presentation later this morning, we ask that you look closely at the numbers and consider the efforts that our team and many others in Rainier Beach are doing to create a beautiful, safe place.

And of course, we would welcome the opportunity to discuss our work with you further.

Thank you very much.

And then can I give you?

You can give it to Roxanna and she'll make sure that we get the information.

Thank you, Jenny, so much for being with us.

And, of course, thank you for all your work in the community.

I'm a big fan of the program, so.

All right.

The next individual is Rosie.

Good morning, council members, and thank you very much for having us here.

And go Cougs.

Go Cougs, indeed.

I'm here to speak on behalf of the Seattle Promise Program, which is part of the FEPP levy, which you'll hear more about later this morning.

And I'm speaking on behalf of not only South Seattle College, where I serve as the president, but also on behalf of the Seattle Colleges.

And if I could also on behalf of my colleagues from Seattle Public Schools and the city's Mayor's Office and Deal Office who worked together on the design process in the year leading up to this work.

I really want to underscore the hard work and the focus on equitable outcomes that was put into the design work.

The precursor program to the Seattle Promise is the 13th year program which was developed 10 years ago at South Seattle College.

And through various roles, I was directly involved in the administration of that project.

It was forged in an environment that was really focused on serving students of color.

We are arguably the most diverse institution in the state of higher ed.

And we have programs like TRIO, federally funded programs that have been in existence for decades that serve underrepresented students.

We have initiatives that really focus on serving students of color.

And a lot of the good learning and the good application around what it takes to make students who are entering the college be successful really went into the formation and the development and evolution of the 13th year project.

so that when it evolved to the Seattle Promise and the Seattle Colleges put forth a concept that would address the needs, it was really well informed by that background.

In last year, many, many hours were spent with this team of partners, of experts in education, to really evolve what the 13th year was into the Seattle Promise, to address the access and the completion goals that we wanted to achieve through the Promise, And I believe that what you will be reviewing really represents that good work.

We already serve in our first cohort levels of diversity that are higher both at the high school and at the college of the students that are served in the general population.

So we really feel like it stands strong as a successful program for equity outcomes.

Thank you, Rosie.

Go, go.

Thanks so much.

Is there, that's the end of our list.

Is there anyone else in the audience who didn't have an opportunity to sign up but would like to offer us public testimony?

Oh, please come forward.

If you could start by telling us what your name is, and then after you're done with your public testimony, you can just write your name down, that'd be fantastic.

On this list?

Yes.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Roberta Greenwood, and I'm here representing Grandmothers Against Gun Violence.

And we're here, we've tried to make several of the council meetings in the past couple of years.

as we are a growing, our membership is now at about a thousand members across Washington.

And one of the areas that we are now sort of structuring and focusing our efforts is how we can best support communities with at-risk juveniles for gun violence.

And so we're here today, I'm actually here representing us, just so that we can learn more about the Seattle Police Department's programs, what their proposals are, and also to let the City Council know that Grandmothers really supports the organizations that are working in the at-risk communities to do everything they can to educate the youth.

And we are looking forward to partnering in any way that we can.

So I just wanted to let you know that we're here today, that we care, and that we're doing everything that we can to ensure that there are sensible gun laws in place and enforced to keep our communities and our schools safe.

Great, thank you so much for being with us.

Is there anyone else who'd like to offer us some testimony on matters that are on the agenda?

Seeing no one, we will go ahead and close out the public comment period, and we will go ahead and begin our items of business.

So if you are here to present on agenda item one, which is the initial presentation on the FEPP levy implementation evaluation plan, I'm going to invite you to join us while Roxanna queues up the presentation.

Good morning.

Good morning.

I'm going to have Roxanna read Agenda Item 1 into the record.

Agenda Item 1, Families, Education, Preschooling Promise, Levy, Implementation, and Evaluation Plan for Briefing and Discussion.

OK.

So we have quite a few people at the table.

And before we get started, I wanted to make a couple of some opening remarks.

And then we'll go ahead and do a round of introductions.

I'm going to inverse that.

We're going to do a round of introductions, and then I'm going to make some opening remarks, and then I'm going to hand over the presentation to Director Chappelle.

Are you going to kick us off on the presentation?

I will.

OK.

So first, we're going to do introductions.

I'll make some opening remarks.

Then, Director, you can go ahead and take it over.

And then we will go ahead and get through the 56 slide deck, 56 pages, the evaluation plan is 130. You guys are killing me.

All right, well, you guys have 60 minutes to get through this, so I'm going to hold you to that.

This will obviously not be the only conversation that we have here.

So let's do a quick round of introductions, and we'll get started with Vy.

Vy Nguyen, legislative aide for Councilor Gonzalez.

Sheila Edwards-Lang, president at Seattle Central College.

Dr. Cristina Gaeta, director of K-12 and post-secondary education with DEEL.

Dwayne Chappelle, Proud Director of Education and Early Learning.

Tim Wolf, the Finance Director for DEEL.

Monica Liang-Aguirre, Early Learning Director for DEEL.

Brian Goodnight, Council Central Staff.

Sarah Riegel, Public Health Seattle and King County.

Great, wonderful.

Thank you so much for being with us this morning.

I am excited to kick off the Seattle City Council's discussion on the proposed Families Education Preschool and Promise Levy Implementation and Evaluation Plan.

That is a mouthful.

Seattle voters overwhelmingly approved this critical education levy in November of 2018, as we all know.

And as the Chair of the Education Committee, I am really proud of the work that the City Council did during last year's legislative process that led to the development of an education levy.

that baked in this council's priorities together with the priorities of the executive and members of our community.

In partnership with Seattle Colleges and the Seattle Public Schools District, our levy investments will be anchored in educational equity with a focus on clear outcomes, including closing the kindergarten readiness gap with our quality Seattle preschool, closing the opportunity gap for our students and increasing graduation rates, and creating pathways to college and careers with Seattle Promise.

And I'm really excited that we can be here to talk this morning about how important these investments are across the educational spectrum.

As somebody who grew up in central Washington state, who was a beneficiary of Migrant Head Start, who was a beneficiary of a lot of support systems in the K through 12 system, and who also had the pleasure of starting off my higher education with two years of community college at Yakima Valley Community College, I really understand and appreciate the work that DEEL is doing and the work that Seattle Colleges is doing and the work that so many of our preschool providers do to make sure that we are able to root our investments in this space through a lens of education, but primarily also just to make sure that we have really wonderful outcomes for our kids throughout the city.

So I'm really excited to be able to host this conversation today in this committee together with Councilmember Johnson, who's been a key ally and partner for me in making sure that we do right by our kids.

So I'm really excited to begin the conversation.

Councilmember Johnson, did you want to make any opening remarks before we get going?

All right, here we go.

All right, thank you for that.

And we appreciate your support all the way leading us up to here and the continued support that we'll have.

Before we dive into the presentation, I wanted to also thank Superintendent Juneau for her support and partnership.

I know we have Seattle Public Schools representation here as well.

Also, I want to thank Chancellor Pan and the presidents that are here today for everything that you've done to get us to this point.

So here's a brief overview of what our presentation is going to look like today.

Just a brief little outline.

We'll have an overview of the FEPP levy.

We'll hear a little bit about the community and partner voice.

We'll dive into the overview details.

We'll lead with promise and then we'll dive into early learning preschool and then we'll close this with our K-12 and community-based and health sections, so wanted to also just start off with our why within thinking about DEEL when reflecting why DEEL does this work.

The reality is DEEL could only think about serving our Seattle families and just the importance of FEPP and ensuring that FEPP meets all of our Seattle family needs.

We know the value of accessing high quality learning is extremely important to our Seattle families.

We also know that it's even more valuable that our Seattle families will be part of this growth expansion that we're looking at within the early learning space.

Then just thinking about just not only the growth and expansion that how kids will be able to start and enter kindergarten ready to learn, which will be, that learning will be complemented by the health investments and other K-12 investments.

For us, it's super important and rewarding that we're investing in this.

But most importantly, and just to be honest, as a former high school principal, one of my favorites that I get overwhelmed and I get to thinking about is the opportunity that kids will have when they graduate from high school, that they'll have an opportunity to have two free years of school.

I always reflect back and think about standing on the stage, giving a speech, and looking at the crowd, and you take that panoramic view, you know, now, knowing what principals and other folks that are graduating young people, knowing that every kid will have an opportunity for two, three years of college is super impressive.

So I wanted to say that this is, you know, Deals Why, and we know that these investments will ensure that our families will be successful to compete in Seattle.

And if you can compete in Seattle, you can compete anywhere.

So I wanted to just start us off with the why.

A little bit about our FEPP investments.

You know, of course, our FEPP investments will invest in preschool to post-secondary.

We're definitely going to increase access and utilization of programs and services for our historically underserved students.

And I will dive a little bit deeper into what historically underserved students are in the upcoming slides.

The FEPP is definitely looking at funding these three core strategies throughout the entire FEPP levy.

We're looking at equitable educational opportunities, we're looking at high quality learning environments, and we're looking at making sure that there are student and family supports throughout the FEPP levy.

As I mentioned earlier, we, we here's our overall goal of the FEPP levy and you know as it says here we really want to emphasize the partnership with families and communities to make sure that we're building a better economic future for our Seattle scholars so we wanted to highlight that I mentioned earlier on a previous slide that speaks to our underserved population students that we're focusing on Clearly, this is what we're looking at focusing our outcome and target is African American, Black, Hispanic, Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander, underserved Asian populations, and other students of color, making sure that they achieve academically from the preschool to post-secondary continuum.

So, just wanted to make sure we identified and called that out as well.

Next, we will talk about, I just wanted to highlight a little bit about the community and partner voice in implementation.

So, when you look at this slide, this is really a high-level overview of the areas by strategy, which is preschool and early learning, K-12 and community, and K-12 and health.

each area of investment, you'll see just a few bullets of who we targeted throughout this community and partnership.

And without going through all of them, I'll just give you a brief second to look at the individual organizations that we've targeted throughout this process.

Dr. Chappelle, can I, before we continue, on the last slide, can you go back to slide five?

Yes.

One of the things that this city council indicated was a priority for us, and this has been a particular priority for me personally is making sure that we're also layering some of the demographics that we are targeting with the component of language and making sure that we are reaching into English language learners in particular, who also, you know, obviously that's not, that's layered on top of the racial categories that you've listed there.

And so I just wanna be, I really want to, want us to be intentional about including that as a category of folks who we are seeking to reach in terms of the work that we're doing here.

Okay.

Because I notice they're missing on this slide.

All right.

Thank you for that.

And I, okay.

Thank you.

So as I was mentioning, this is just the overview of the community and partnership, the voice that we've collected.

And as you see, these are the folks, few of the folks that we engage throughout this process.

So we just wanted to highlight that and show everyone that.

Next, we're looking at, as far as the levy oversight committee involvement, what, as you see this timeline right here, we've looked, we've actually started back in 2017. So, I'll take you through this timeline.

In 2017, we've developed the FEPP levy implementation.

priorities and principles was developed by the Levy Oversight Committee back in 2017. And then you'll see between January and June of 2018, I kind of feel like we were sitting right here around the same time last year, getting council approval of the FEPP and levy package.

And as you highlighted in your opening in November of 2018, which actually was just a few months ago, but it seems like it could have been longer, the voters approved this FEP package, which then a month after that in December of 2018, we sat at this table and had our FEP LOC members confirmed by council, which then brings us to kind of where we are now.

from January 2019 to present.

We've had LOC meetings and recommendations to transmit the implementation and evaluation plan.

And then upcoming later this month of March, we'll definitely have a LOC meeting regarding our partnership agreements that we'll be sharing with you all.

So I just wanted to really highlight this timeline and just to show the commitment that everyone has committed to over the past couple of years.

And thank you too, Council Member, you've been a part of the process on here.

I have.

I've been there every step of the way.

And I appreciate the cooperation and the work that we've been able to accomplish together.

So thank you.

Next, so right here what we have is our budget overview.

And you see the slide, it's a little murky.

Sometimes it comes up funny.

But I'll just read the budget overview to you.

The green is the preschool and early learning, which is approximately 54% of our budget.

You'll see the light blue color, baby blue, light blue, is K-12 and community, which is about 29% of the FEPP budget.

The dark blue is the health investments, which is approximately 11% of this seven-year budget.

And then the orange is the small 6%, which is our Seattle promise.

So I just wanted to just make sure we share this slide with everyone prior to moving forward.

And I know that it's not showing up properly on the display here, but for those folks who might be watching at home, it is uploaded on the website and it is appearing accurately without the formatting issues in the system.

Okay, that sounds great.

So what I'll do now is let us dive into Seattle Promise and I'll ask Dr. Gaeta to kick us off with that.

Thank you, Duane.

We're excited to have our partners here today to present to you.

And I've got Dr. Sheila Lange, who's been very instrumental in the co-design of the Seattle Promise.

She's been working very diligently on this.

And I want to actually just start off by talking about the Seattle Promise is.

So the Seattle Promise provides students, Seattle students tuition, student support, and includes non-tuition financial support for eligible students.

And so as we heard earlier in public testimony, this model, the Seattle Promise is modeled after the success of the 13th year scholarship program.

And the Seattle Promise maintains a universal approach that has opened access to college for many students who wouldn't otherwise pursue a post-secondary education.

So that's something that we're actually very excited about with Seattle Promise.

We know that the jobs that we are seeing even today, 70% of them require some type of post-secondary education.

And so what we're really proud of is that in 2017, as Dwayne mentioned, Mayor Durkan sought to reduce the financial barriers for Seattle Public High School graduates.

And with the help of the council and public vote, we've now got the Seattle Promise in place.

I'd like to dive into, thank you, Dwayne.

I'd like to dive into the goals of the Seattle Promise.

And so in strong partnership with the colleges, the Seattle Promise Program is a non-means tested program designed to increase access for Seattle high school students to enroll in Seattle colleges, be North, South, and Central.

And to support them to earn a certificate, credential, or a degree of their choice.

Our intended outcomes, as you can see here, allow students to earn up to 90 credits towards a certificate, credential, or a transfer degree.

And we aim to provide a seamless pathway for students straight into college.

And as future slides will show, I'm about to display some of the race-based opportunity gap goals that we're trying to achieve with this.

Thank you.

So what we have here is we're really looking at the universal access and equitable outcomes that have been mentioned.

Seattle colleges are open to all students of all educational levels and abilities as an open access institutions.

We're proud of this partnership.

This year, the 13th year is in full force at six high schools and will be expanded into 17 Seattle public high schools starting the next school year in 1920. As a well-known practice, the Seattle Promise will provide staffing.

And so as we see here, we've got student success specialists and college advisors.

The ratios for them, for student success specialists, these will be individuals that will go into the high schools and talk to students and bridge that understanding and awareness about what college is.

We really believe students have to develop that sense of identity and understanding that college is there for them.

And we're also looking at these specialists working with a ratio of 300 to 1, so a really condensed ratio so that there's a high quality support system there.

We also have in place college advisors in this model so that students get the hands-on approach and wraparound services once they're in college and have that student support.

We've really looked at existing research to focus on the simplicity in this design.

And so what we've found is that research has shown, and even within the 13th year scholarship program, research has shown that keeping this model simple is probably the best approach so that families and students aren't caught up with eligibility requirements.

And the big goal that we're really trying to achieve is a college-going and college-completion culture within all of our schools.

We really believe and feel very confident that students are really, really, we want to bridge that access to post-secondary education.

So what we have here is in the first year of Seattle Promise, we are going to be in six schools.

And so with that, we have lower rates of students in that.

But by year two, we're going to be expanding to the 17 schools.

And so within year two, students in the 12th grade will be getting supports and be getting that exposure to college awareness and application support to the Seattle Promise.

By year three, we will be in full effect, and so we will have students here already participating in Seattle Promise, both in the 13th and 14th year.

And our model, as you can see, is estimated at 870 students once we're in full operation mode.

We feel very confident about this model, and we've worked in partnership to develop the seven-year enrollment matriculation estimate for our Seattle students.

I want to highlight some of the demographic ratios that we're going to see in current 13th year approaches.

So looking at some baseline data in the school year 18-19 Seattle Promise cohort, what we see is that currently 60% of the students that are participating are on free and reduced lunch.

So we are actually making a change and making an impact for students who are considered low income and free reduced lunch.

In terms of race and ethnicity, as you can see in this pie chart, we really do reflect a very diverse demographic.

As you can see, black is the largest group, followed by Asian Pacific Islander, white, and Hispanic, followed by multicultural and Native American, which we hope to be able to increase that as well.

Here, we're really looking at even further at the schools that we're currently at.

If I can get your eyes on the bottom of the slide, we're currently in six schools, Chief Sealth, Cleveland, Garfield, Ingram, Rainier Beach, and West Seattle.

Within that, when we look at the chart above, the bar chart shows that of all the students in these schools, we have 48% that qualify for free and reduced lunch.

Of that population, we're currently seeing that 60% participate in the Seattle Promise, or excuse me, in the 13th year.

And so really free and reduced lunch students are overrepresented, or I would like to say very well represented, in the current demographic.

I want to take your eyes to West Seattle.

So West Seattle currently estimated at 22% of the students on free and reduced lunch.

And even there we're seeing that 42% of the students that enroll in Seattle Promise and are actually participating are, 42% are on free and reduced lunch.

So we have really positive outcomes and we believe that even as we expand into schools that reflect a certain demographic, that we'll still be maintaining equity.

I just want to make sure that I'm tracking what you're saying.

So it's not 42%.

It's 42% of the 22%.

It's 42% of the 11 right there.

Of the 11?

Students in West Seattle.

Which is 22%.

You're telling me that this chart represents 22% in West Seattle, 22% of the students attending West Seattle High School are on free or reduced lunch, correct?

And of those 22%, 42% of that is enrolled in the Promise cohort.

So of the 22%, 11 from West Seattle are currently in the school year 18-19.

What does the 42% mean?

Of those 11, 42%, or if we go down to five to six students, would be currently participating.

So less than half of the 11 students are on free and reduced lunch.

Correct.

OK.

Are you ready for next?

OK.

Now looking further into this slide, which shows the equity and ethnicity makeup of that same cohort, 18-19 Seattle Promise participants, we've got a total of 190 students.

And it's broken out on the bottom of the slide based off race and ethnicity, being Asian Pacific Islander, black, Hispanic, multiracial, Native American and white.

Of the 190, we look at the bar charts above also show now the demographic breakdown within the six schools.

And they definitely show that within the black population, where we see that we're serving 51 black students within this cohort, that makes up 27%, much like the pie chart that I showed earlier.

So we are seeing very high rates of students from diverse backgrounds that are able to participate in this.

And this research definitely is reflected in existing national programs were modeled after place-based, similar programs that are place-based.

Kalamazoo is one, for example, that has definitely shown that race and ethnicity and underserved students are definitely reflected in PROMIS programs.

Do you have any questions about this one?

Council Member Johnson.

Thanks, Christine.

So just to make sure that I'm tracking all of this stuff well, in this year, how many students do we have that are in the 2018-2019 cohort?

Because our number on this slide is 190 students.

Our number on the previous slide was 114. I assume that those are representative samples of the total population?

Correct, so there's currently on this slide, there's 190 total students because it's broken down by race and ethnicity accounting for all of them.

So if I go to this slide, I have 114 students.

This is the makeup of 60% of the total population.

So if you look at all six schools on the bar chart to the left, 60% of the current cohort are free and reduced lunch students.

I think the question is broader.

It's not about how many.

The question is, how many students are enrolled in the 18-19 Seattle Promise cohort?

190.

109?

90. 90, 190. So there are 190 students in the 18-19 cohort.

And these other slides that you're walking us through are just subsets of the 190 students that are in the 18-19 cohort, correct?

That's helpful.

I mean, as we look at the setup slide for all this, you know, the kind of continued ramp-up of the program, I think having realistic expectations about the staffing up of the cohort considering, you know, we need to add success specialists, college advisors, all of those things associated with it.

So to know that we've got 190 kids in the program today, the expectation is that next year's program, i.e. this year's program, because we're in 2019, but it's the 2019-2020 school year, so the soon to be seniors will have about 260 or so and that the following school year will be up to 545. That ramping up period I think is important to understand and it'll be great to see how as we get those ramp ups ensuring that we are targeting if you go stay on this slide, making sure that we're targeting those students and, again, overrepresenting those that are traditionally underrepresented, both in terms of race and ethnicity and in terms of economic equality, I think is going to be really important.

So I get the complicated nature of your slides.

I'm trying to just unpack them a little bit to make sure that the data that we're tracking over the next couple of years as we roll out the program, is going to be easy for folks to understand.

And I think what you're hearing a little bit is that two folks who have spent the overwhelming majority of the last year and a half thinking about this program are struggling a little bit with it.

So finding some ways for us to make it a little more user-friendly to understand would be helpful.

Great.

So currently, this slide shows that we're in the first year.

We're going to continue with the high school eligibility at six schools.

In years one and two, we'll be expanding to 17 schools.

Within the second year, we're also going to pursue conducting a racial equity toolkit to do exactly what you're talking about.

assess our equity measures and assess how we're rolling out with the Seattle Promise.

And these recommendations will be delivered to the LOC, the Levy Oversight Committee, and the Council and make recommendations of how we can expand on this program to see what's going on with our program.

And within year three, We're really trying to design the kind of approach where we, DEEL has the authority to modify eligibility criteria for tuition.

We really need that time to be able to see what the behaviors and patterns are for full implementation as the Seattle Promise matures and performance is monitored.

So DEEL will seek the recommendation of the LOC to implement new eligibility criteria and we will be notifying council 30 days before any changes take effect.

At least that's your proposal.

That's the proposal.

And you have mentioned that you wanted to see prioritization of students.

One thing that we have actually brought into play is a contingency plan.

So should the case for Seattle Promise exceed the FEPP levy funding, tuition funds will be prioritized for low-income students, first-generation students, and students of color, African-American, Hispanic, Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander, and underserved Asian populations.

A little bit about the model and the design of Seattle Promise.

We have actual metrics and steps that we want students to be following in order to guide their path into Seattle Promise.

One being, within the 12th grade, we actually want to walk students through completing the Seattle Promise application.

So actually filling out the application that is developed by the colleges.

Within that, students are also going to be applying to distinct colleges that they're going to be applying to, North Seattle, set central.

We also want to provide that hands-on support for the WASFA and the FAFSA applications so that students can actually apply and get the kind of aid that they're eligible for, for those that do, are eligible.

And that's a very complicated application process, so we want students to have that kind of support built in.

And students will be asked to participate in readiness academies.

What these are are seminars and workshops built into the day where students are brought onto campus and they're actually learning about the college opportunity they have.

They're actually going to be filling out their financial aid application, filling out any additional forms that they need in order to prepare for their first time, first experience in college.

We really wanted to mystify what college means for students and help them understand what careers look like and how to pursue that type of a major certificate once they get to the colleges.

Also, one of our requirements is that students earn a diploma from Seattle Public Schools.

And for those that carry out up to this point, we are going to ask that they participate in a summer bridge program.

What we want to do is handle the summer melt concept.

So students many times over the summer because of something that happens within their families or something, some unforeseeable reason might fade away from pursuing college.

And so this is a really important what I would say is orientation to the campus.

And really over the course of this spectrum, these students will have somebody, a student support specialist that's actually talking to them, knows their personal stories, knows what's going on for them in case there's some issues as to why they can't start so that we can help offset those barriers during the summer bridge program.

This is typically in August.

Once students begin their 13th year and enroll into Seattle Colleges, students will be asked to meet quarterly, if not monthly, with an academic advisor.

This ratio is 100 to 1. And this is where students, for example, if they have some concerns about courses that they need to take, academic advising that's needed, sometimes they might have that sense of insecurity of taking a certain class or just not feeling like they know how to navigate the college.

This is where that advisor support will really help.

And last but not least, we're asking students to main satisfactory academic progress.

And this is a term and a mechanism in which the colleges are often, most institutions of higher education, use this approach to maintain student momentum of progress towards degree.

Really quickly on, in this proposed implementation plan, does it require, well, let me phrase it a different way.

Does the proposed implementation plan still allow for portability and mobility of students?

So in other words, if you, it doesn't matter what high school you graduate from, you can choose to go to whatever college, whatever Seattle college you want to.

Yes, once fully implemented, students will have ultimate choice to go to whichever college they want to.

So choice is still included as part of the design of Seattle Promise?

Yes, this first year it was not because we were.

This first year is under, it's not part of this levy?

The levy funded it so that it could be fully portable for students so they choose where they want to go.

Okay, and I did offline raise some concerns about the maintain satisfactory academic progress component.

So I want to just let my colleague know about that.

And then I know Brian is tracking that issue and will be doing some analysis for us in issue identification.

That's a, it's a term of art as it relates to education, maintaining satisfactory academic progress.

Doctor, you're welcome to explain it to us if you wish, but if you're curious, Council Member Johnson.

to what it is.

The goal is to make sure that students are moving towards completion because we want them to earn a certificate or degree.

And if they are spending their wills, taking credits that don't matter, or if they are not making progress towards some degree, then they're not making good use of the money.

It also, I think, the way that the design is proposed does not take into account part-time.

But we do, we allow the flexibility if something happens in a student's life that they can work with their advisor, the student success specialist.

And we have in the 13th year program allowed students to stop out as needed or to go part time as needed.

The goal though is to get students toward completion.

And we know from the research that students who go full time are more likely to complete.

Dr. I wonder if you might just talk a little bit about the application process.

I mean, one of the things that Christine talked about is how we are planning to Intentionally try to ensure that folks from low income backgrounds or students of color or first generation students.

are the ones that get prioritized for the program.

Does that surface itself through a traditional college application or is that going to be part of our promise application itself?

And how many applications will a student have to fill out?

Is there a chance for us to have sort of one application or that the applications look similar enough that it doesn't look too confusing from one application to another?

So they will have to fill out, too, because the college application is actually a state board.

So every community college in the state uses the same application.

And it's fairly simple.

And the Seattle Promise application, we're trying to keep it as simple as possible as well.

And the focus on low-income and underserved students is working in the high schools with the building principals and with the community-based organizations that are there.

And that has been our approach to always partner with college access programs that are in the schools or that are out in the community.

So we're not just in the high schools.

We're also doing work out at community centers.

college fairs that are hosted by community-based organizations to make sure that we're getting the word out to those students who are traditionally underserved.

So the way that we're doing that is not necessarily through the application process but by using counselors, nonprofit organizations, advocates within the schools to do outreach and ensure that applications get into the hands of those students and that they continue to apply.

Great.

It's helpful.

The strategies and approaches that we will encompass within Seattle Promise are by offering tuition.

So tuition costs for up to $2,500 per Seattle Promise student.

For those that need more, we have the equity scholarships.

So equity scholarships are for students with a zero EFC.

This will provide support for non-related tuition expenses, because we understand that students have additional expenses in order to pay.

pursue their college education.

And so, and really, we really believed strongly in the equity approach of providing college preparation persistent support.

So we've dedicated a bulk of our investment into the retention support.

And so we want to make sure that students are college ready and that there's a transition plan in effect for them, as I just showed you in that model.

And we want to make sure students are able to persist and complete their education.

Council Member Johnson.

If I may, I think this is one of the opportunities where we want to make sure that someone who is eligible for the Promise Program is also getting understanding about their eligibility for other benefits.

I look at that equity scholarship number and think, as we've heard around the table, that all of that money could be sucked up into books in a heartbeat.

But that somebody who is eligible for the Promise Program is likely also eligible for the other benefits that we might have through other buckets within the city, whether that's the ORCA Lift Program, whether that's about child care, whether it's about some of the other things we want to do around housing.

How are we going to ensure that someone who's applying for the program understands that they are eligible for these other great city programs as well and not sucking up all their $1,500 into transportation when they may be eligible for the OrcaLift program coming out of the Department of Transportation's budget?

We are working very diligently with our partners in early learning, as Monica will be talking about shortly, and we are looking at child care subsidies so that we can provide that affordability.

for students with children.

And we are looking at other means as well.

We're currently working with SDOT to see what kind of opportunities are available in the future.

And so one of the other things that we want to really highlight is that students in the levy, which I'll be talking about the K-12 investments, we actually have five high schools and we're going to be targeting a lot of our investment approach in those five high needs high schools.

to add extra emphasis for students.

And Sheila, do you have a chance to say?

And I would add that the student success specialists, we say that three times very fast, and those folks are really going to focus on connecting students to resources not only in the community and through the city, but that resources that we might have at the college, like TRIO, like the United Way Benefits Hub navigators that we have.

And those folks are specifically in our colleges to connect students to resources outside of the college, especially low-income students who may be struggling with housing insecurity or food insecurity.

I think it'd be super helpful to make sure that we understand the framing of that.

Like if you're filling out an application and you were to see a box that said, do you have housing instability, I would imagine folks might not be willing to check that box.

But everybody's interested in housing that is affordable or transportation that is affordable or, you know, would you be interested in a discounted bus pass?

Everybody wants a discounted bus pass.

So thinking about ways that we might be able to market that so that students will be willing to raise their hand and say that's something that I'm interested in as opposed to trying to ensure that every student in the very limited time that they'll have with those advisors can surface issues, I think would be helpful too.

And I want to get a sense of whether the wraparound plan that you've described, Dr. Lange, is included in, or anybody from DEEL, is that included in the implementation plan, or is that something that would be included in the partnership agreement?

It's included in the implementation plan, because the implementation plan includes funding for a student success specialist for a caseload of 100 per one.

So for every 100 Seattle Promise students, there will be one advisor assigned to them.

So they get to know the students fairly well.

And the outreach counselors who are working in the high schools get to know the students pretty well.

So, a lot of times they don't have to ask that question because they're helping them fill out those forms and so they know those students fairly well.

They get to know their student stories.

So, Brian, if we can flag this as a potential issue in your issue identification work, that'd be great.

Absolutely.

Great.

All right, let's keep going.

All right, so next we'll ask Monica to guide us through the early learning piece.

Okay.

I will try to go fairly quickly, because I know we have lots left.

So as you know, we're coming off a very successful four-year demonstration phase of the Seattle Preschool Program.

And the bulk of our preschool and early learning investments revolve around modifications and tweaks to the program based on all of our experiences and the experiences of our providers.

and from DEEL staff.

So I definitely want to thank the committee and the council for all your support over the last four years as we launched this program from the ground up.

It was an incredible process and we're really delighted to have seven more years to make our program better and more accessible and continue the good work that we started.

So the overarching goal for the early learning investments is that all Seattle families will have access to and utilize the high quality early learning services that promote success in kindergarten.

And what we hope to see is that children are ready to thrive in kindergarten, that we have high quality early learning environments that are evidence-based, culturally responsive, and equitable in their practices, and that families have multiple ways to gain access to these early learning environments because we recognize that family is different and different needs and one size does not fit all.

and that ultimately the race-based opportunity gaps are closed.

So the early learning strategies are divided, early learning investment is divided into seven different strategies.

And the first four on this slide are directly associated with the Seattle Preschool Program.

As I mentioned earlier, we've learned a lot from our pilot and our modified strategies, and so really reflect the experiences and the best thinking of our providers, our teachers, our families, and our internal deals staff.

So I'm sure you've heard me say before, some of our biggest learnings were around one size does not fit all.

So you'll see that we are incorporating more flexibility in a differentiated approach, both for our providers and our families.

We learned that quality has to be, can't be cumbersome.

So we set the bar very high for SPP and we're not wavering from that at all.

As a matter of fact, in the most recent review of the Pre-K's and American cities report, we were the only city that met 10 out of 10 of the quality benchmarks.

So we're not waiving from that, but we also want to recognize that sometimes these high standards can set up inadvertently some barriers for our providers.

And so we're trying to be creative and work with our providers to make sure that they can meet the quality standards.

in a differentiated approach without causing hardship.

And then finally, we also want to reduce barriers for our families.

So access for families means that we're continuing to assess our program policies and our processes and some unintended barriers that we may have created for families.

So we're continuously trying to simplify the application process, increase eligibility, and also the supports that our families can use.

So the four, if you can go back one more slide.

Yeah, so the four strategies around SPP are the first bucket is the services and tuition, which is our tuition subsidy and the payments that we give our providers for running our SPP programs.

I'll talk more in detail about that in a later slide.

Our second strategy is around quality teaching.

And this has really been a huge success for us.

And in what I mentioned earlier, in terms of getting the outcomes that we want and the types of classrooms that we've been able to establish throughout SPP.

So our equity focused responsive coaching, the curriculum training, the assessments and continuous quality improvement, as well as workforce development that we've been doing with our scholarship program for teachers.

Comprehensive supports is a strategy that focuses on ensuring that any child can fully participate in SPP.

As you know, some children come to SPP developing more than one language at one time, or they have special developmental needs, or they are experiencing homelessness or other trauma and exhibiting challenging behaviors.

One thing we want to make sure is that our teachers and our providers are equipped and have the resources to serve all children, because that's the only way that we can make SPP equitable.

And so funding comprehensive support is really an important component of any high quality program.

So different types of things are public health partners implement the child care health consultation.

We are focusing heavily on establishing strong supports for dual language learners, as well as students with individualized education programs, special education, and we also provide a lot of technical assistance to our providers to meet the different needs.

and increased family outreach and also family support.

And in this next iteration of the SPP, we're going to be creating a family advisory council as well to help inform our practices.

Councilmember Johnson.

Monica, if I may, we're in the middle of the application process right now.

Yes, it's launching on Friday.

So how are we getting the word out?

I mean, I'm the guy who sees the ads on the inside of buses, but we want to make sure that we're targeting folks in a more targeted fashion than just all of us transit nerds.

So we are, we're using ethnic media.

We have also mainstream media.

We're using our providers.

So all of our providers, word of mouth is really the best mechanism as well.

So in addition to social media, we're providing all of our sites with the materials and the resources to promote their programs and the upcoming application, which is opening on Friday.

And one would imagine that once you've got a kid in the program, you want to try to get that kid's siblings in the program and that kid's, your friend's kids in the program.

So that word of mouth thing, I totally appreciate.

But I love the focus on ethnic media in particular and in language materials that providers can hand out because I think Sometimes we all think that we're interested in it, but we don't have the time to really contemplate it.

So being able to take something with us and think about it more and be able to follow up with people I think is really great.

And then the final strategy under the SPP component is organizational facility development.

This is just a continuation of recognizing that we need to help providers expand their facilities.

Licensable, affordable space here is really a challenge.

And so we, this, in our past, in the levy, we've spent about $6.5 million with direct development facilities development.

And then also organizational capacity is something that we recognize that some of our providers can benefit from business practices, so short-term consultation on running our small business.

So the last three strategies are separate from SPP, but fall within the early learning realm.

Child care subsidies fund child care for SPP and pathway participants, providing supplemental funding for the city's CCAP program, which is a child care assistance program for income eligible families.

The rest of CCAP is funded through the sweetened beverage tax, but this is specifically for SPP families.

Our Homeless Child Care Program is an investment that is a continuation with our direct contract with Child Care Resources that over 15 years has provided child care subsidies for families experiencing homelessness, providing additional supports and case management for them.

And finally, our newest strategy is around family child care mentorship, and this is a new program that we're starting up with that will directly support our family child care providers, and I'll talk about that a separate slide.

So just to summarize sort of some of the changes or differences between SPP past and future.

So over the course of the seven years, we're going to be expanding by 65%, so reaching up to 2,500 children by the year 2526. As I mentioned earlier, we are focusing on increasing our support for special education and plan to expand our inclusion classrooms throughout the program.

We're also focusing on supporting our dual language learners, both in dual language programs as well as non-dual language programs, but we know that all of our programs serve children who speak multiple languages.

Monica, on the special education inclusion, so that's our SPP plus program as we refer to it?

That's the one that is through Seattle Public Schools, yes.

Okay, but there are other types of classrooms that are not SPP plus specific, correct?

Right.

All of our programs are open to all children.

So there are kids with special needs in all of our programs throughout the city.

SPP Plus, the one that goes through Seattle Public Schools, a lot of S's and P's, is the one that is specially designed to be an inclusion classroom where they reserve a specific number of seats for children with IEPs and have a special staffing structure.

Great, thank you.

And also, through our comprehensive supports, we will be supporting families experiencing homelessness at a higher level, and we'll have more resources for our providers.

And finally, just improving and streamlining processes for everyone involved.

In terms of eligibility and prioritization, we are really excited to open our eligibility for all Seattle three and four-year-olds.

So in the previous iteration of SPP, it was only income-eligible three-year-olds, and now it'll be all three and four-year-olds.

We're also expanding the free tuition threshold to 350% FPL.

Previously it was 300, so we're recognizing that child care and preschool is very expensive.

So we want to make sure to take the Seattle context into consideration.

And we are also prioritizing access for children experiencing homelessness or who are in the foster care.

And then, Monica, on that 350% FPL, can you just give us the hard numbers around that?

Yes, I can.

And I had to look it up so that I could.

So 350 for a family of four is 90,125.

And 300 is 77. So it's going to make a big difference.

Big difference, yeah.

And we noticed that the majority of our families who were delinquent in tuition or challenged paying it on a regular basis for those families that were right in that middle ground.

Yeah.

And I'm assuming that the implementation plan will have, is going to recognize that we're expanding the eligibility to all three and four-year-olds and that we're modifying the federal poverty line marker in terms of the eligibility criteria.

So the evaluation plan takes into account that there's this modification and we'll be tracking it, correct?

Yes, definitely.

And finally, I wanted to go to the next slide, please, is around the Family Child Care Mentorship Program.

So Seattle has over 350 licensed family child care providers, the majority of whom speak Amharic, Arabic, or Somali.

So because the FCCs are such an important role in our early learning network and often especially supporting families who are from immigrant and refugee communities, DEEL has purposely expanded our supports, and we're working on developing a cohesive FCC strategy.

So we commissioned a landscape study last year to look at our family child care overall in the city, and we also assembled our Family Child Care Advisory Council that worked throughout the year to offer recommendations and strategies to best support them.

And the one thing that really surfaced from both the study and from the council is that family child care often are very isolated.

They don't access the same professional development that centers can.

They have different hours.

And so they need a differentiated approach to professional development and support.

And so we were really excited when this mentorship opportunity came to FEPP, and we are going to be working directly with the Imagine Institute, who is currently implementing a pilot of an FCC mentorship program through the state.

So we'll be working with them directly to tailor it to the Seattle context, and we'll be co-developing that with them as soon as we get started.

Yeah, I don't think we can underestimate how important this body of work is within the context of our investments in preschool and early learning.

I mean, we all know that we live in a childcare desert, but I think part of that system is the lack of people who are entering into this industry.

And it's really important for us to play a strong role in making sure that we are supporting People who want to enter into this space to provide these really critically important oftentimes linguistically culturally Sensitive You know type of learning environments for kiddos in in the city, so I'm really excited about this body of work, and I know that It seems like we're having some good progress at the state level as well that will help us be able to leverage these dollars in a way that I don't think we fully understood when we first were developing our concepts around Imagine Institute and FCC Mentorship Program.

So thank you for the work on this.

Okay, what we'll do now is kick it back over to Christina for our K-12 and community-based

Thanks, Duane.

So back to me.

And sorry, Christina, before you get started, I just want to do a quick time check.

So we started at about 9.58, so you guys have about 20 minutes to go.

OK.

I'll get through this quick then.

OK.

All right.

So let's start off with the goal for the K-12 school and community-based investments.

And so really, our goal here is focusing on students having students completing a high school Students graduating high school and what we're looking at is aligning our investments from K through 12 and making sure that students are on the pathway to graduate high school.

We also want to reinforce the goal that we have that students are graduating college and career ready and to have the type of experiences that prepare them for that.

I want to preface our outcomes that you can see here in this slide and really I want to just start by discussing our outcome-based approach that we have.

We have a performance pay model that we encompass.

So what that means is that we really allow those school building leaders and the community who know what the issues are in their building, the concerns, and we allow them to design a proposal and design an application that's going to create the solutions that they need in order to create our outcomes.

So we lead with our outcomes in our proposals.

We do a competitive application.

And as you can see here, we want to ensure that students are academically prepared.

All students are academically prepared, graduating high school on time, college and career ready.

And we really invest in evidence-based promising practices.

As you'll see in our investments, we are investing in diversifying the educator workforce.

And you'll see that some of our targeted approaches are about expanding learning time and college and career readiness.

And ultimately, with the FEPP levy, we want to close opportunity gaps.

So what we learned from our 2004 and 2011 levy, we wanted to gather the best practices that we found there.

What we found was that school-based investments, this is our largest investment bucket.

And school-based investments are these large investments that allow schools the ability to design a proposal or solutions and give them a surmountable amount of money to be able to implement those interventions.

What we plan to do is fund five high schools, five middle schools, and up to 20 elementary schools within this levy.

With that, these leaders will be expected to expand learning and academic support, and what that means is students will have that expanded learning time.

We know that not all students can learn at the same rate, need extra tutoring, and so we want to allow that opportunity for our building leaders to design that, as well as college and career readiness, develop the kind of experiences for students to develop and come out college and career ready.

The next investment strategy that I have is opportunities and access.

And so because we know that not all students that we want to target with this levy are going to be in those 30 schools, we have opportunities and access which allow schools that have a smaller ratio of levy focused students to pursue some of the city investments.

And also achieving the out of school time and expanded learning and college and career readiness goals that we have in mind there.

Last but not least, we have our wraparound services.

And so we want to look at the whole student, the whole child.

And we have investments to support family support services through Seattle Public Schools.

We also have investments to support homeless and housing service support services.

We're targeting doubled up students.

And in the future slide, we'll be getting to that.

We also want to focus our investments on sports and transportation.

In previous levies, we've actually invested and targeted this intervention on middle schools, which we're continuing to do, to provide transportation to and from sports activities, for example, and provide coaching stipends.

Last, we have this new investment approach, which is culturally specific and responsive, where we invest through mentoring and culturally responsive programming.

As you all know, in the city of Seattle, we've got our Our Best initiatives that prioritizes black male achievements.

We're continuing with those efforts.

And we also have our educator diversity investments.

And I want to thank you, first and foremost, for the investments that you've done, the seed funding.

And we want to continue with that.

And we'll get into a slide about that as well.

Can I just provide a firsthand testimonial for a quick minute?

Absolutely.

One of the things that we really spend a lot of time and energy on as part of the levy is reading and math interventionists for those K-5 students.

As somebody who's got three K-5 students right now, I will not name her.

One of the three girls has had some struggles and doesn't consider herself to be a really great reader.

And that has manifested itself and had difficulty getting homework done, et cetera, et cetera.

But with the help of a reading interventionist this year, she has now flipped the switch and is reading constantly around the house.

Homework has gotten easier.

You know, sometimes as parents, even well-educated parents, well-intentioned, well-informed parents are not the best teachers because they don't want to necessarily learn from you.

They want to learn in a different environment.

But those reading interventionists for my family have made a huge difference in seeing that kid be successful.

So, you know, this is a thing that unfortunately the district doesn't have the resources to provide to everybody, but we step into that space.

And I think that that is really making a big difference, not just for my family, but for a whole lot of other families.

So thanks to all the good work that you guys do in helping make my little kids be successful students.

Thank you.

Moving on to these homeless investments, We want to actually, what we're trying to do with this investment is we've got 4.15 over seven years in this investment.

And what we're trying to do is bring a prevention focus to serve Seattle school district students who are unstably housed.

So what we currently want to do is the McKinney-Vento law actually allows and has a very liberal description of students that are experiencing homeless.

That includes doubled up students.

So we want to target our investments in areas where we see the need is not there, is not yet met.

So we're looking at partnering with HSD on a contract to be able to serve those students.

And with that, we want to, we want to, work with an existing provider that HSD has and bring that type of service to the table so that there's a quicker service to students and families that are experiencing homelessness.

What we know is that in the schools, students are going to find a trusting adult or may disclose that they're experiencing homelessness.

And so that provider would actually be able to call a phone number to the service provider and access someone that is trained and knows how to do the assessment for homelessness and be able to meet with the family that much quicker.

And so the key elements to this is within our investments we would provide some emergency assistance funding for families experiencing homelessness that might provide some funding for emergency rent, It might provide money for, because they're double up living with other families, it might provide the kind of funding that's going to help them to stay stabilized or move in with someone in a situation that's going to promote long-term stability in the school.

The other thing is that we're going to be able to provide that referral and connection within 24 hours to three days with bringing an immediate provider closer to the schools.

What we want and our goal here is that teachers are able to do what they do best which is teach students and that they're not out there trying to find housing support services for students.

We know that the McKinney-Vento office is very limited and there's a very high homelessness rate.

We know each school in Seattle Public Schools has at least one homeless student and so we wanted to bring that resource closer to the school so that teachers can stay focused on teaching and that there's someone close to that.

to the families in order to get, expedite this type of support they need.

We're going to conduct a competitive RFI process using existing city resources with HSD.

And when families aren't eligible for the type of support that we have, we will be able to pipeline them into city, or excuse me, city and regional efforts for homelessness.

And you didn't bring, I forgot.

In the past, in our conversations, you've been using the flow chart to sort of compare and contrast how the current system works and how this particular design is going to work.

And I noticed that you didn't include that in your presentation, but we'll make sure to So if you could follow up with us and make sure that we're able to highlight that in future presentations for council members, that'd be really helpful.

Cause I do think it's illustrative of our principal concern, which is that we want to make sure that students and their families who are experiencing housing instability going to be able to have maximum ease of accessing services available here, which is not currently what is occurring per se.

And in large part, that's not because the school district and others aren't committed to providing services to those students.

It's just by virtue of the horrific underfunding of the McKinney-Vento program that has really put the school district in a position to have folks in those positions who are really doing multiple jobs with very little funding.

So I think it's really important for us to show how we are going to approach this design to really best support some of the systems that currently exist within the school district to allow better ease, better and easier access to some of these critical investments.

Yes, thank you.

And we're really about aligning our existing efforts and making it a more efficient process so there's not so much bureaucratic navigation for the families and the students already experiencing this.

And a big, big change to that is that we're going to have folks, service providers going to families as opposed to the other way around, which will be really, I think, a key improvement.

Next, I'll discuss our educator diversity investments.

So over the course of seven years, we're going to be investing $5.2 million over the next seven years.

And so this is building off of an existing contract that we have with Seattle Public Schools that we hope to expand.

We saw some great results.

So investments will serve diverse aspiring educators with a prioritization for multilingual black African-American males.

But really, our ultimate goal is to diversify the educator workforce.

here specifically in Seattle Public Schools.

What we do know is that with 52% of students of color being represented in Seattle Public Schools, only about 19% of the educator workforce in Seattle Public School represents them.

And so what we're dedicated to doing is pursuing a direct contract with Seattle Public Schools and with community-based organizations.

What we have found to be true is that students that are pursuing education degrees and education careers, a lot of what happens for them is, one, they just don't know how to navigate.

They don't know how to get into those programs.

And so we're looking at building a tiered approach for students that, for current practitioners that are in there, instructional aides that need an AA, we have a pathway for them.

For those that need a BA, a bachelor's degree, we have a pathway for them.

And for those that need a master's degree, we have a pathway for them.

So we're really honing in on building that skill set.

We're expanding on our class to cert program that's existing, that's been successful for us across the way.

And what we're really focusing is on funding an FTE that's going out to the schools and targeting students and being able to identify, excuse me, not students, current practitioners in the schools and targeting those that are multilingual and aspire to become future educators and advance their careers.

So we'll be providing tuition assistance And I call it culturally responsive retention support because what we know is that for people of color that are in teaching and education professions, there's this invisible tax of being the know-it-all of diversity once you're in those schools that are predominantly white.

And so we want to be able to provide that identity development for future teachers as well as their teacher education development.

We also have embedded in their mentoring opportunities and coaching and professional development opportunities in line with existing Seattle Public School efforts.

Great.

I just want to take a quick little pause.

So we have some special guests in the audience this morning.

So we have students who have just walked in from the TOPS K through 8 school, which is located in East Lake.

So hi, everybody.

How are you doing?

They're here touring City Hall learning a little bit more about how city government works.

It just so happens that we are having a presentation about investments that the City of Seattle makes in your education through our levy programs.

So really excited to have you all visiting us at City Hall and really excited that you can pop in for just a moment.

to hear about some of the work that we're doing here at the city to invest in your success and your future.

And what we're hearing about now is how the city wants to make sure that your teachers are more diverse, meaning that they look and represent you culturally and linguistically, and really excited about being able to to work on those issues.

So I don't know if anybody else from either the school district or DO wanna give some welcoming remarks to our guests.

Sure.

I mean, I always love...

Director Chappelle never misses an opportunity.

I want to congratulate you all for taking this opportunity to come down and learn about City Hall and the government.

You guys will be extremely impressed with what you see.

We have two amazing council members up here that are passionate about education.

that are making sure that, as she mentioned, that not only teachers represent that look like you, but also that we are supplementing and complementing the work that you all, the services that you need within school in order to be successful.

So looking forward to learning more about what you guys are doing.

And when you get to high school, just know that you will have two free years of college paid for, despite whatever high school you go to.

So really encourage you to take advantage of that opportunity.

But welcome to City Hall.

Well said.

Thank you all.

Let's have a round of applause for the students.

I apologize for the interruption.

It will not count towards your presentation time.

That's all right.

That's all right.

Well, that was perfect, because we were actually concluding on this slide.

Is there any questions that?

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Okay, so what I'll take us through quickly are our K-12 and school health.

You'll see what the goal is.

Ultimately, we want to make sure that our health investments are giving kids an opportunity to have access and utilize physical and mental health services that's going to support their learning.

You'll see our outcomes up here.

We're making sure that where race-based opportunity gaps are closed, we want to make sure students are healthy and ready to learn.

We also want to make sure that our teen health clinics, I'm sorry, student-based health centers are evidence-based and provide high quality and culturally responsive equitable care.

And most importantly, we want to make sure that the providers implement a best practice role of a model of medical and mental health care, which is extremely important to our young people in schools.

We have four strategies that we're focusing on throughout the healthcare.

I won't go too much into them, but you'll see, as I just mentioned, as far as the school-based health centers, the two strategies below are very important to the success of the schools.

We also are looking at, while I'm talking about school-based health centers, we're looking at providing some seed funding for, excuse me, we're looking at expanding into three new health, three schools next year, Meany Middle School, Robert Eagle Staff, and Lincoln High School.

Those are the three new schools that we're looking at expanding student-based health clinics to.

We also have some seed funding for NOVA, that we're working right now with NOVA and providers to see how we can provide support there.

I wanted to touch base on that.

We also provide support or additional services for school nursing.

We wanna make sure that it's compliant with the state and students have an opportunity for immunization shots.

My favorite, I always have a favorite in all of these, but my favorite is the oral health one.

And I keep reflecting back as the high school principal, I remember certain parts of the day, the dental bus would pull up.

I hope I'm using the correct term for it.

but the dental bus will pull up at the parking lot, and students would be able to run out, receive services.

We're definitely gonna continue that strategy.

And then, the last one, health systems enhancement is opportunity for professional development for medical and mental health providers.

And we're also providing a little bit more web-based mental health monitoring and feedback.

So that is just a high-level overview of our K-12 health funded strategy.

We're super excited about them.

And my last slide, really, I just wanted to highlight to you all and the community and folks in Seattle, our upcoming events.

We have a community outreach event later this evening at the Youngstown.

We'll be co-hosting that with arts, and then we'll have a few more throughout the other districts.

We'll have one on the 19th at Magnolia Library, and then we'll close with...

the one at the University Heights coming up in March.

So I just wanted to share this, and hopefully folks will come out and join us and learn about all the work that we're doing.

Great.

Council Member Johnson.

Can you go back one slide, Director Chappelle?

Sarah, I wonder if you might just talk a little bit about those oral health investments that Duane was referencing.

Obviously, school nursing and school-based health centers are very focused on the building, whereas, as he so rightly pointed out, our dental and oral health care as a roving facility.

How do we choose where it roves to and when it's there?

So the funding for dental services was awarded in the last levy, as you might remember, to Neighbor Care Health.

And they have been refining and developing that model over the last seven years and really honing in on how they're approaching and partnering with each of the schools that they're in.

The support that the levy provides to them allows them, based on capacity, to serve about 10 of our existing school-based health centers.

So I want to be clear that Not everybody is served by levy dental service, but the mobile van that Director Chappelle mentioned is actually operated by ICHS, another provider with a different set of funding.

So they're also serving and providing dental care to all of our students in Seattle schools, those that have school-based health centers, but that is not levy funded.

So partially it's about a decision around who does what service in what areas.

and the partnering organizations and the school-based health center provider sponsors in terms of how NeighborCare has chosen to do that.

But all of the schools that have school-based health centers have access to direct dental care on site.

That's great.

Okay.

All right.

If there's no other questions, before we close, I just wanted to also thank Michael Stone for coming up here, being with us at the table.

SPS worked with Michael for many times.

So I just want to thank you for coming up.

Okay, so I don't think there's any other questions.

I want to thank you all for the work that you've done to get us to this point and I think you've given us a lot to think about and consider and we're excited about digging into this body of work with the assistance of central staff to really make sure that we get this implementation and evaluation plan correctly.

I know that it has gone through the Levy Oversight Committee and that we have a letter from them giving us an indication of some of the things that they'd like us to continue to work through as we go down the path of our legislative process.

So I'm really excited about the opportunity to take those recommendations into consideration and to continue to work with the department and with our partners at the Seattle Public School District and with our partners at the Seattle and King County Public Health and Seattle Colleges to make sure that we are all on the same page.

So really quickly in terms of process, we will take up this topic of the implementation and evaluation plan again on March 27th.

At 9 30 a.m.

Here in council chambers that will be an opportunity for Council members to hear from our central staff around a variety of issues that they have begun to identify In some part at my direction another part at their in their own due diligence of the evaluation of the implementation and evaluation plan and We will then expect council members to submit any potential amendments to the proposed implementation evaluation plan to central staff by no later than April 2nd, 2019. We will then have a special committee hearing of this committee on April 18th.

at 2 p.m.

where we will consider any amendments to the implementation and evaluation plan and potentially vote on those amendments.

We will also hear from Deal about the partnership agreements with our various partners who we work with to do this work.

and have a possible vote on those partnership agreements if we're ready to do so.

And it's my hope that we will be able to get the entire implementation evaluation plan as amended to full council by April 22nd of 2019. So I really appreciate your flexibility and understanding and needing to have a slightly modified committee schedule for consideration of this.

I had some family commitments come up the week of April 8th.

So I really appreciate your all's flexibility in helping me fulfill those family commitments by being willing to have this work get done just slightly later than we had anticipated.

So I appreciate that.

All right.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you.

Okay, we are gonna hear from our, God, we are like right on time.

This is amazing.

So we're gonna hear from our second presentation here.

Thank you so much for being here.

We're gonna hear from the Seattle Police Department now.

So Roxanna is gonna cue up the presentation and I'm gonna ask, there you are.

Hi, Chris.

Thank you for, it doesn't matter where we wanna be.

You didn't come with an entourage today, it's just you.

All right, Roxanna, you wanna read this item into the agenda and then we'll go ahead and do introductions and then Chris will hand it over to you and you can walk us through your presentation.

Agenda item two, Seattle Police Department shots fired data and gun violence response for briefing and discussion.

Awesome.

Thank you, Roxanna.

And why don't we go ahead and have you introduce yourself for the record, Mr. Fisher, and then we'll go and dig in.

Thank you.

Good morning, Madam Chair, Councilmember Johnson.

Thanks for inviting the department to be here today to discuss this important topic of gun violence and what SPD is doing in partnership with our other city agencies and the community to reduce these incidents.

My name is Christopher Fisher.

I'm the Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives for the Seattle Police Department.

In this role, I lead the department's data analytic efforts as well as our research and policy engagements.

Thank you so much.

I'm really excited to have you here with us this morning.

This is something that I have developed somewhat of a tradition of doing in this committee since I've been the chair of public safety is inviting the Seattle Police Department to come into committee and just give us a sense of where some of these incidents are occurring and then also give us and the public a general sense of how the department is addressing some of these issues.

We understand that gun violence is not just a issue of public safety, it's a public health reality, and the city of Seattle, in partnership with the police department, has really taken a public health approach to a lot of, to gun violence in general.

And so really want to be aware that today's presentation is not necessarily seen squarely through that holistic filter, but it is an opportunity for us as policymakers to get a sense from the police department in terms of where some of these issues are occurring throughout the city to give us, you know, a better, a set of data that we can rely on in terms of considering approaches for meeting the safety needs of our community members.

So I really appreciate you being here.

Thank you.

Just go ahead and get started?

Yes, please.

Great.

So to begin with, in 2018, we actually saw some very positive results from both the ongoing prevention and engagement efforts that the department, you know, in these public health perspectives that you just mentioned, and some of our enforcement actions during prior years really paid off.

Specifically, as you can see on this slide, 2018, we actually had the second lowest year in terms of shots fired since we began tracking these data this way since 2012, which Overall, that means we had 13% fewer reports of shots fired in 2018 compared to 2017. Additionally, it was actually the third lowest year for fatal shootings.

So what this data is looking at, it includes shots fired, which is when there's a report If someone heard shots fired and either there's an eyewitness or there's evidence of property damage or shell casings are found.

If someone says I think I heard gunshots and we go to the scene and there's no evidence, there's no eyewitness, that doesn't count.

There's also then showing non-fatal shootings where someone is injured as a result of gunfire but is not killed and then the fatal shootings are those where it is a homicide as a result of a firearm.

We do not include in here self-inflicted, suicide, or officer-involved shootings.

These are the criminal incidents when we talk about shootings and shots fired.

But Chris, the department does track those incidents where somebody is using a weapon to free their self-infliction or otherwise.

Yes.

We just don't include it in our shots fired because the intervention and the response is much different.

Additionally, it was also the third highest year for non-fatal shootings, which in a way, it's a good trade-off.

It was not a high year for people being killed.

There were people who were hit and saved.

And we attribute a lot of this, as you look at research around the country, to the ever-improving trauma responses, especially at a place like Harborview.

It's one of the standouts.

But cities around the country, there was a lot of change in the survivability of gunshot wounds, especially following some of the sort of the military engagements over the past decade or so, a lot of improvement in the technology to help people if they have been shot.

So that's one thing, when people are getting shot, fewer people are being killed.

A lot of that goes to the great surgeons and others at Harborview.

And it's also important to note, it's on a later slide and we'll get there, but in 2018, SPD also recovered about 10% more firearms.

from the street.

Now that includes a wide range, that people voluntarily, you know, a parent or relative died and you don't want it, they had a collection and you don't want to deal with them and you turn them in.

It also includes finding them, finding them involved in criminal incidents, but we did we recovered just over 1,400 firearms were turned in or taken by the department.

So it was an increase.

And I think anytime we have fewer guns that could potentially be illegally used out on the streets, that helps contribute to the reduction we saw in the shots fired.

And then another thing that's on this slide, and it's a little hard to see, one thing I would offer to you, Madam Chair, or any of your colleagues, it's easier to do this sort of briefing across the street in the department behind our security firewall, because we could drill into this.

A PowerPoint is not the best way to zoom in on where stuff is happening at the neighborhood level, but we gave it our best shot here.

And if you are looking at it, you know, live and not on the screen, you can zoom a little bit onto the PowerPoint.

But we tried to look at where things happening geographically because we heard that request from your office.

And we looked at this over the past seven years.

That's what that sort of heat chart on the left and the map on the right are showing is those are the top 15 neighborhoods across the seven years if you total them up.

And the important thing really to note here is that while year to year you might see some variation in who's in the top, generally Rainier Beach, the Central District, Brighton, Dunlap, and Rainier View are all consistently sort of in that top decile.

of our micro-community policing plan neighborhoods, which is what these neighborhood names come from.

They're 57, 58, depending on how the community feels from any one year to the next about how they want to organize themselves.

But generally, those four or five are somewhere in that top 10. And consistently, when you go across the seven years, you see Rainier Beach is number one.

with shots from the central area and the ones I just named.

But thanks to a lot of concerted efforts to address, in some of these neighborhoods, gang-related violence.

In some neighborhoods, sort of ongoing feuds between people who I wouldn't call it gang.

territorial group, you know, whatever language you want to use, but not sort of the formal definition of a gang, just disputes going back and forth, and a lot of working with communities in some neighborhoods we'll talk about in a little bit, have seen from the highs of 14 and 15, they've all experienced generally a trend down in terms of how they're experiencing occurrences or reported occurrences of gun violence.

And we know there's more work to be done, but most of these neighborhoods seem to be on the right track.

You can see in these data an uptick in the Madrona Square Park area.

If you could drill down on this, what you would see is a lot of that happens on the boundary.

of the Central District and Madrona, and which is an artificial boundary.

In the MCPP process, we had to pick, really a lot of these boundaries are defined by where census blocks end.

It's just a way to help with GIS, geospatial mapping, is to keep things all on the same level.

And so if you moved that boundary down a block or two, or up rather north a block or two, they would be in the CD.

Here they're in Madrona, but it's that area.

So I wouldn't get too hung up on a particular neighborhood is up or down.

We know by drilling in, it's an area of the city.

It's just the way we were aggregated out by neighborhood shows that there was an increase in the Madrona MCPP, but it's really right on that border between them and the CD.

Got it.

Christopher, in terms of this data, I know that the police department has made a lot of progress in making a lot of its data very public and accessible.

So is this shots fired by neighborhood map, is that a widget on your website that people can access, for lack of a better term?

Or how do members of the public who have interest in drilling into their particular neighborhood, how are they able to do that?

So right now this is only an internal dashboard and the reason for that is this is not natively coming out of our record system.

A detective every week reviews all the incidents that could likely have involved gun violence or the use of a firearm, and she reviews them and codes them and tracks our quote-unquote shots fired.

At the end of this month, we're launching our new record management system, thanks to a lot of support from the council and the city, and that's gonna make it more active and live, so it's not gonna be so dependent on this weekly review and updating of it.

Our plan and hope is to swap this out to be a public version.

It won't be as detailed as most of our public-private sort of internal-external dashboards, because we don't want people to drill down and know this happened at that house, you know, for privacy reasons.

But we do want to have the shots fired publicly.

Right now, they're inherently in the homicide and assault data.

If someone was hit, just the criminal shots fired It would be hard to find in our public crime dashboard, but we do want to have a public version of the shots fired because we do know people want to see this.

It was just right now it was hard to feed that system from this manual process, but moving forward we'll be able to.

And I appreciate that because one of the things that we've been talking to the department about is getting this more specific shots fired by neighborhood map.

because it's a question we get a lot from constituents in terms of, well, where are these things happening?

And in the past when we've done these presentations, it's been done through a citywide lens as opposed to really getting into the granular detail of where are we seeing some of the trends occurring over a long period of time.

And I think this is a much more helpful tool for us as policymakers looking at public safety, public health investments to address the trauma of gun violence and trying to figure out how we can get further upstream to prevent these things from occurring is an absolute priority for us.

And then I think a lot of, you know, sort of more public safety oriented folks really have interest in this information to see how well the city is responding to those particular needs as well.

So I appreciate you all taking the time that It requires to really drill into some of the data to generate this kind of mapping because I think it'll be really, really useful in the future.

Additionally, one other point to note from this slide is you can see, if you looked at it in a slightly clearer version, that both the Northgate and South Park MCPP neighborhoods have actually sort of gone against that trend of coming down from 14 and 15. But through some really concerted efforts, specifically in South Park, I think a lot of leadership from you, Madam Chair, and from Councilmember Herbold, who makes sure that we hear from that neighborhood a lot when they have concerns.

I think working with that community, with the Southwest Precinct Command, and with our Collaborative Policing Bureau, who does a lot of work through community engagement and youth engagement in the neighborhood, South Park has actually really seen in the past year a great reduction.

A lot of that was addressing some problem locations that were consistently experiencing gun violence, and a lot of work from across the city and the law department and a bunch of folks helping to address those locations.

But we've seen a turnaround there in South Park.

I think we're continuing to focus on what can happen around the Northgate area.

There is a different type of issue, but that is definitely on our radar that those are two neighborhoods who saw slight upticks in 16 and 17, and we're really trying to turn that back down.

Council Member Johnson.

Chris, can you speak just a little bit to the Beacon Hill as part of that too?

It looks like we're having a lot of just sort of similar issues in Beacon Hill, but whether that's mid Beacon Hill or North Beacon Hill and kind of toggling back and forth, if you will, between the locations.

Are we seeing success of similar micro policing in one neighborhood and we're just kind of chasing it to a different part of Beacon Hill and then chasing it back?

Talk to me a little bit about what's going on there.

I can't say specifically for that neighborhood.

I'd have to talk to the folks on the ground about what the dynamic is in that specific area.

But I do know generally from the research, you don't tend to displace gun violence.

This type of violence tends to be associated with a location that is attracting.

So a feud with where someone lives or a block that someone quote unquote feels they own or control.

Most of what My memory, and this isn't a sort of an operational perspective, but in the Beacon Hill area, it has been, there was one or two houses where there was some consistent involvement.

And we've tried to address that.

And I know we've heard from community members about some of those locations.

But I'd have to get back to you after talking to folks probably in investigations about what they really think is the issue there.

Thanks.

All right.

So speaking of other neighborhood information, this is something that actually in one of our most recent hearings with you, there's a lot of discussion about wanting information from the council district perspective.

This is now on our general crime map up on the public data.

you can see the major crimes by council district.

And so here on the left, we just looked at the past two full years of shots fired by council district.

Just for that perspective, the darker the green, the more frequent the report of shots fired over those two years.

And then so people could see really within that, if you sort of could overlay them in a and a transparency.

On the right is the more traditional hotspot or density maps where as you go from blue to yellow to red, red is where the most frequent across those two years.

And really what we see here is, you know, if you added more years on, it would really just sort of get noisier.

You'd see more distribution of dots across the map, but those hotspots would be pretty persistent.

Up and down MLK, along 23rd and Union for those two years.

South Park definitely popped, but it's quieted back down.

And then around the Chinatown ID, Pioneer Square, also in the past year or two, in those two years, a spike in terms of density overall.

You don't see here, but it doesn't rise to the density analysis, but you can see visually there is a little bit of a concentration along Aurora, if you follow that straight line dividing those MCPPs, and along Lake City Way, and a small little cluster in the U District, which are all things that we're really aware of, that we have seen a little uptick in those areas.

And there are operational plans in place trying to address what has been driving that.

Some of it has been just completely, for lack of a better phrase, random luck that they've happened in the same neighbor.

There hasn't been any sense that there was a particular reason why it was happening in that area.

But other attractors of crime can sometimes bring with them also gun crime.

That was the point from this slide.

I just want to see if you have any questions before moving on.

I don't think we have any questions on this one.

Thank you.

So in slide three, we took a look at last year, 2019, the demographics of those who were involved in these incidents, be they known victims or known suspects.

And so we had 79 incidents in 2018 where someone was injured by a gun or killed.

And demographics for, we have demographic information on 84 of the victims and 103 suspects at the time of the incident.

Since some of these data were pulled, obviously investigations may have uncovered more, but this is what we had when we started pulling these data.

And generally, regardless of the year that you look at, if we had done this for 17 and 18, the scale would be different, but not the pattern.

Victims are split between being young adults, sort of in that 18 to 29, and then the middle age bracket of 30 to 49. Suspects, when we know who they are, they are definitely trending younger on that 18 to 29. That's not unique to Seattle.

When you see nationally who tends to be involved in gun violence for a variety of reasons, it is that 18 to 24, 25, 29 age group.

But we see that play out here.

And obviously, a good number of unknown suspects, which is always something we're trying to drive down.

Victims and suspects are predominantly male, also not a surprise when you look at local and national data.

And the racial demographics are actually sort of proportionally fairly close.

There are a few categories if you turn those numbers into percentages of totals or percentages of the columns where they'd be off 3 to 5 percent, but generally the demographics of who is being, the subject of a victimization through gun violence or who's inflicting it, the demographics are fairly similar.

And is it your sense that that's consistent with sort of the national regional trends as well?

I think it depends.

Some places it's you're going to see a much different makeup just because of who lives there.

Yeah.

Right.

But there's nothing startling.

There are troubling things but nothing startling.

I'm not surprised by the data.

These are things we all are obviously working with all of our partners to address sort of the disparity in the victimization and the suspects, but it's not something that is out of the ordinary when you look at national data.

And I think data like this is really helpful for us to get a better understanding of what kind of programs we need to be investing in on the community-based side to make sure that we are supporting interventions that are squarely focusing on younger male and folks of color to really be able to interrupt some of the violence that we're seeing happening within our communities that are also inflicted within our communities.

Right.

And as you said earlier, Madam Chair, so much of that, not a law enforcement.

It's a symptom of broader disparities on a whole variety of factors.

And then this slide is really just to give sort of an update of how is 2019 looking so far.

So we actually pulled this to get this ready through last week's update, but it actually has been, there's a little bit, I have the numbers from this week that they're not on here.

But we do know that January of this year was up a little bit from January of last year.

Last year was fairly quiet January.

This year upticked a little bit, but then definitely came back down in February.

I attribute a lot of that to the great work of the department.

I also say we had some really interesting weather in February, which probably didn't hurt the case.

I know lots of cities, when you have extreme weather, can play out that way.

I know Chicago, when they had that super cold snap, had very little anything, you know, when it was like negative 20 there, they had a pretty quiet week.

Everybody stayed home.

But definitely, February definitely came down.

And so I know through this week, we're actually, we have 47, this is 41, that was last week.

This week through Monday, we had 47 compared to 43 in 2018. So the gap got smaller.

So definitely, we're trending fairly close to the sort of close to record year we had last year in terms of recent lows.

So I think things are continuing to look good.

in terms of where the incidents are occurring and from geographically just looking at where the dots are and the only thing that we've really noticed that's unusual in these trends is a little bit of an uptick in the number of incidents around the U District and that MCPP.

The, you know, the continued issues around basic sort of down MLK in the Rainier area and along 23rd and Union, as we've seen in the presentation, that is historically where we have the gun violence.

Very little in the southwest precinct, and I think just one in South Park.

But the small little cluster around the U District, no real, I wouldn't definitively say no real connection without having someone from investigations here, but from my knowledge, it is more sort of not an ongoing issue, but sort of one-off issues that they're very aware of.

And then I know we're going to get to the sort of what's the department doing here to respond to this, but, and, you know, I just want to recognize that we of course want to be able to live in a community where these numbers are pretty close to zero.

So, you know, even one death as a result of gun violence is too much and absolutely preventable.

And so we, obviously want to get to a point where we see much smaller, smaller numbers than what we have here.

But why don't you, so I recognize that these numbers are important and significant because it's somebody's life that's being impacted as a result of COVID.

of gun violence, but really want to acknowledge that Seattle is a little bit of an outlier in the sense that as compared to other major metropolitan cities like ours, we fare much better in terms of this particular issue than others.

And maybe you can talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, I would just say whenever we're at sort of national policing conferences or any sort of analytic get-togethers.

A different kind of nerd cam than the ones we go to.

Yeah, exactly.

And I know folks on my team have gone and done sort of trainings of the work that we do really around these dashboards and the great analytics that the team does.

And they'll show sort of the shots fired map.

And they'll be like, wait, that's for a whole year?

Or like, wait, and then they'll say, how many homicides did you all have?

depending on the year, you know, anywhere from 20 to 30, and they wait for the whole year.

So I do think through a variety of reasons, I think from a very strong and involved community, from a department that tries to keep a connection to be able to hear what's going on on the ground, through some really good, you know, legislation and regulations around the gun access and storage and other issues, and just around a lot of, I think, the perspective that the city's taken from that public health perspective that we are, very fortunate to not have, I think, equal to a lot of our sister cities that are our size and sort of our dynamic, the level of gun violence that they do have.

And as you said, you know, any of it is too much.

But I think through a variety of factors, we are definitely on the middle to low end of the person crime in general, but definitely on the gun crime specifically.

Yeah, and I think that that's a big testament to the ecosystem we've been able to create, not just in the city of Seattle, but as a county as well.

We have strong partners in this space with King County, our King County Council and King County Executive, Dow Constantine, all very, very strong partners in making sure that we're looking at this as a regional issue, because when we dig into these numbers and the reasons why a lot of this gun violence is occurring and who is committing it, oftentimes it is from throughout the region and outside of the literal borders of the city of Seattle.

Of course, we do a lot of public health work through our Seattle-King County Public Health to really, again, build an ecosystem regionally and throughout the state to to really make sure that we're pushing and pulling all of the different levers that we need to in order to reduce gun violence as much as possible within our communities.

So really proud of a lot of the work that we've been able to do around extreme risk protection orders and being experimental in that space and and innovative in that space in a way that is really creating an impact.

We, on our legislative agenda for the state and the federal government every year, have a suite of priorities related to sensible gun reform laws and safety legislation.

Here at the City of Seattle, we've done a lot of work through this committee and through and through prior iterations of this committee on sensible local laws related to firearms and excited to continue to explore other potential opportunities this year in that space as well and really just appreciate the department's willingness and change in mentality around making sure that we are utilizing a public health lens to address this issue and I think that All of those things combined together with investments in community-based organizations who are trusted allies in this work as well, I think all of that together results in an environment where we can have some of our counterpart cities sort of stand in awe at how how relatively speaking few shots fired we have in our city as compared to other major urban areas.

So I want to thank the department for that work.

Councilmember Johnson?

Thanks.

I was going to ask a question, Chris, about the U District itself.

You mentioned and the chart shows that we've seen a higher than usual amount of shots fired in the U District.

At what point does the department take that data and realize that that trend looks like it's going to continue, that it's not, in your words, sort of a one-off, but instead is something else broader that's happening in the neighborhood?

At what point do we see that shift happen, and what are some of the strategies that the department then uses in order to decrease incidents?

Yeah, so I mean, we look at this data, you know, this is on our dashboards, the shots fired gets updated every week.

But anytime there's a shots fired, there's a significant incident report that goes out to command staff and captains.

So people know when stuff's happening, and then it sees that every two weeks.

that's definitely going to be, if there's been a homicide, a shot's fired in your precinct as the captain, you're going to, you know, you're going to get asked about it.

What do you know about it?

You're going to ask investigation.

What's going on there?

Is it part of the trend?

So, I mean, the department takes, you know, any issue of the legal use of a firearm sort of at the top priority.

And that gets brought up consistently in between, but definitely at the CSTAT management meetings where the precinct captain is going to brief on what he or she knows.

And then investigations will say, you know, is this part of a trend?

Do we think this is something that there's going to be retaliation?

Do we need to put in something to quiet it down?

Is there a problem location that we need?

You know, they're dealing drugs and that's attracting the violence and we need to shut that down.

So, we always have that problem-solving conversation.

It doesn't take the third shot's fired.

I think every time, you know, there's going to be a different way to if it was someone heard it and then we found the shell casing and there was no property damage, no one was hurt, there was maybe someone fired stupidly into the air or whatever, that's going to have different than if, you know, a bullet goes into someone's house or someone gets hit or that's going to obviously get a little bit more of an impetus right then and there, but even if there is, in that weekly review of the data that seems like, hey, we are trending, we're having a lot of, even if no one's getting hit or property damaged of shots fired in a neighborhood, that's going to come up in CSTAT and it's going to kick off that problem-solving conversation around what's going on here, what can we do to quiet it down.

And we also routinely quickly then hear from any community, like, you know, hey, we're not used to hearing this, or we do hear these, but they seem to be happening more frequently.

And that stuff normally comes straight to the chief and to the precinct commander, and that kicks off its own series of events as well.

It would just be helpful for me to have a follow-up conversation about what some of those answers have been in response to the first three months of the year and a higher density in the university district.

So I'd love a follow-up conversation about it.

Speaking of responses, so quickly to run through sort of what we're currently doing, both sort of longstanding and recently new, and then what is sort of on the horizon.

Speaking from the perspective of, you know, it's a public health issue as well as we're not going to be able to solve this without the community support.

A lot of our efforts are really focused around community engagement and how they're both can be advocates for us, they can help solve the problem, and also in times when we need the support and the trust, they provide us the information to get that dangerous weapon and person using it off the street.

So, through a variety of the task forces that the city has, we are, you know, the department makes use of Alive and Free, which generally, for those who don't know what that is, it is in the model of sort of ceasefire of violence interrupters.

It's get out on the street when we know there's a conflict going on and let trusted community members try to tamp down the temperature, get people to put the guns down.

That model has worked across cities.

in the country in terms of helping to control gun violence.

We routinely partner with the U.S.

Attorney's Office, who is the vehicle for the Project Safe Neighborhood funds from the federal government.

generally are working with them and the Department of Correction to focus on folks coming out of DOC who are high risk and known to participate in gun violence or are thought to be on the route to potentially engaging in violence and try to do a lot of sort of custom notification or direct deterrence talking to them.

This is very much along the lines of the work that David Kennedy and others do around You know, we know you're here, we can get you services, we can hook you up with access to jobs and treatment and like, but if you use a gun, we know you're one of the folks who's going to be using a gun if it happens in this neighborhood and we're going to come, you're going to be early on the list of the people we come and talk to.

So make a choice here.

We can help you or we can keep our eyes out for you if violence does happen.

We work with the United Black Christian Clergy and Seattle Link, the comprehensive gang model, to really bring in all the other resources to, really on those ends, it's a lot of focus on getting, preventing people from going into that life, so to speak, to getting involved in gun violence.

We're a big participant in the Our Best initiative in terms of a very robust mentoring campaign, and then the Youth Opportunities Initiative.

From a crime-fighting perspective, More traditional, we are a member of the Regional Gun Crime Task Force, which is our model of the best practice National Crime Gun Intelligence Center.

So basically that just means we participate with all of our regional partners and when we find a gun, you know, an illegally used gun or shell casings, we enter that information into the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network.

to see, you know, is, has this, has the gun that we have or the gun that fired the shell casing we have, has it been used in other incidents?

And that allows us to start linking cases, connecting and solving more cases of this incident.

The same gun was used in this same incident and starting to build that picture of where, how are guns moving around the community and how are potential offenders working around the community.

In 2018, we had 237 new hits in that system and 123 of those linked to SPD cases where we had evidence in one of our cases that matched up with the Niven evidence.

And then in 2018, actually half, about half of our shots fired incidents, that gun that produced the shell casing, was linked to a Nioban hit.

So participating in this really adds the information to the work that our investigators do to try to figure out who's pulling the trigger, where are the guns coming from, and who's using them.

And then as you mentioned, a lot of great work in this past year through the Red Flag Law, the ERPO, the Extreme Risk Protection Order, and the Domestic Violence Protection Order teams.

In 2018, the ERPO team assessed 80 incidents or individuals They did 32 ERPO petitions, 29 of those, they were granted a full ERPO and have seized, in 2018, they seized 79 firearms from 27 individuals.

And then the domestic violence team recovered 137 firearms in 2018. Most of those are, that's voluntary compliance.

They've been told you have to turn over your weapons and the person does.

The ERPOs are obviously a different situation where somebody is at risk of harming themselves or others and we go in and seize them, all under due process, all through a judge.

But we, at some of those national meetings, we've had a lot of cities very interested in this ERPA work that we're doing, and it's definitely expanding across the country, and a lot of folks are looking to Seattle for how is this working, what lessons have you learned.

So, you know, I think the team here has done excellent work, and people are definitely interested in talking to them and see how that's working.

Yeah, they're doing fantastic work, and when you look at the numbers that you're putting up there, there's 79 firearms seized from 27 individuals.

My colleague over here, who's much better at math than I am, did the division, and that's about, that's an average of three firearms per individual, although I'm sure that's not- One was a substantial cash, yeah.

Yeah, I recall seeing some coverage of- Yeah, there was a story of that.

Yeah, there was a story of one that had, a significant portion of those on one person.

So this is, I mean, we know that most victims of gun violence and death in particular are in the arena of domestic violence.

And so I just, it's really important for us to continue to highlight the work that we're doing here and to support this work of the police department to recover those firearms and get them out of hands of really dangerous, volatile situations.

But of all the information that I've seen, that is the area where, regrettably, firearms are used most successfully, meaning that somebody actually is murdered in that context if there is a firearm being used.

So really trending in the right direction in terms of getting those firearms out of those volatile situations.

Yes, and we've been as part of this speaking with our federal representatives because there's a potential bipartisan bill.

I think it was part of the omnibus and it might still be getting worked out about sort of incentivizing jurisdictions to do this across the country by giving them support for these teams.

And we pointed out that we did this team with no support.

So how about, you know, don't just incentivize those who don't do it, reward those who've already done a little bit.

So hopefully they'll find a way throw a little a little support because that was something where we had to we pulled folks for a very good reason to form this team but they're they're not doing other stuff now so yeah getting a little support from the feds if they're gonna give support to other people would be great and then some other things we're continuing to do we have the ongoing collaboration with the King County Prosecutor's Office where their analysts are working with all the other police departments so they can track shots fired like we do for the city they track it for the whole county We work with Harborview Injury Prevention, Dr. Ali, and others around sort of hospital-based interventions.

Obviously, the chief is the rulemaking authority for the new safe storage law that the Mayor Durkan and the council moved forward and got into place.

And we're also going to be working to evaluate sort of how does that work.

We're working with the Washington DOC as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods and just other ongoing work to really outreach to high-risk offenders who have been known to use guns in the area.

And just an important point to note out is that the department, the investigators, I think from that trust that a lot of them have built with the community, we really have generally an above average clearance rate for homicide.

Nationally, the clearance rate for everything, but particularly homicides over the past 10 to 15 years, has sort of consistently trailed down.

If you look over our past nine years, our average is at 68%.

We've been some years at 90. I think we had one year that was 47, I think, if I remember correctly, that pulls that average down.

But generally, we are far above the national average of 60%.

which I think just speaks to the great work and relationships that our investigators have.

And then stuff that's sort of on the horizon, the Arnold Ventures, formerly the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, recently partnered with RAND to launch the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, and they're doing, I believe, three rounds of giving away $50 million.

to on seven, I think there's seven different research tracks.

And we had four research teams ask us if we would be partners with them on some proposals.

And I know at least one of them has already been told to proceed with stage two of putting together a formal proposal, and that was looking at the effect of ERBOs.

I think we're a prime place to generate knowledge in that area, so I hope that gets funded.

We continue to help with the Helping Individuals with Firearm Injuries Research Committee out of Harborview.

And we are also working with the Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility and Criminal Justice Researcher to do what a lot of other cities have done and look at our NIBIN trace data to develop a picture of where are our crime guns coming from and how are they being used.

And so we're working with them to sort of facilitate that relationship and get that report done.

So that's sort of stuff we're doing now.

That's great.

Any questions?

Well, Christopher, thank you so much for putting together a very thoughtful and thorough presentation.

I know that the department is increasingly data-driven, particularly in this space, so I really appreciate all of the work that you put into making sure that we and the general public have access to this information and really appreciate all the work the department continues to do to reduce gun violence as a good partner with community-based organizations and really look forward to hearing some good results out of some of this potential research work to identify other best practices to continue to see improvement in the number of gun violence incidents occurring in our city.

anything else customer Johnson okay great thank you so much for being with us that is the last item on our agenda and there is no more business before the committee so we are adjourned