SPEAKER_21

Sorry I guess it actually recessed at 4 18 p.m..

The board has recessed out of executive session and the special meeting of the board is reconvened at 4 19 p.m..

And there's no further business to come before the board in the special meeting.

So the special meeting is now adjourned at 4 19 p.m..

The board will convene for the regular board meeting.

I'm just going to say momentarily.

SPEAKER_99

you

SPEAKER_21

in just a moment.

SPS-TV will begin broadcasting.

For those joining us by phone please remain muted until we reach the testimony period and your name is called.

This is President Rankin.

I am now calling the March 20th 2024 regular board meeting to order at 4 23 p.m.

This meeting is being recorded and we acknowledge that we are on ancestral lands and traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish people.

Ms. Wilson-Jones the roll call please.

SPEAKER_19

Director Cron-Baron.

Director Muthuswamy.

SPEAKER_03

Present.

SPEAKER_19

Director Briggs.

Present.

Director Hersey.

Present.

Vice President Sarju.

Present.

Director Topp.

Director Topp is was here was here.

I'm sure we'll be back and President Rankin here.

SPEAKER_21

We will now go to Superintendent Jones for his comments.

Brent Jones

Thank you President Rankin, board members and audience.

Welcome, everyone.

Happy first day of full spring.

I don't know about you all, but I was definitely rejuvenated by the spring-like, summer-like weather, in fact.

Feeling rejuvenated and ready to tackle what's ahead.

I hope you all are feeling that level of energy and optimism that I do as well.

Before we get into some of the comments, some of my further comments, I want to have you all check out our latest edition of First Bell.

SPEAKER_01

I'm Keri Wheeler, the proud principal of Viewlands Elementary School.

SPEAKER_29

What's up, SBS?

I'm Maya Wilson.

And I'm Diego Jozo.

Thanks for tuning in to First Belt, where we chime in with news from around the district.

We're excited to bring you the news from our new school building.

This beautiful campus was funded by taxpayers through the Building Excellence Capital Levy.

We love our new school, and we want to thank everyone who voted for the levy.

Now we've got some awesome stories to share, so let's get into it!

SPEAKER_27

Photos, stuffed animals, and traditional clothing from around the world were just a few items Thornton Creek students displayed during the school's Art Fact Day.

The event bridges the gap between generations and cultures.

The tradition began after Principal Jared Kishner and community partner Dr. Donald Felder came up with the idea as a way for students to share more about themselves.

Part of Artifact Day is connecting students with their elders in their community.

Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors were invited to serve as listeners and help guide students in conversation about their items.

Dr. Felder called the event the best day of his educational experience.

SPEAKER_37

When we connect children to their history, their origin of language.

SPEAKER_28

During Career Week, counselors give students the opportunity to see themselves in different professions.

Guest speakers encourage them to explore their possibilities by diving into careers in public service, the arts, STEM, trades, and more.

SPEAKER_22

We stick an IV in your hand and we give you drugs.

SPEAKER_28

From military service woman and music executive, the school principals and screenwriters, BF Day counselor John Taylor and counseling intern Shelly Frappier.

SPEAKER_29

John Muir Elementary and Orchid K.A.

brought black families to campus for food, fun, and fellowship in honor of National African American Parent Involvement Day.

Mothers, fathers, guardians, and extended family came together with students and staff to celebrate black history, black culture, and parent involvement in their child's education.

At John Muir, the school hosted a career fair, and families had the opportunity to see firsthand what their children experienced and learned in the classroom.

We've got some quick important announcements, so get ready for the rundown.

SPEAKER_27

Applications for the 2024-2025 Seattle Preschool Program are now open.

SPEAKER_29

That's it for this episode.

Be sure to tune in next month because we've got some very special stories coming your way.

And before we go, we want to say congratulations to our friends at Viewlands and other students around the district who are competing in the Global Reading Challenge.

Good job!

To learn more about these stories, visit our website.

Until next time, I'm Maya Wilson.

And I'm Diego Angelo.

We'll catch you later for First Bell.

Brent Jones

That's first, Bill.

I want to talk about tonight in our budget work session.

We'll work together to ensure the continued success of SPS, to ensure we're supporting our students, our teachers, our community, and our city.

In that session, I'll be talking about our plans for balancing the budget for next year, our road to a system of well-resourced schools.

And together, we will work to envision, problem solve, and ensure the success of our beloved system.

I'm grateful for the dedication and expertise of our team as we work towards ensuring fiscal responsibility while meeting the needs of our students and staff.

I also want to recognize that we are joined tonight by many in the public who have had concerns about how budget reconciliation will impact staffing and student outcomes.

I want to give assurance that we are committed to making decisions that mitigate impacts to student experiences.

In recent weeks, our principals have been meeting with HR and budget staff to develop their budgets for the upcoming school year.

To those who have been actively participating in building leadership teams, we appreciate your involvement.

Your presence ensures that families and communities have a voice in their individual school budgets, and your contributions are invaluable to our decision-making process.

I want to acknowledge that there are challenging decisions ahead of us, and I hear your concerns, but please know we are carefully considering all perspectives as we navigate these complexities and strive to make decisions that are in the best interests of our students and our staff.

You know, despite these challenges that we may face, we are united in our shared goal of creating the conditions in which students thrive.

Together, I'm confident that we can overcome any obstacles and continue to provide a high quality education for all of our students.

I just want to thank everyone for their dedicated support.

And in closing, I'll hand it back to you, President Rankin.

SPEAKER_21

I will now turn it over to our student directors for comments.

Director Cron-Baron.

SPEAKER_41

Thank you President Rankin.

It's exciting to call you that.

I.

First of all, I want to thank everyone here tonight, especially those with concerns about impacts of budget decisions, because I share your concerns.

I feel those concerns.

I'm in the school building all day.

And this stress over how things that are shortfalls on on parts of bigger systems are going to impact our communities.

It's hard.

And I want you to know that I see you.

I'm with you.

And the reason I'm up here the reason I came wanted to be in this position is to be able to advocate for you for my community at SPS.

So thank you for being here.

Kind of on that note this month March is theater in our schools month.

If you know me personally, you know I'm super passionate about theater and about arts education in schools.

And bouncing back to when we were talking about budget, I think what's been really difficult for a lot of my peers who are also find so much passion and joy in arts programs at their schools is is a consistent fear and stress around their their programs being cut or sacrificed or.

diminished when we face these budget challenges.

In fact over the over the weekend I was at the Washington State Thespian Festival and we did a letter writing exercise.

So school board directors up here you may be receiving some letters not mean ones just very important.

I promise I.

Letters that really hold some very powerful stories about how arts changed lives of so many students.

And so I hope when those come, you will take some time to read them and think about them when we're in our decision-making processes.

Turning to a different point now, so just a couple weeks ago, There was a bill passed in the State House that was a parental rights bill when it came to children's education.

This was initiative 2 0 8 1. Unfortunately and really disappointingly to me as a student this Republican started and backed bill received widespread Democratic support especially as a student who has had has has accessed programs at my school like medical programs or teen health centers which would be directly affected by this bill which sorry I forgot to tell you what it does.

It gives parents right to access medical records of students.

It gives parents right to access what is currently confidential of you know if students have reached out to try to seek counseling mental health counseling at their schools.

I cannot stress enough how detrimental moments like these and bills like these are to the safety of our students to my safety at school to the safety specifically of our students who are survivors of sexual abuse to the students who are experiencing mental health issues and have an unsupportive space at home.

to trans and LGBTQ students who who seek support at schools when they don't have that support at home.

It is so vital that our schools are safe havens for our students no matter what their backgrounds are.

Our schools are places where people can seek out medical care when they need it.

It's it's you know.

It's just it's really hard to see things like this happen.

And so I I hope that as a school board as much as we can especially when things come into state law push to make sure we're always keeping the safety and well-being of our of our students in mind.

And yeah that's all I really have to talk about tonight and I'm going to hand it over to Ayush Director Muthuswamy sorry.

SPEAKER_03

is totally fine.

Thank you Director Cron Barone.

I want to take my time today to elevate some of the concerns I've been hearing from students I've been talking to over these last few weeks regarding the school board.

The board is the highest level governing body of this district and that means you make the highest level decisions for this district.

And with that it's easy to remove ourselves from the day to day function of the district and some of that is necessary.

It's it's impossible to run a district of our size if we divert our attention to every single instance an issue that pops up in the dozens of schools that we represent.

But when I talk to students over and over again one thing comes up and that's.

The question of how have I gone 12 years without knowing we had a school board.

How have I gone 12 years without knowing who my school board director is.

This board wants to hear from students.

I see that I know that I feel that and it goes without saying but students want to be heard.

But unless we actively engage with our students they will not actively engage with us.

We get a few amazing individuals who come here to these meetings and talk with us but that's just a snapshot of who this district is and our district's needs.

If you could give kids a name and ideally a face to put with that name I think you'll be surprised with how much they have to say how in tune they are with the issues that are facing our district.

That means showing up to schools, to basketball games, to musicals, and just being a person to them, not just a name on a website or a figure on the dice.

And when you do that, I think they'll be a person right back with you.

And they won't say what you want to hear, but they'll say what you need to hear.

And I know you all are incredibly hardworking and busy people, but that extra step, just to show up with no agenda, no goals in mind, just to talk and be a person goes an incredibly long way.

And with that I also wanted to give a shout out to all the seniors they're getting college decisions backs.

It's crazy.

It sucks but hang in there.

You're almost there.

It's on the home stretch and Ramadan Mubarak to all those observing.

That's all.

SPEAKER_21

All right.

Excuse me.

Thank you directors.

Moving along in the board comments section.

Let's see I need to time check.

Since it's 436 I'm going to suggest I'll do a couple of things and then let's move on to other business and we can come back to any further comments after that.

I'll say a couple of things I need to say now then we'll go for the audit report and then we can come back to the rest of board comments at the end of the meeting if that works for everybody.

OK.

So really happy announcement.

And I just found out about this.

So on behalf of the whole board to want to recognize with great pride.

And extend heartfelt congratulations to Dr. Jones on being honored with the prestigious UNCF 80th anniversary Outstanding Educational Leader of the Year award.

This recognition is a testament to his unwavering commitment to excellence and his visionary leadership of our school district especially as a son of Seattle schools I will say.

It's the United Negro College Fund right.

Yeah.

Oh I've been asked to.

It's not for some reason on here that's the United Negro College Fund is UNCF.

In navigating the precedent the unprecedented unprecedented challenges faced by our district.

Dr. Jones has exemplified resilience compassion and partnership.

So congratulations and thank you Dr. Jones.

We are grateful for your leadership and partnership.

You guys can clap again.

So quick work plan update for the board.

As I have mentioned previously the Washington State School Director Association has a time bound window where they accept platform revision proposals.

And I know we have many we have new directors we have to to be filled seats.

We also put forward four position proposals last year.

So I sent this information out to directors and did not receive indication that anybody had an issue they wanted to bring.

So we don't have a bar for that for this year which is fine.

There are probably years that there haven't been.

But if you in looking at the.

Standing WSSDA catalog of legislative and permanent positions if there's something that we want to put up to the WSSDA membership which is all the school board directors in the state for next year we would have to be ready to do that.

This is this is the time of year and we have to submit those.

SPEAKER_25

So yes.

SPEAKER_21

OK.

Moving on.

SPEAKER_25

President Rankin can I ask a quick question about that.

Is it officially too late now or do we or do we still have time.

SPEAKER_21

Well it's so it has so under the under new rules it has to be adopted by the board and submitted as a board.

So because of our meeting calendar we would have to be intro and action in the same meeting.

If you have something do you have something.

SPEAKER_25

No not at the moment.

SPEAKER_21

Oh OK.

I can't remember the platform.

Oh no.

Yeah.

The revision window closes April 8th.

So I guess yes.

OK.

Sorry I did that out loud.

OK so the board will be holding a forum changing topics.

The board is holding a forum for the eight finalists for school board director District 2 and District 4 positions.

We will be holding this forum on March 27th next week at Lincoln High School beginning at officially beginning at 6 p.m.

though candidates and directors will be asked to join us a little bit ahead of that.

The forum will be open to the public and streamed live on SPS TV so we invite the whole community to join us.

We are scheduled to appoint one person to each position during our April 3rd regular board meeting and then plan to hold the oath of office for our appointees on April 4th.

So I will do a legislative update and other things later.

So our other reports for tonight Director Briggs let's go to you for the announcement of recently completed audits.

SPEAKER_25

Thank you.

OK so board procedure 6 5 5 0 BP states that internal audit requires an announcement of completed internal audits as the Audit and Finance Committee chair.

I am announcing that at the March 5th quarterly audit meeting the Office of Internal Audit presented two internal audit reports one audit on contract data and another audit on the Webster school addition and modernization project.

All audit reports are discussed at a public audit meeting, and the completed reports are posted for public viewing on today's agenda and on the Office of Internal Audit Department website.

That's all I have.

SPEAKER_21

Thank you.

Yeah I will save legislative update.

I was in Washington D.C.

until less than 24 hours ago.

So I have local state and federal updates.

But because of time let's go now to public testimony.

Unless there's anything urgent.

No.

Board procedure 14 30 BP provides rules for testimony and I ask that speakers are respectful of these rules.

In summary we take testimony from.

Individuals called from a public testimony list and if applicable the waiting list all of which are included in today's agenda posting on the school board website.

Only those who are called by name should unmute their phones or step forward to the podium and only one person should speak at a time.

Listed speakers may cede their time to another person when the listed speakers name is called.

The total amount of time allowed will not exceed two minutes for the combined number of speakers and time will not be restarted after the new speaker begins.

The new speaker will not be called again later if they are on the testimony list or waiting list.

If you do not wish to have time ceded to you may decline and retain your place on the testimony or wait list.

The majority of speakers time should be spent on the topic you have indicated when signing up.

And we expect the same standard of civility for those participating in public comment as we expect of ourselves.

As board president I.

I have the right to and will interrupt any speaker who fails to observe the standard required by board procedure 14 30 BP.

And I will also just again remind and ask everyone to please stick to that two minute limit so that we can get through to everybody.

And I don't like cutting people off so don't make me.

So let's see staff will read off the testimony speakers.

SPEAKER_19

Good afternoon for those who are joining remotely to provide testimony when I call your name please make sure to unmute on the conference call line by pressing star six and also unmute on your device.

The first speaker today is going to be Chris Jackins.

Chris will be followed by Ashley Warner and then Kate Campbell.

SPEAKER_34

My name is Chris Jackins.

Box 8 4 0 6 3 Seattle 9 8 1 2 4. On district use of artificial intelligence or A.I.

Five points.

Number one the superintendent is promoting the use of artificial intelligence.

Number two the district announced a new tool for classrooms including a students.

student including access to a student's activity history after class.

Such surveillance is disrespectful towards students.

Number three screen based education did not work well for everyone during the COVID pandemic.

Number four one wants humans directly in the education loop.

Number five the school board needs to publicly discuss these issues before the superintendent and district implement AI tools and strategies on school closures.

Two points.

Number one the district has now explicitly said that there are no plans to close the recovery academy.

Number two the district is supposedly not yet going forward with school closures but in doing this public relations dance the public can see the district's feet moving below the curtain.

Please do not close schools.

Thank you.

On the district audit of the Webster school addition and modernization project.

Two points.

Number one district staff originally claimed that the school had never had a gym.

This is not true.

I attended Webster for seven years and had a gym.

Number two the district originally planned to restore Webster's south side main stairway.

This never happened.

Why?

On due diligence I have attached written questions on agenda items.

Please pull items from today's consent agenda and ask questions.

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Ashley Warner.

SPEAKER_13

My name is Ashley Warner and I am a school counselor at Ingraham High School.

On November 8th 2022 one of my students brought a gun to school which he used to murder one of my other students not far from my office.

Since that day our community has been drowning in a tempest of fear and grief.

It has been 498 days since the shooting and Ingraham students continue to carry the weight of this trauma on their shoulders.

While trying to make sense of this unthinkable tragedy our students have come to rely on the Counseling Office as a refuge of sorts, a port in the storm where they can check in with their trusted adult, a place where they can seek solace and find the courage to continue on with their day after taking a break in a quiet, calm space.

For some of our students, visiting the Counseling Office is a highlight in their day.

Yet in the face of our students profound suffering Seattle Public Schools has made a decision to defy all has made a decision that defies all logic and compassion.

They plan to reduce our counseling FTE from 4.0 to 3.6 for the 24-25 school year.

This means that the 350 students on my caseload will only have access to my services three days a week instead of five.

This means that my team will have to take on extra work to support my students on the days I am out of the building, all while trying to manage their own incredibly large caseloads.

They will have to take on extra work despite barely being able to keep up with their own because they are dedicated to serving Ingram students, even the ones not in their assigned alphabet.

I know that my co-counselors will help because that is the nature of what we do.

We entered this profession because we love to help and are here to serve the many varying and diverse needs of our student population.

And while our team will be stretched to its very limits, at the end of the day, it is still our students who will suffer the most.

to the district.

I urge you to reconsider this decision before it's too late.

Our students cannot afford to bear the brunt of your short sightedness.

They deserve better.

They deserve our unwavering commitment to their well-being and success.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Kate Campbell.

Kate Campbell.

Kate, if you're on the phone line, please press star 6 to unmute on the conference call line.

Is Kate in the room?

Going to move to the next speaker, Leanne Hust.

SPEAKER_40

Good evening.

My name is Leanne Hoost and I'm a school counselor at Ingraham High School.

As a school counselor I am the ultimate problem solver and a team player.

Every time the district asks me to pilot a program I do it.

I have piloted direct instruction AVID Naviance and SBIRT a mental health screener.

All these programs benefit our school district with millions of dollars.

All benefit our students.

I'm the epitome of a team player.

Cutting school counselors is not right.

especially when school counselors have worked so hard for funding the best programs for our students.

I have helped thousands of my students access college-level classes at the community college through a program called Running Start.

Ingram alone received $67,000 from Running Start funds one year, money that my department generated.

The district took all of our Running Start funds away, and now we cannot fully fund our department.

We will lose a full-time counselor.

For the first time this year, the state increased Running Start funding so our students could attend Running Start year round.

So now counselors are helping students sign up for summer classes.

And again, our building is not being compensated.

Running Start is an amazing program with many benefits.

It gives our students free college credit and increases their chances of being admitted into a university.

This is a program where most students are first in their family to attend college.

Running Start is important to me because I was the first in my family to graduate from college.

It is an important work that counselors do, registering our students for college classes.

In addition to helping procure funds for our school district, I also provide mental health supports for my students.

Many of our students are struggling with mental health issues and I help support them every day.

I would like to end with a list of my students who have died because of the violence in our schools and our community.

Please don't forget our students.

Angel Ortiz Serrano murdered in his apartment.

Jasper Toms drug overdosed in the day before school started.

Deshawn Milliken murdered in a Bellevue restaurant.

Quincy Coleman murdered on the Garfield community steps.

Travis Wittenbarger drug overdose and Ebenezer Hawley murdered inside Ingram.

Please don't cut school counselors.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Cheryl Lynn Crowther.

Cheryl Lynn Crowther.

Sherilyn will be followed by Marian Wagner and then Anthony Milaki.

SPEAKER_22

Hi I'm Cheryl Lynn Crowther.

She her pronouns.

I am the co-president of the Seattle Special Education PTSA.

And as Dr. Jones pointed out budget discussions are underway at the building level.

They are based on the enrollment predictions in the school's funding allocation.

Here's a brief comparison of how enrollment predictions went last year.

Last March the prediction for 75 percent of our middle schools turned out to be off with about 30 more students on average showing up per school.

This year most middle schools are projected to see fewer students.

At two thirds of the schools about 20 students less on average will be in school in October when enrollment is counted.

Predicting enrollment is a science and an art.

Like last September some students as a result will start without a teacher in their classroom without their teacher in their classroom.

They may not have their teacher for several days but if the past is a lesson then it's highly likely students receiving special education services and so-called self-contained classrooms those needing the highest support levels will start the school year without a teacher or the staff to support that classroom.

And if it goes like last year, the staffing positions won't be filled for weeks or possibly months, even with educators shifting from one school to another.

In the student focused outcomes governance manual a fun read the definition of input says resources and activities invested in a particular program or strategy that are usually knowable at the beginning of a cycle are measured of effort applied and the outputs are defined the result of a particular set of inputs usually known in the midst of a cycle and that is a measure of the implementation of the program or strategy.

I'm asking the superintendent with the board's support To change the input now for next September.

Hire this year for next year's student outcomes.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

Next speaker is Marian Wagner.

Marian Wagner here and be followed by Anthony Malachy and then Alex Wakeman Roos.

SPEAKER_38

Hello about exactly one year ago I was here giving public testimony about the loss of my job share a job share that was that was a cost neutral job share point four point six split.

So only one of us gets benefits in that situation.

And after being an elementary teacher in SPS for 19 years I uprooted myself and my relationships with students and families to move to another school in SPS.

to work part time so I was able to spend adequate time with my young family during the precious early years that we all know pass so quickly.

Everyone who knows me here in SPS knows that I'm passionate about students teaching for social justice and improving our educational system so all of our students succeed.

And now I stand here again one year later because in my new building, Hazel Wolf, my principal just ended job shares for next year.

Eight employees' job shares will be ended even though the staff, just like the staff at my last building, have showed they unanimously support job shares that are cost neutral.

I will be leaving this school and finding part time work for a couple more years until I'm ready to return to work full time.

This is what my family needs.

This is what my students need.

When I'm working honestly I am fresh.

I am focused.

I am delivering high quality education.

It not only works for my family but.

This flexible work arrangement works for our schools, it works for our students, it works for our communities.

So why is it that HR is pressuring principals to end job shares?

Why aren't they being transparent about that?

I would like to ask HR to collaborate with labor partners to find a way to support job shares.

SPS should be encouraging principals to retain job share options openness to job shares is a good H.R.

practice to both attract and retain educators not allowing flexible work arrangements in equitably in equitably impacts women as lower wage earners in our society.

Women tend to be the ones who care for children or aging parents eliminating part time work.

It keeps many women from being able to access work at all forcing them to stall their careers and struggle with reentry several years later.

Please retain job shares in Seattle Public Schools that are cost neutral.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Anthony Malachy.

And to all of our speakers I forgot to say this at the top.

Please feel free to reintroduce yourself.

I will not be pronouncing everyone's name correctly.

Anthony with us.

Going to the next speaker Alex Wakeman-Ruse.

Is this Alex on the phone.

SPEAKER_24

Hi can you hear me.

SPEAKER_19

Yes we can.

SPEAKER_24

OK thank you.

I am Alex Wakeman-Rouse a parent and PTSA president at Dunlap Elementary and volunteer with All Together for Seattle Schools who I'm here representing today.

We urge you to prioritize transparency and honest two way engagement with all families during the next few months of budget development.

We support.

the district's engagement focus to ensure that students of color who are furthest from educational justice in their families have meaningful voice in school and district initiatives.

We're concerned that the small equity focus group meetings you have planned as the only means of engagement are likely to exclude thousands of these students.

SPS has tens of thousands of students furthest furthest from educational justice.

This is why engagement with the entire SPS community is crucial when there are proposals that have major changes to kids.

like staffing ratios and school consolidations.

We need to be problem solving together to shape the district's proposals.

This means publicly sharing options and analysis of how these proposals could impact student outcomes equity and student well-being.

For 24-25 we're concerned that SPS is proposing changes that will harm students such as budget cuts to school staffing without any clear analysis on how this is less bad for kids instead of selling non-school properties.

While these may be the best options to address our budget challenges it's crucial we are all informed of the options you're exploring and why you'd support some over others.

Transparent and honest communication builds trust and allows communities to understand the rationale behind final decisions.

It builds shared responsibility for the success of our schools.

Excluding families may breed distrust and resentment ultimately undermining the district's ability to achieve its goal.

Mistrust also grows when SPS leaders have failed to take action when staff have made decisions that increased harm to our kids.

District leaders and board members have known for years of the situation at Rainier View Elementary.

The board needs to ensure that the current concerns of Rainier View families are addressed.

Let us work together to ensure that all schools have the resources they need to provide the best possible education for all of our kids particularly those furthest from educational justice.

Thank you for your dedication to our schools and community.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Dayzann Davis-Porter.

Dayzann Davis-Porter will be followed by Jennifer Motter.

SPEAKER_02

So good evening.

My name is Dayzann Davis Porter and I'm a kindergarten teacher at Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School.

I've worked for Seattle Public Schools for 40 plus years.

I started when I was six.

Not only am I a product of Seattle Public Schools I am the proud mother of five adults who went through Seattle Public Schools.

I care deeply about all scholars in our school district.

I'm here to speak today about the importance of early communication and planning around potential school closures and consolidations.

I understand there has not been any decision made to consolidate or close schools yet, but is being considered as a way to address budget deficit.

I'm here not to speak in favor of or against closing or consolidating schools, but rather to stress the importance of early communication and engagement with the school communities that may be impacted.

I speak from experience.

I'm a parent and an educator that was at the African-American Academy before it was unjustly closed.

During its first year, we were placed in the same building that is Coleman Elementary School that is now known as Thurgood Marshall.

There was no plan, no collaboration, and we became second-class citizens.

The following year, we were moved to the Sharpless Building, which was an alternative reentry program.

The communication with our school community was lacking, and we were not given the time needed to prepare for such a significant change.

As you know, families plan their lives around the schools and the experience they want for their scholars.

Closing the school is disruptive.

That disruption can be mitigated if scholars and families have enough time to plan ahead, or it can be made worse if the process and communication is rushed.

If you're going to close or consolidate schools please engage with those closest to the work.

Scholars parents and educators as early as possible to build the trust and to allow communities to be informed engage and to build true partnerships.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Jennifer Motter.

Jennifer will be followed by Kent Say and then Sam Friedman.

SPEAKER_09

Hi I'm Jennifer Motter I cede my time to Laura Adriants.

SPEAKER_10

Good afternoon.

My name is Laura Adriants and I'm a teacher at Daniel Bagley Elementary.

I've come tonight to shine a light on one of the lesser known consequences of budget cuts and staffing reductions and that is educator collaboration.

We all know educators are more effective when we work together as a team.

Sitting down with our grade level colleagues to discuss a challenging math objective for instance can lead to real instructional improvements for students as educators share ideas and resources or make a plan to find or create what their students need.

Strong collaborative teams are built on a foundation of trust and it takes time to develop those trusting relationships.

When educators are displaced effective teams are broken apart.

The process of building those collaborative relationships has to start all over again.

Those of us who have been in the district for a while have seen this happen so frequently that it becomes hard to muster the will to keep trying.

After all everything takes longer when decided by committee.

I wouldn't be working such long hours if I just shut my classroom door and work by myself.

But is that what we really want for our school communities.

I'm certain it is not.

Then along comes the October count and maybe the school receives more FTE and hires another educator.

From the outside everyone thinks that the school has been made whole again but it is not whole.

We are stuck in a cycle of broken up teams and inefficient in effective or non-existent collaboration.

This cycle based on low ball enrollment projections completely fails to support students and families.

I urge you to dig a little deeper when weighing the consequences of specific budget cuts.

Please direct district leaders to do a June adjustment and help school communities begin the school year with reasonable staffing allocations and a reasonable hope of keeping effective teams together so students will thrive in our classrooms.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Kent Say after Kent will be Sam Friedman and then Allison Gee.

SPEAKER_00

Good afternoon my name is Kensei and I cede my time to Rebecca Holtman.

SPEAKER_14

Good evening.

I'm Rebecca Holtman a teacher at John Stanford International School.

My school has a dual language immersion DLI program in Spanish and Japanese.

At JSAS we support students who are heritage speakers and students who are learning Spanish or Japanese for the first time.

This year our budget did not give us enough staffing to continue our DLI program at the fourth and fifth grade level.

We tried to submit a waiver to move staffing around and we also asked for additional funding from SPS but both were denied.

With the current staffing allocation to JSIS it is not possible to maintain our dual language immersion program at fourth and fifth grade.

What is our school supposed to do?

We do not have enough staff to support the learning at our school and there has been no guidance from SPS on what to do next.

The SPS strategic plan touts the importance of developing a culturally responsive workforce that effectively supports students and families.

DLI programs fulfill this goal.

Students are supported when they can learn at school in their home language.

Families involvement in their child's education is supported when they are able to speak to their child's classroom teacher in their home language.

Students and families deserve the opportunity to learn in their home language and have access to staff that share their language and culture.

Furthermore, SPS is refusing to allow students to come off of our waitlist.

We have space in almost every grade.

SPS has an open enrollment policy where families can choose where to send their child.

Why is SPS not following through with this policy?

We have heard these struggles are occurring at every DLI and option school and SPS.

SPS needs to engage and work collaboratively with DLI schools to understand the needs of our programs.

If SPS changed how they allocated staffing to meet the needs of our students and follow their open enrollment policy it would help to solve the problem.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Sam Friedman.

After Sam will be Allison Gee and then Diane Tao.

SPEAKER_04

My name is Sam Friedman I'm a teacher at Wedgwood Elementary and I'm here to talk about the budgeting process how it's affected the place where I work as well as educators more generally.

Over the past few years our resource room has been inadequately staffed at the beginning of every year and our cert in that room has had to take so much extra time and energy to push for adequate staffing.

This results in students who often need the most support receiving that irregularly and unsustainably.

We need more proactive and transparent engagement with our communities so that we can start every year with the staff and resources we need.

Those of us on the ground the teachers the family the community partners we know what our students need and we get so little opportunity to work with the district when plans are made and budgets are created.

The biggest decisions seem to be made without consulting us.

During our last bargain the decision to switch funding models was a complete surprise and we ended up wasting many hours debating how this would maybe even be possible before pushing this decision back.

It was clear this hadn't been discussed with community partners and families and teachers well enough to have a clear idea about how it would happen.

I wish this could have been brought up and discussed in a more in a less time sensitive less professionally fraught space.

Similarly the original decision to close schools was felt sprung on our city's community.

It became clear that this also hadn't been well discussed.

It led to fear and frustration and finally a delay in these plans.

It ends up feeling like the district's announcements about some of our biggest changes are a test an idea floated to see how the community will react.

This is not communication.

We need authentic community engagement.

Educators need to feel like their expertise and experience are paid attention to at the district level.

Please work with us not above us.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Allison Gee, and then Diane Chow, and then Miss Vickio.

SPEAKER_11

Hello I am Allison and I am a newer employee at an SPS elementary school.

I've been working in professional child care for over 15 years and I have studied the wages of educators versus the current day's economy and the job market.

I have color coded the SPS salary schedule against minimum wage data and the UDEP self-sufficiency standard study.

It is clear to me that SPS through resources systems or collective efforts does not have the wherewithal to pay some SPS employees especially paraeducators a monthly wage that is comfortable to live on long term and a minimum standard of living.

There are possibly SPS employees who are making a monthly wage with default summer deferral pay that is near to or below a monthly salary for a full-time 12-month minimum wage position.

Some may say that this is legal, but I think we might all agree that this is highly uncomfortable we pay them this way year-round.

In society at large, minimum wage no longer serves the purpose it was originally intended for.

I would like those who are listening and capable to make change to hear my request that SPS employees be at least provided with a bridge to resources geared toward low-income earners.

This could be through the EAP program or partnerships with organizations that make access to housing, transportation, extra salary, and food security a little easier, especially for low-income educators.

This could include a monthly bus pass through something like the ORCA Passport Program.

It could look like summer job or second job suggestions or even placement.

This could look like food security resources such as a map to food banks or even some kind of optional staff meal program.

This could look like access to resources on applying for low income housing, ideas for housing or even housing placement for educators.

I feel that SPS could start to compile a bank of resources without utilizing extra monetary funds.

These are there are already many SPS employees living monetarily under resourced lives and our knowledge is power together.

I think you could start with an action step like surveying the employees of SPS schools for their ideas and needs.

I ask the board and those listening to join me and make making waves of change toward alleviating the challenges of poverty for SPS employees.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Diane Tao.

Following Diane will be Mish Vigio and then.

SPEAKER_09

Philip Gerard Montejo Thompson after that.

Hi my name is Diane Tao.

I am a classroom teacher at Wing Luke Elementary and I am also a parent to an incoming kindergartner in the fall.

Each year budget time in schools is extremely stressful and unnecessarily anxiety inducing.

We are asked to look at our budget and make hard decisions using an equity lens.

But the cuts in our building we are asked to make are innately inequitable.

Wing Luke is a high poverty school, yet we were funded a 0.0 AP.

We had to choose between getting academic intervention services and tutors that have a direct impact on student learning in reading and math, each day or to fund an assistant principal.

How is that equitable.

We are an early literacy priority school district leaders come and do walkthroughs at Wing Luke to see all the learning that takes place.

We work hard we do our job we analyze data we close gaps.

We reach goals each year.

The district applauds.

But how do you think these goals are achieved.

We need the people in our buildings in the positions that we have to be maintained.

Budget cuts in schools like Wing Luke where the student population is more than 75 percent free and reduced lunch are hugely impactful.

High poverty schools should just be funded a point five AP at the very minimum.

We need strong admin so that teachers can do our job effectively.

Having to choose between these roles is not right.

Nothing is as excruciating as when we were told we had to vote between art or music.

Two years ago staff had to vote on whether we should keep our art teacher or music teacher.

This process is not equitable to our students and it is deeply flawed.

The district says these cuts need to be made.

And I know mine is not the only school making these hard choices.

But if the district really wants to be equitable instead of providing slides about equity they would require employees in the district office to visit schools regularly on a rotating schedule because schools need support daily in real time.

Inefficiencies should be identified and cut first at the district level to make more money for budgets in schools.

We are getting new students every single week with the reduction of funding it becomes harder for our students furthest behind and our students on the cusp to catch up.

Cutting positions in schools is detrimental to student learning and minimizes student gains.

District representatives should attend staff budget discussions in school buildings to really understand what these cuts do and the impact they have on the school community.

We need more collaborative collaboration and transparency in this process.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Mish Vigio, and then Philip Gerard Montejo Thompson, followed by Lisa Alicio.

SPEAKER_15

Good evening Mish Vecchio former special education teacher with Nova High School and currently proudly serving as the vice president for the Seattle Education Association.

When I last gave testimony this past October I asked for transparency and collaboration and laid out missed opportunities to adequately staff our schools in the hopes of preventing the disruption we previously experienced in all our future planning.

Now as we are in building budget season we seem destined to make the same mistakes we made in the past year.

The WSS committee, a monthly committee established for joint planning, met only three times, and those meetings were used to inform us, PASS and SEA labor partners, of decisions that had already been made.

Decisions including raising all secondary class sizes, cutting running start funding, and limiting options for mental health support staff.

Our questions were not answered and our concerns were not addressed.

We could not advocate for proportionate equity dollar deductions and were not given the racial equity analysis that defended those across the board cuts to non-staff funding.

There were no opportunities to discuss any changes made to the allocation formula.

Now buildings have been giving funded allocations with little explanation for the basis of student projections or clarity as to how the allocation model was developed.

Special education staff are not given projections for their intensive pathways and resource numbers appear under projected again.

Some schools have requested mitigation and received it while others have been denied or do not know that this mitigation is even possible.

This is a continued lack of transparency and communication.

Tonight we ask first to reexamine alternatives for balancing this budget to restore funding to schools before we finalize budgets this March.

If we do not invest in our schools and currently enrolled students today we will never achieve our shared vision for the future of Seattle Public Schools.

We also ask for a clearer mitigation process and to earmark funding for a potential and likely needed June adjustment.

We know today that we will need to remedy staffing funding and projection concerns and we believe we can avoid the disruption we saw in October if we begin to collaborate now.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Philip Gerard Montego Thompson after Philip will be Lisa Alicio and then Vivian Van Gelder.

SPEAKER_07

Hello, I'm Gerard, first grade teacher now at Highland Park Elementary.

What I'm here to say, you've already heard.

We need more staff.

And I know what you're going to say.

There's no money but there is.

They're just not giving it to us.

And I would beg the district that I don't feel like we're working together on getting the money.

I know it's there somewhere.

We can get it.

And I just I would like to feel like we're working together towards reaching that money and making it available so that we can actually support these students because they're not getting what they need.

I'm not getting what I need.

My co-workers aren't getting what they need.

And we can't keep going this way.

We can't wait for a lawsuit to decide to fix the problem.

Let's be a little more proactive.

So let's figure something out.

Include us.

Tell us what's happening.

Tell us what we can tell you that you can tell other people so that they can give us the money.

Please.

SPEAKER_19

Next speaker is Lisa Alicio and then Vivian Van Gelder.

SPEAKER_16

Hello, my name is Lisa Alicio, and I am an occupational therapy practitioner.

A little history of OT, we help students who qualify, who need help with writing, self-regulation, organizational skills, sensory integration.

and even basic self-care skills.

These services, once identified, are federally mandated for our students, and our OT department has been chronically short-staffed.

There are students who can't receive their full therapy minutes due to this, and now, due to stated budget cuts, the district is threatening to displace OT, PT, and speech therapy assistants.

Our entire team of four OTA practitioners is being displaced as we speak.

Collectively, the four of us serve 13 different schools, 48 classrooms, and spend over 40,000 minutes a year with students.

These students, over 90% of color, are especially vulnerable.

They receive Medicaid, many of them, and the district is reimbursed for these minutes that we serve.

And by displacing our OTA team, students will suffer, Families will become frustrated and established and successful sped collaborations will be disassembled.

Ultimately the district will lose money while causing harm.

We're asking for the district to reconsider and support special education by maintaining their current level of staffing and keeping their classified OTAs PTAs and speech language pathologists.

I urge the board and the superintendent to seek full funding from the legislature to ensure that this happens.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Vivian Van Gelder.

SPEAKER_17

Good evening directors and Superintendent Jones.

I'm Vivian VanGelder co-president of Seattle Council PTSA.

PTSA's mission is to make every child's potential a reality by engaging and empowering families and communities to advocate for all children.

As a child advocacy organization we appreciate your work in developing goals and guardrails for our district giving us a clear north star in the form of student outcomes and a roadmap for getting there.

We are acutely aware that it has been an immense lift to bring us this far, and for this we are grateful.

However, we also know that the most difficult part of this work has only begun, and that is the work of making these golden guardrails a description of our system as it is, and not just of what we hope it could be.

We know that our district does not yet serve all students.

As we heard right here last week from the immensely courageous Rainier View community egregious system failures are occurring causing profound harm to our children.

We are aware of many equally concerning instances like this.

In our sprawling, decentralized, intensely siloed district, sometimes these harms are not visible to decision makers, and that is a problem.

And sometimes they are visible and remain unaddressed, and that is also a problem.

Our PTAs and families are asking us, How do we get from where we are now, where our children are repeatedly failed by fragmented systems and broken lines of responsibility and accountability, to where our system should be?

And we do not know how to answer them.

They want to know.

How do we get ground level information to decision makers about where critical system failures are occurring so that they can be immediately addressed.

And we do not know how to answer them.

They want to know as those closest to the problems where can we bring our expertise and knowledge to the vital work of creating a system that uplifts our children.

And we do not know how to answer them.

Directors and Superintendent Jones these are our children.

We cannot not show up to do this work.

Council and our PTA communities are ready to partner to build a system that puts our students at the center.

Are you ready to partner with us.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Yana Parker.

It's Yana or Janna Parker in the room.

I'm not seeing any speakers remotely.

I'm going to go to the next speaker James Parker.

SPEAKER_12

Hi, everyone calls me Whitney.

I'm a paraeducator at Franklin High School.

I'm here to talk about safety.

Monday after winter break, we started school with partial power.

There were no lights in some classrooms, or in some hallways, or in the bathrooms, or in the stairs.

There was no heat, no internet, no working elevator for our wheelchair users, and no cafeteria or nurse refrigerator that had power.

But when our principal reached out to SBS about closing the school, he was denied.

How was that not enough to close the school?

It wasn't until there was a literal fire on the third floor that school was canceled.

The way these decisions are made needs to change.

And since then, we have had more basic problems.

Two weeks ago, the boys' bathrooms on two different floors were broken.

They've been broken since then.

Our principal sent in a work order.

We've received no word.

How are bathrooms not a priority?

It's clear that the budget cuts to the repairs have severely undermined the ability to have safe schools and I yield the rest of my time to my colleague to talk further about this.

SPEAKER_23

I'm Jonas Crim.

I'm a teacher at Franklin High School as well.

Just a second while Whitney was talking about I teach newcomer students.

All of my students talk about how beautiful Franklin is on the outside but how it's a mess on the inside.

These are students who recently arrived in our country and are very excited to be studying in SPS.

There's a 10 foot pit outside the lunchroom that's a safety hazard for students.

It took me six months to get a work order to fix a leaking sink in my classroom that was causing a mold problem that was giving students headaches.

The bathrooms the kids have to go all the way to the top floor to access.

Physically I would hope that the school could invest in the staff that we've all been talking about but also in the maintenance staff and in the physical maintenance of our structures so that we can do our jobs as professionals.

SPEAKER_19

I'm going to go one more time through the names for folks we weren't able to hear from earlier.

Kate Campbell is Kate Campbell in the room.

OK.

Moving on.

Anthony Milacky Anthony Milacky.

And then finally Yana Parker.

OK I'm going to go to the wait list.

Now if you already had time ceded to you please just let us know because we won't go back to you.

The first person on the wait list is Juniper Amundson.

SPEAKER_39

Hi, my name is Juniper.

I am speaking on ensuring Interagency Recovery Academy stays open.

I'm a youth health advocate and educator, and I was a student at Roosevelt High School from 2014 to 2019. In that time, I saw firsthand how harmful the drug culture was in a school without a focus on recovery and wellness.

Every year I attended Roosevelt, people I knew and went to class with were overdosing at parties, hurting themselves or other people.

The recovery school is a necessity in the community now more than ever.

Youth have missed significant developmental opportunities from years of online school and the culture around substance use among youth is now something entirely new.

It's something none of us have ever seen before, and if SPS's core mission is to support students, all students, then the Recovery Academy is an essential part of that mission.

The increased prevalence of isolation, depression, and suicidal ideation among high schoolers that we've seen in the last handful of years means that they're more susceptible to substance use disorder, and students who need that support are seldom able to find it in other schools.

When I attended Roosevelt, our budget routinely overshadowed many other public schools in Seattle, and if any of that budget went toward building healthier relationships between students and substance use, I never saw any of it.

But Roosevelt is in a wealthier and whiter part of Seattle, and so the funding discrepancies were always brushed off as, well, it's always been that way.

I know it has.

Students and families and teachers know that it has.

Many SPS students learn in Seattle schools the history of redlining and its legacy of funding discrepancies.

But that isn't an excuse to uphold these systems.

We can't change the past of SPS but we are responsible for shaping its future and the Recovery Academy is an integral part of that.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_19

The next speaker is Veronica Pugh.

Veronica L. Pugh.

Is Veronica in the room?

Not seeing Veronica.

Going to need to go to Allison Littman.

Is Allison Littman stepping forward?

No Allison Littman.

OK then Marshall Reed.

Marshall Reed here.

If your name was on the list and I called it and you're still here.

OK.

President Rankin that concludes today's testimony.

SPEAKER_21

Thank you.

I'm actually I'm going to take chair's privilege and do a little preview of the legislative update because it's very relevant to a lot of you with us today and I imagine you might not all be here at the end of the meeting.

Although I really encourage you to stay for the fun of the budget work session.

So I was just in Washington D.C.

with the Council of Great City Schools which is a.

It was it was formed on the on the tail end of the civil rights era to advocate for students that attend urban school districts.

It's a very long standing organization and as a member district Dr. Jones and I both serve on the board of directors.

It's a really unique organization that does have a superintendent and a board director on represent represent represent each district on the board.

We have two annual meetings.

One is at the legislative conference in Washington D.C.

which I was just at and one is at the annual conference of Council of Great City Schools which takes place in the fall.

This year it will be in Dallas and I hope that the majority if not all of our board will attend along with our superintendent and staff.

And I'm sharing that because it the experience that I had Being there these past few days was really frustrating and also Validating in ways that I wanted to share with those of you who came to speak about budget and and other things it I We have a lot in common with a lot of other school urban school districts a lot in common a lot of shared challenges.

We also have some challenges that are unique to us and we're fortunate to not have some challenges that many of our colleagues serving students in urban districts do across the country.

So I. The shared challenges that we all have are in trying to address educational disparities.

We're somewhat unique compared to other urban districts in that our city is segregated, so our schools are segregated.

But the unique part of that is that our segregation is within our city.

A lot of other urban school districts have the segregation being in the urban core and then in the suburbs which we also have that.

But we have a unique population that when you look at student achievement We are a high performing district because we are a high performing district for white students who have what they need when they come to school and we have more of those students than other urban districts which is not to discount the work of educators for their students or families participation but it's a little bit of a falsehood to say well look at how much we are performing as compared to other urban districts because if you look at black and brown children We're not outperforming anybody.

The moment that we are in right now that I'm going to ask those of you who said work with us to back that up with action because the moment that we are in right now is going to require us all to get very uncomfortable with changing the ways that things have been happening in our district for decades.

And if I know anything about people in Seattle, we are not super comfortable with change.

I mean, maybe it's not just Seattle, but it feels like a very Seattle thing to me.

The fear of having something taken, I have seen and experienced as someone who grew up here, actually keeps us from getting to greatness.

And so we have the reality of the situation that we are in is we actually do have fully funded education.

Education in our state is fully funded.

The problem is the model that is fully funded is from 2009, and it's 2024. And we have 2024 needs that we are all desperately trying to meet with 2009 funding and allocations.

So I try and I feel it in myself get you know we're not talking about cuts it's reductions because of enrollment.

It doesn't that may be technically true.

It doesn't matter because when you lose somebody at your school it feels like a cut.

We can come together around what our students really really need.

We're still a one point two billion dollar district in one of the richest cities to have ever existed.

And we don't care about our children collectively enough to lean into discomfort and also to demand that not just other people change but we change.

We are not going to do these hard things and get these things to our students that you are all asking for.

If we maintain what we have because what we have is built on decades of racism and dysfunction and it's not what our kids need going forward.

We the national reality is we have a house at the national level that proposed a budget that would reduce Title 1 funding by 80 percent.

So when we're talking about go find the money, we have to fight even to just have what we already have that we know is not enough.

Nobody's giving out more money for schools.

I talked to school directors.

In Philadelphia, their counseling ratio is 1 to 600. And half their students go to school in buildings that are over 100 years old.

That is unacceptable.

This is the 21st century in the United States where everybody is supposed to be able to achieve and we do not invest in our children.

And so what I'm saying this for is we have, so this proposal to reduce Title I funds, while we are asking, hey, could the federal government meet their obligation to fully fund IDEA at the 40% that it said it would when it was first put into law, they're not going to.

And if they did, they would take it out of Title I funding.

I had somebody from the Department of Education say that to me directly.

New money isn't happening.

I mean, I just feel like maybe capitalism is not working as well as we were hoping that it would, just as a structure.

So we have the wealth disparity is just growing and growing and growing and growing.

Our schools are more segregated than they were in the civil rights era.

So the context of the level of challenge is so much beyond this room which is not to say that we don't all have a responsibility but it's it's pretty bleak if I'm being honest.

And in a lot of ways we're really fortunate in Washington and in Seattle.

But just because it's better than it is some other places doesn't mean that that's enough.

So I guess, so the things that came up consistently from cities all across the country, urban cities all across the country, mental health is, everybody is trying to figure out, our students are facing a mental health crisis.

And our adults are too.

And if they're not already on their own, they're absorbing one from their students.

And we barely have enough funding to provide basic education much less also pick up where there's no support for mental health and people can't access health care.

Gun violence also a lot of districts we are all talking about how it's falling to school districts.

Because it's impacting our students and our families.

But it's not a school district issue it's an everybody issue.

And so.

Sorry I didn't wasn't planning to say anything right now.

So there is I guess nobody's coming to rescue us.

It's on us together.

It's on us together.

And so I really appreciate when we hear directly the impacts of things that happen in our classes and I really appreciate hearing how much people want to be part of the solution.

And so my challenge to all of us is to remember that.

that nobody's coming to save us and that if we want to show up and do things differently for our kids we are going to have to start with ourselves and reach out and come together around our children because that is what they deserve.

And that's the only way that we're going to make the change that we want and that they need.

So thank you for coming.

And please come back.

And let's also come back together in different ways because this is not really a conversation.

And it's not designed to be.

But we I had a great experience today with some Ballard the University Ballard Lions Club.

These are all people who have lived in Seattle for decades who don't have kids in the system anymore.

And I showed them First Bell and they just were like we're in.

How do we how do we support you.

What do we do.

I think we get caught up in the fact that there are not as many kids in Seattle as there used to be.

But the plus side is that means that there are so many in our city who don't have children of their own who are there and ready to offer support and resources and who want our kids to succeed.

So my my challenge to everybody is that we we Remember that we're not alone and that also we're all we have and that the way we're going to change this for our students is to be OK with getting uncomfortable when we know that it's going to lead us to better outcomes for our students.

And so I thank you and ask you to partner with us and commit I know everybody up here is very committed to you know we're we're all here because we care about kids and the more we can remember that and focus on what they need and stop swirling around with problems that happen between adults the better off we're all going to be.

So thank you very much.

Do we need a pause before we go into budget work session or do we want to.

All right.

All right.

We're going to take.

We're going to let's start the budget work session at 545. That's seven minutes.

Thank you.

We have a budget work session today.

Folks in the audience, this is gonna make a weird sound.

If you want to continue your conversations, please do, but please do it out in the hall so that we can hear each other and get on with the work session.

Thank you.

Superintendent Jones, take it away.

Brent Jones

Thank you everyone and we have a budget work session.

We're going to talk about 24-25.

What are we doing to bring that to closure in terms of our our strategies our recommendations.

And then we'll at a later date we'll get into 25 26. But right now we're trying to talk about what is it that we are trying to propose going forward.

And as we come here together tonight we want to begin to address these budget challenges in a profound way.

The goal is to ensure our system success for years to come.

And I want to start by providing some of my thoughts on where we have been, where we are today, and where we're going.

So our overarching goal and my North Star, as you've heard me say, is to create a well-resourced school system where students thrive.

These schools offer students, families, the adequate support programs and resources and inspiration they need to succeed.

And I truly believe it's going to take all of us.

I heard President Rankin talk about that in her comments a few minutes ago.

Our SPS staff our board business philanthropic community elected officials.

Everyone is necessary to make sure that we're successful and we need to be led by students and students understand what their needs are and we need to make sure that we're following following their lead as well.

And as a person who is a Seattle native I know what we can do and I'm commit committing to working with everyone in our system to make sure that we have this success.

We do have work to do but let's not forget that our system today is among the very best.

We still are the very best.

And when you start to look at us compared to other urban districts we we do have some areas that we shine and but we continue to have this need to be better.

And I get that.

And it's always about continuous improvement.

We've spent the last number of years on the defensive.

Navigating COVID, budget cuts, reductions in enrollment, persistent gaps in state funding and basic education, and more.

And we have plenty of tough decisions to make in the coming months.

And I believe we must face these challenges together.

Now it's time to play offense.

We've been on the defense too long.

And I think there are eight main things that we need to be focused on.

One is balancing our budget for the next school year.

We're obligated to do that.

We need the support of our legislature to do that.

We need to engage community teachers students and the board in a listening process around a vision for our well-resourced schools.

We've we've heard we've heard people talk about that.

We need to conduct a fiscal analysis and an enrollment analysis of how we can increase our numbers for years to come.

We need to ensure a smooth transition to any changes that might be necessary with full community engagement.

We need to increase the safety of every school that needs it.

And we need to we need to also institutionalize racial equity in all systems programs and services.

And the last two we need to make the case for our success with the legislature in 2025 and we need to run a successful levy campaign in 2025. So there's a lot of things that we have in front of us and my goal is by 2030 we have created enduring pathways that ensure every student thrives in a safe sound innovative learning environment.

So I'm an alum of Franklin High School a father of a student that attended SPS a son of a teacher in the central district.

I could not be more committed to the success of our schools.

Look I'm here for the journey and look forward to working together to ensure our system is successful for years to come.

This is an inspirational charge that I'm trying to set forward as we go into this budget session.

This is one of our tools or one of our obligations if you will in trying to get ourselves set for funding our future.

So with that said we're going to roll out the planning that we're doing.

We're talking about this from a perspective of let's get this done so that we can go into the next phase and you'll hear me talk about us going on the offense.

I think that's where we need to be.

And it's challenging to be in a defensive posture all the time.

Your legs get tired and you can't hold the offense back.

So now it's time for us to be able to do some things proactively to say, we have something to offer.

We expect to be resourced properly.

And I think we have to be active to go get that.

And I think that would echo some of the sentiment that President Rankin said earlier.

So with that said, let's look at the agenda.

I just talked about funding our future.

This is how we've talked about this budgeting process for the last two years now.

This isn't about us taking a backwards step.

This is about us thinking about how do we get our resources directed to the right things.

We're going to talk about strategic goal alignment.

How do we make sure that our resources are aligned with our strategic goals?

We're going to talk a little bit about the background where were we where are we going.

And then we'll we'll recap a little bit around the fiscal stabilization plan that was a resolution that the board approved.

And then what are our future considerations.

We do have a twenty five twenty six opportunities if you will.

And we'll talk about those and then community engagement.

We'll we'll share a little bit about our plans for that and then next steps.

And so I think this is number 10 of.

Number oh numbers still number six.

Oh my goodness.

No it's number number six of 13 engagements that we're going to have around.

I know it feels like it.

Next slide please.

One more.

So these you've seen these before but it's good to remind us around what the goals and the principles are as we're moving forward.

Three three main things we want to make sure again we're stabilizing our financial future to be able to fund our highest priorities.

We want to resolve the long term decades of structural deficit spending.

We want to make sure through all this process we're trying to be transparent to show fiscal stewardship and responsibility prioritizing quality instruction and learning.

And we we assume that there's good faith efforts.

We all share the same values around trying to create a condition where our students thrive.

Teamwork the board superintendent we're one team.

This is this is our collective mission our collective charge and we want to be clear eyed and transparent again around the challenge and opportunities in front of us.

And so I just want to remind us that this is what we how we started and hopefully this is the way we'll finish.

Next slide please.

So how are we going to do this?

We are developing a comprehensive package.

We are going to reduce our expenditures to a level of future sustainability.

We're going to make sound choices to match our capacity.

And we are going to continue to advocate to the legislature because that is our main source of revenue.

Next slide.

This is what I was talking about when I said we're ten sessions in but we're actually six sessions in and we've had a lot of dialogue about where we are our main intent again is to make sure that this board and Interested parties are seeing where we are along the process today.

We're giving an update for 24 25 that process and as you'll see we're going to get to to the end of this and shoots and ladders or this this snake here in in August of 28 and so we're about halfway through and we're I think we're trending in the right direction.

Next slide please.

So board policy 0 0 6 0 that's new.

We just wanted to make sure that we are giving you assurance that this is a policy that is guiding our work.

It was a newly adopted policy recently but we are making sure that we are trying to do long term planning in compliance with state law and to make sure that we're managing our risk and that this is going to be aligned to the district strategic plan.

Next slide, please.

I'm going to ask an early question around do you have questions observations on the budget process to date.

So this is this is number six and we were coming around coming around the bend here and I want to also ask you what do you see as the policy are the policy implications for where we are in this stage of the fiscal stabilization plan.

I just want to open it up briefly for you all to to to weigh in on this.

SPEAKER_21

Director Topp.

SPEAKER_26

So quick question.

This is sort of the same kind of same line of questioning that I've had in the past.

So you know we've we've rejiggered a little bit the May 8th and June 10th meetings for what on the timeline on the snake.

What are your what do you expect to come out or not?

What do you expect the recommendations to be?

But when you say recommendations for a system of well-resourced schools is that for the 25 26 26 27 years or or and how is that different than I guess what's happening in June?

Can you just give a little bit more clarity for what you think about what's going to happen in those two meetings?

I guess.

Brent Jones

Yeah my assistant superintendent Bodleman to help me with this but.

This particular session is really here are the budget resolution items the tools that were in the tool kit that the board approved for us to utilize to bring us to balance for 24 25. That's the that's the intent of this meeting.

The subsequent meetings that we have in I think it may will have the actual technical document The F-195 what's going to populate the F-195 submittal to the state which is required for us to actually balance the budget.

But this is really here just to give you all reassurance of here are those nine items or so that were approved in the fiscal stabilization plan.

Dr. Bettleman any additions to that for clarity.

SPEAKER_36

I can just add that it turns the corner after April 3rd and so April 3rd is Kind of closing the shutters on the 24 25 discussions by and large and then start to look towards the longer term view on May 8th as how the decisions made 24 5 start to inform decisions going forward is how I'm viewing sort of this timeline.

So does that help.

SPEAKER_26

It helps a little bit I guess where I'm a little where I'm a little bit confused and maybe as we go through the budget today you know the this upcoming budget the 24 25 I think I think we kind of just eats around at the edges a little bit and I thought the next sort of discussion on this well-resourced schools is how are we actually making some larger changes and is that a is that a preview happening on May 8th of what your thoughts are there or am I misunderstanding in some way.

Brent Jones

Well resourced schools will be many items and sometimes frankly people have confused that with school consolidation.

But that's all of the different efforts that we need to take to get to a as I described this this future state of 2030. And so well resourced school plan would be what are all the requisite.

budgetary matters that we need to address.

How do we position ourselves for the strategic plan moving.

How do we look at the that complementary to the levy that that's coming up.

So May 8th should look like all of the different moving pieces represented at least in this context in the budget.

And colleagues feel free to weigh in if there was a salient point I missed.

OK.

All right, so.

This is Dr. Jarvis, I believe, who's going to speak to these next slides.

One of the things I had a brief conversation with the board about is how are these resources aligned with our strategies?

And so, Dr. Jarvis, if you can give some highlights around strategic goal alignment.

SPEAKER_35

I can, and I think I can be brief.

We have used the phrase in the past that while we're doing the budget cutting and trimming, we still look at a $1.2 billion school district and budget that in essence says we have to carefully plan what we do with that $1.2 billion.

But we still have the resources to look at our assets, to align it with our goals.

We won't have money for everything but we will have money to do our strategic priorities.

So in this case the short version of the goal alignment is that you've not seen any reductions in what the board has previously identified as the strategic goals.

We are continuing those dollar commitments in those areas.

I think it begs the question that we will as this strategic plan expires.

And we commence on the next one.

We're going to be in this middle ground of both continuing the alignment of what we have supported beginning to lay the groundwork on the vision and values of what's ahead.

And how do we direct those funds so that all of our actions and I see you edging around that question what's ahead for us in 25 26 and 26 27. All of that needs to be part of what is that vision?

What are the values?

Yes, we're going to have to carefully shepherd our resources.

But again, the bottom line message here is that our strategic goals that have been identified continue to be funded.

They have not been touched.

They've been carefully protected.

And while you see evidence of some of the allocations that are shifting because of decreased enrollment the overall cuts within the schools I believe add up to about 1.2 percent and they focus largely on one time items rather than than staffing wherever possible.

So when you see the staffing reductions Those have been the reductions of the actual enrollment decline and the cost of that not the cuts being made.

So I think at that note I'll either answer questions or hand it back to Dr. Jones.

Brent Jones

Dr. Jarvis if you want to speak to the next three slides that has third grade seventh grade and college and career readiness if you'd like to highlight anything in there please do.

SPEAKER_35

I think mainly in the sense that you have been getting the regular reports progress monitoring reports to give the details.

They've also included the I guess the dollar commitments on each one of those pages.

So as you as you hear that third grade reading goal in the seventh grade math let me just concentrate on those two for a second as they're up.

You will see that in fact the high quality standards we go through each of these bullet points are in fact prioritized there.

They're working hard at that.

We're continuing that that staffing and that support and attempting to deliver on those goals.

I think I'll again I'll stop there because I know it's a lot of work to do in the later part.

Brent Jones

and then show a college and career and then we'll keep moving.

SPEAKER_35

College and career is maybe that ultimate one of are we succeeding and all as all of the efforts come together.

And in terms of our I think I'll generalize in a statement that by and large our high schools are not seeing the tremendous enrollment loss that we've seen at the elementary.

So the college and career in many ways are able to move forward without even quite as much anxiety.

Doesn't mean there isn't anxiety but it's not based on the sudden enrollment loss or the loss over the last five years.

So we are seeing success.

This is one of the threes where you've seen the progress monitoring report success and we are continuing to fund for that success.

Brent Jones

Next slide please.

And so I know this is a desire of the board to make sure that we continue to show alignment with how our best show alignment with our investments.

What are your thoughts on how we can make sure that we can express that clearer and give you all more assurance that we are planning our budgeting to make sure that we're supporting our priorities.

Anything that you all need to see or like to see to put an exclamation point by that.

SPEAKER_08

Can I go.

So first I'll just thank you for asking the question because I think this will be a critical component in communicating how the decisions that we're making here actually translate to the goals that we have like expose our community to and that are becoming a regular part of the vernacular that we see even as early as tonight in public comment.

I would like to see a really clear connection between the goals that we've set out.

and the line items that are impacting that goal and in what way.

Right.

So I think community would really benefit from that as well.

For example if we're utilizing our third grade reading as just an example like I want to see OK.

Show me how much we're spending on curriculum or whatever the case may be.

Show me how much we're spending on professional development.

Show me like how are we connecting this to the dollars that are being spent on staffing across all of the different portfolios and whatnot.

And show me how in addition to that give me a like paragraph or something to show me like how the culmination of all these efforts We believe will result in the goal that we've set for our children.

Right.

I think that this is going to be new territory for us just because we very seldomly made a very clear connection between how the money that we're spending actually sees a return on investment in our children's you know academic outcomes as one facet of this question.

Right.

And I think that for us as we are communicating the vision and values to you the way that you communicate that back to us is showing like how are those things being funded in the budget.

And how do you feel confident that that level of funding is going to yield the results that the community has communicated to us.

Right.

And I think that that's a really nuanced way to have a two way communication.

But it's going to equip us quite frankly as board directors when we go out and have conversations with community about like you because the question that we get often is like how do you know that the amount of money that you're spending on this is actually going to get you to where you're going.

I think the reality of that is that we need y'all to tell us that or at least give us kind of the breakdown in how that calculus is happening in terms of the investment that you're making toward the goals.

So that would be super helpful.

And just, you know, I've had this conversation in different capacities with Dr. Jones, but Even as a starting point, this can develop over time.

I don't think that that necessarily requires you to change the way that you are presenting the information, but rather, like, as an addendum, give us a one pager that says, okay, here's goal number one here's goal number two here's goal number three for each of those.

This is a pull out from the bigger budget document that aligns directly to each of those goals and then a little bit of like I said a summary of how that money that we are spending will help us reach that.

That is important for a couple of things for me.

First it shows me.

In context to the rest of the budget how much are we actually spending on our goals.

Right.

Because that's going to be a very clear value statement for us.

And then second I think that it also shows us in regard to the individual goals themselves.

Where are we putting the most investment and does that make the most sense.

Because if we are saying that our third grade literacy goal is the foundation of all that right.

Because it impacts how well students can read math problems and math impacts college and career readiness as well as literacy.

Then to me that means that we should be spending more on third grade literacy as opposed to the others in that like kind of headspace that I'm talking about.

Right.

So I know that that was a lot but just a really clear connection between the money that we're spending on the goals.

How do we know that those are actually getting us toward or the rationale rather of how they are getting us toward our desired outcomes and then contextualizing that against the budget and then against each of the other goals.

That's really helpful.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_21

Director Harris.

SPEAKER_41

Yeah.

So for me my questions more lay sometimes in in language and language that's being used.

And what I seek to understand and want to see more of is A more direct layout of specifically I'm thinking of this section of college and career readiness.

This bullet point that says SPS is promoting success in advanced courses by helping high school educators promote joyful culturally responsive classrooms and deliver supports for students with IEPs and multilingual learners.

Sorry my words are kind of leaving me but what I want to see and what would be helpful to me when it comes to transparency is to see like this is exactly where the money is going and this is how it's like creating giving teachers resources to create those joyful culturally responsive spaces because it's difficult for me. to understand or contextualize that kind of information that we see here with the kind of feedback that I get from teachers and community members at my school at the school that I'm in and at schools around the district when I'm not really seeing exactly like went through what I'm provided.

I'm not really seeing.

how exactly the money is being spent to make those to meet those goals.

I'm just I'm just seeing this language and it sounds really great but I just want to see more and I think that's going to be super helpful for community dialogue is up front showing more talking more being more specific.

Yeah that's all.

Brent Jones

Thank you.

SPEAKER_21

Director Briggs.

SPEAKER_25

If you have something to say President Rankin I don't need to butt in line.

I'm just indicating.

SPEAKER_21

I have provided the floor to you.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_25

OK so I guess my question and this is I mean it's not unrelated to what's already been said here but it looks like so these numbers that are attached to the goals that's how much we're spending basically.

So that so the grand total is like eight point three million that we're spending on our goals.

Brent Jones

Roughly yes.

SPEAKER_25

OK.

That just seems really low to me.

But I guess that's where it would be helpful to have a little bit more context for like this is this is this is why we don't need to spend more than eight point three.

Yeah, that's.

SPEAKER_21

So kind of connecting what the last two directors just said, I mean, I think, is this sound?

This sounds weird to me.

It sounds fine.

We're bumping up against what I was talking about in terms of discomfort.

So really, our budget for achieving our goals should be $1.2 billion.

Every dollar needs to be towards, supporting progress towards our goals.

The discomfort part is most of that budget pays for people, and we are very used to talking about people in terms of FTE, and what one school has and one school doesn't, or we lost this FTE, or whatever, whatever, whatever.

That actually doesn't mean anything.

Connected to students, so I heard at least one person giving testimony talk about Connecting resources to student need and we know I know we've talked about that before with or excuse me staffing to student need we've talked about that with special education we have ratios that don't take into account the wide range of needs that an individual student has, and our formula now says, well, you get three people for this many IEPs.

Good luck.

Instead of this many IEPs requires this much support in order to actually implement them all, and then doing that.

So I know it's the weighted staffing standard now.

It used to be the weighted student standard.

These are all just different ways Different districts call it all kinds of things, but it's all ways that districts figure out how to send money out to buildings.

What I want to see is where we have students with higher needs in reading, we should see more staff that support reading at that school.

But right now, we have a WSS that says, well, you have this many kids, you get this much staff.

That's the budget alignment that I want to see, but that's actually less about, tell me how you are showing how your investments align with your goals, and more about saying, I think we should think about investments in a completely different way, which I know, excuse me, I know we're in this, we're just about to launch into a new strategic plan, so this is kind of the, this will be the last year under the current strategic plan of which measurable goals only came into it part way.

We're in a system of transition, certainly.

What I really want to see, and part of the leaning into discomfort is, are we willing to actually say, hey, third grade reading, is a priority.

When we talk about budget allocations, we're not just talking about this program or this service.

We're talking about realigning staff with ensuring that third graders can read at grade level.

And that means that not every school and not every kid is going to need the same FTE.

But we're not going to make progress on our goals and we're not going to close gaps if we don't make changes.

which I know is not for the 24-25 school year, but how are we thinking about that, that the eight point whatever million dollars is not, well, let's see how far we can get on our goals with this little pot of money, but actually that our entire system's existence is to make progress on these goals for our students.

That's the whole reason that we're here.

Director Topp.

SPEAKER_26

So you know I think thank you to staff.

I think this is sort of what we were asking for from this next step is some numbers that align with our goals.

I just have a very quick clarifying question.

So these numbers are for our priority schools are 13 schools are six schools and I'm not sure how many schools are in the college and career readiness category.

I should.

And you Dr. Jarvis you said there's no cuts for in the in this coming year's budget and that's for the priority schools in the in these areas.

SPEAKER_35

It's really continuing the same the plan that we have been directing.

So we didn't change.

We are as you heard in those latest reports the plan would be to scale up and move beyond the six schools and the 13 schools.

And that is in the plan.

But that's right now.

We have not changed the plan.

I think that's the basic message.

SPEAKER_26

So as we so so I guess then my question you kind of hit on it as you know our goal is to scale up past these numbers in our next budget or in our in the budget we're discussing tonight.

These numbers should be higher.

I don't know.

Brent Jones

I get where you're going where you're going.

And I think the the strategy will dictate it as we learn from these six schools and the 13 schools we're going to try to pull out the our learnings and that might make us more efficient and may cost less if we've learned how to.

I don't know but I think.

Right now how we're budgeted it's it's a continuous of that and then we're going to pull back on the focus for the 6 and the 13 and just really try to see what are those learnings that we had.

How much do they cost to to redistribute those back to the system.

So we're talking about the targeted and then we want to move it to the universal.

I don't know if there's a proportionate cost like if we go from 13 to 64 does that mean it's going to cost you know four times as much.

I don't think so.

So I think we need to look at that from a strategy perspective.

Dr. Jarvis if you have any comments on kind of the strategic run up to that please do.

SPEAKER_35

Well two comments.

One is Dr. Jones is very persistent in saying he has to know the why.

And if I can just parrot that for a second.

What you're really put on the table is is part of the why Why it isn't just a budget deficit that we're working on and trying to it's the stabilization of the budget that gives us Not only moves us away from having to constantly cut and shave But gives us the resource to move in the very directions that we want so The direction is very clear on going to the universal.

The direction for not at all abandoning our third grade reading but at the same time moving to the broader spectrum of all kids and the successes that we're having in Seattle and building on those successes.

but not jeopardizing it by having less resources every year but rather smarter use of the resources.

So I'm just going back to that for the very first piece is the why.

The second piece is that this one could derail our timeline forever.

Dr. Jones and I get combined on this.

But that's looking down the road at what we're trying to create.

What are we trying to create in terms of what really is a thriving school, what really is not just a phrase well resourced but a school that serves multi-tiers in reality that has an entire spectrum of students that are served from whatever their needs, if it's wellness, if it's the support for reading, if it's additional special education, if it's full-scale tutoring and before school, after school care in order to make it work.

That's what we're trying to get to.

And the stress I guess that we're suffering right now is we're having we're simply having to cut the budget without getting any necessary benefit from it other than just trying to stay alive.

We know there are inefficiencies in the system in in the way we're aligned and we're going to have to look at that in order to get to the very goals that we're talking about.

I was trying really hard to just stay in line now I'm I'm jumping and I can go there for a long time because I think the reality is again for many reasons Seattle Public Schools has can and will be the lighthouse district of the district that they can demonstrate everything whether it's AI or or universally teaching it and along the way to definitely not lose sight of something of our students that need the most help that that have somehow not benefited in the past from from that.

So that's the highest priority.

But it's one of the places that helps take all children to where we're going.

That's within our reach and that's there.

We're looking at this major shift, if you will, coming out of the COVID area, coming out of a new funding system at the state, coming out of the declining enrollment and saying, this is what we're going to work towards.

So I apologize for getting pontificating here.

trying to set the vision and the goal, which is very much where, if I may just tease my colleague down on the other end there, he is very insistent that that why not get lost and that that is the reason we're making these hard choices.

So, thank you.

Sorry, Beverly.

I tried hard.

Brent Jones

All right, so thank you.

Took a lot of notes, and let me just summarize a couple things.

You want to see a clear connection to my phrase, the why.

You want to see what's going to culminate in these efforts.

I see that's a return on investment.

You want to see some one-pagers that articulate alignment.

You want to make sure that we have specifics where the money is going in order to contextualize and want to really make sure it's connected to staffing where the student needs are greatest.

If I missed something, let me know later, but that's how I interpreted your wisdom.

OK, let's move on.

We're going to talk a little bit about background and we'll kind of move quickly through this.

Just again, context setting and Dr. Butlerman, I believe you're up on this.

SPEAKER_36

I think so.

Thank you.

Just a quick slide.

This is from last year's budget book.

The 1.2 billion has been mentioned a couple of times already.

So just giving context for the discussion today around the reductions that will be proposed for the 24 5 budget.

Today we're focusing on those changes the significant changes in the meetings coming up May June and July they'll be focused on the entire budget so graphics like this will be available at that time once all the information is in the system.

Just to Director Hersey and Barone Corone Barones questions around sort of tying the goals to the budget.

Just a macro level look here is 73 percent of the spending of that one point one seven billion is in teaching or teaching supports.

So just try to highlight those things.

It's a good learning for all of us to continue to highlight those things as we go on.

It's not.

There's not just 8.3 million dollars for these initiatives, but 73% of our funding is now going or 835 155 million is going to teaching and teaching support so Just context there.

We've seen this before.

Dr. Jarvis shared a little bit about that.

Our deficit is 104 to 111 so that number is slightly different than what we've talked about before.

There have been some cost increases some more special special ed needs this year.

There's been inflationary increases and so we won't know the specific answer to the exact 104 to 111 until couple of months from now and the dust starts to settle but it will be in that range and so that's what we're putting sort of forward in terms of how we're trying to balance the budget.

And as we've talked before state funding is deficient for a school district that serves kids in the way that Seattle children deserve to be served.

Our enrollment is down about 5000 students over the last four years and then some of the.

The changes in funding the McCleary decision the lack of ESSER funding some of our system inefficiencies that resulted as we came out of the pandemic and the staff that are needed as enrollment has declined we've had more staff staffing growth as enrollment has declined.

SPEAKER_21

Dr. Bettelman I just want to add something to that that in 2015 SPS had 98 schools and we now have 106. So schools have also increased as the number of students has decreased.

SPEAKER_36

Thank you.

Next slide please.

Another piece of background just a reminder I think Dr. Jones touched on this but last year there was one hundred thirty one million dollars in reductions that were made to the Seattle Public Schools budget.

So just some context for that much of that that first half the sixty nine million was.

In the rainy day fund utilizing that as a one time problem or solving one time solution.

There were some reductions in contingencies there as well.

And so we're getting to the point now where we're running out of one time solution.

So in response to the board's direction to continue to seek those ongoing solutions that we're trying to lean more into that in the 23 or 24 5 budget that we're proposing today.

I don't know if Fred or Dr. Jones want to say anything about this part.

You were here and I wasn't.

SPEAKER_05

Thank you.

Holding a mic would tax my ability to multitask.

I guess I would and this is not my usual posture but like to take a glass half full view of this slide and the arc that we're on is We're getting better at finding sustainable solutions.

So we're going to talk and to Director Topp's question about where are we going next with these next work sessions is really about the future.

We've talked a lot about the need for multiyear planning.

So this, you know, we solved a $131 million problem last year.

It's 104 to 111 this year.

Spoiler alert there's still a problem the year after that but it's 50 to 75 because we're getting better making sustainable changes system changes that you can't do a year at a time that.

Director Hersey noted at your last meeting that hey some of these situations we built up over time they're going to take time.

to solve.

So we're, you know, really getting geared up, you know, for bigger system changes that take time that we can't.

And in the past, to a fault, we solve these problems annually and then came up with a different set of solutions the following year instead of taking a long arc And some of those things take more than a year to do.

So you see some things in this presentation you'll see some things over the next two presentations that are more about system level changes that are sustainable.

So we're we're making sustained progress with this problem.

But there's there's still a lot of work to do.

Did you want to add anything Dr. Jones because I have a couple.

So if we could go to the next slide just say a couple things about enrollment.

We've talked about that a lot that you know we've lost our enrollment has declined.

The numbers a little better than that this with our latest counts but still lost forty nine hundred students since 2019 and our forecasts we work with our team and other demographic consultants and we don't really see anything that gives us any confidence that these numbers are going to spike up significantly.

least structurally.

So again we have to make a long range plan that is you know going to take to account larger demographic trends that are going on everywhere.

And in that same time period King County overall overall has lost 14,000 enrollment public school K-12 enrollment has reduced about 14,000 students.

So we.

present a big piece of that but this is happening to many many districts.

There are some gains and declines depending on how urban or suburban districts are as housing and demographics change.

But this is something we really have to think about.

And then Director Rankin just made this point about you know how many schools we can sustain.

And you know we have about half the students and pretty much you know all the buildings that we used to have.

And so you know we just have to think about where we want to prioritize between the various resources we have.

You know people and.

buildings and infrastructure are two big categories of expenses.

So what is the give and take between those two priorities is is really our problem to solve.

Forty nine hundred students a decline of that size is about 14 of our average size elementary or K-8s.

And so you know whole neighborhoods of schools have disappeared in just a very few number of years.

We could go to the next slide.

So this is our optimistic, flat, and pessimistic forecast over the next 10 years.

The middle one looks about right, that we're kind of facing flat circumstances.

The key features that we look at are kind of housing and real estate and the permitting pipeline.

How much housing stock is there going to be?

How much of that is really affordable family ready housing?

And there are a lot of building permits.

There's a lot of construction going on in Seattle.

There are a lot of one bedroom and studio apartments being permitted.

And that's kind of the housing stock we expect to grow.

We look at births and birth rates which took a fairly steep decline in the last few years in King County.

We're hoping and I think people were hoping for you know a post COVID bump that has not shown up and kindergarten enrollments for us and and public school districts around the county are not seeing you know optimistic numbers going forward and that kind of ripples through the whole system.

So we have to have a long range plan for this.

And then kind of migration are people moving into the city out of the city into the suburbs into our local you know those are that's how we build these forecasts.

We work with consultants that work here and with other districts and I think we're all expecting pretty much the same trends.

Again some suburban districts have reason to be a little more optimistic than we do but there aren't any big outliers in these numbers.

And I think I turn it back to Dr. Buddleman.

Brent Jones

Will you skip to 21 please and keep keep going real quick.

SPEAKER_31

You want to go to legislative?

Brent Jones

Yeah I'll just go to 21 just to connect the dots.

OK.

SPEAKER_31

Enrollment study?

All right.

Much has been said regarding...

21, please.

It's a slide 21, yes.

Much has been said regarding our legislative session.

One of the pieces that we did receive from our legislative partners, I'm calling them partners, projecting we're working together on our funding, is money to do or some funding to conduct an enrollment study.

$100,000 to conduct the enrollment study of...

and examine where students may have gone and then a plan to see what we can do in terms of increasing that enrollment.

So while we're planning on one hand we're also planning on another and making sure that we're covering all bases.

Brent Jones

And now go backwards one please to 21 excuse me 20. All right, go ahead.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_31

Continuing our legislative impact.

Again, much has been said tonight regarding legislative efforts.

We went into the short session with tempered, tempered expectations, so we were pleasantly surprised with some of the outcome.

As you're looking at the screen, you can certainly see that we had some key investments from our legislature in terms of our material supplies and operating costs, also known as MSOCs, paraeducators and special education, resulting in about $7.6 million in additional funding for our schools.

Again, a note to our enrollment study.

And then also that we have $5.6 million in capital funding for Whittier Elementary's roof.

That is a yay for us.

But the entire goal and we thank certainly the partnership from our our delegation our legislature.

The goal in any of this is again to see is particularly with the enrollment study making sure that we have those well-resourced schools where students can thrive.

We also promised the delegation that we would be back.

We also promised them that we would be back together.

Thank you.

Brent Jones

Out of slide 22 and I'm going to let President Rankin run with this a little bit.

We got excited when we saw this because we knew she'd be able to speak powerfully to this.

Do you want to tee this up?

SPEAKER_21

Would you like me to?

Brent Jones

Yes, please.

SPEAKER_21

So you may have missed it.

This was in a packet a few weeks ago when we had a really long meeting, and I said, oh, yeah, and there's a legislative report in the slides.

This was one of them.

So this is belies the fact that, oh, but our state has increased funding in public education.

The dollars have certainly gone up, but so have costs, and so has inflation.

And so the purchasing power, the value of those dollars, has declined.

So the overall investment in K-12 education in Washington State is less than it has been.

It hit a peak, as you can see, around 2018-2019.

That was a little bit after McCleary.

Here's the other thing about McCleary is that it helped bring up educator salaries for a lot of districts that had not been able to keep up with the cost of living around our district.

And here's the connection also to enrollment and housing.

The way the legislature paid for McCleary was instead of increasing state revenue, they did kind of a magic trick where they actually did a local levy increase on King County and called that state revenue.

Typically state revenue is, it is property tax, but it's across the whole state, it's sales tax.

In other states, it's income tax.

We're one of only like four states that don't have an income tax, I think.

And something we can talk about another time and I can show you slides on is a study about equity versus adequacy of different sources of revenue for education.

And it's because it's not just about the number of dollars and where they go.

It actually really matters where they come from.

And property tax is a little bit more stable, but it's less equitable, and it will never be adequate to cover the costs of providing services that a government needs to provide.

Income tax can be more volatile.

So in terms of stability for the government, that's why kind of like any kind of investment, you want to have a diversification.

You don't want to have everything relying on one source.

So income tax is good for adequacy.

And depending on how it's implemented, it can be good for equity or it could be unequitable if it's like a flat rate.

But basically, our structure cannot ever be adequate because of the way that the revenues are collected.

The other thing that happened during McCleary that has led to some of our issues is So the state Supreme Court said, you have to fully fund education.

So they said, OK, we will.

But like I said earlier, it's a 2009 funding model that hasn't been adjusted.

When it was adopted, it was supposed to be two parts, the baseline formula and continual adjustment and updates.

That part never happened.

So we just have the baseline.

We also have a 2014 ballot initiative that was approved by voters to lower class size that, when it's approved by voters in Washington state, that's law.

It has never been funded.

So you've got all these kind of vague, like, oh, sure.

And then there's so many reasons for, why that is the way it is, and none of them are really good ones.

So, oh, yeah, so the thing, the state Supreme Court said with McCleary, you guys have to fully fund.

So they said, okay, we will.

We'll do it by taxing, additional tax on King County.

And then they took another step, which wasn't required by the state Supreme Court, which was to say, well, now that we're using more of these local dollars as state dollars to be equitable, we should limit the amount of local dollars that districts can raise.

And so they put a cap on our voters actually authorize us to collect more money locally for our local levies than the state will allow us to use.

So it was a double.

They said, yeah, we're going to tax you more in King County.

We're also going to limit how many tax dollars you can keep locally to make up for the fact that we're still not funding public education fully.

But we're going to do it all on property taxes so people who are low income, people who are fixed income will not be able to afford to live in your city anymore, and your enrollment will go down.

I mean, so these are all.

They're all connected.

And the, oh, we've made more investments in education, it's just not true.

And even as just a small example, part of that MSOC amount, that's another amount that has never been or not for a long time been increased, hasn't kept up with inflation.

Part of one of those costs that we have as a district is insurance.

That's a cost that we have to pay, right?

We can't say, oh, we won't do insurance this year.

We won't insure ourselves.

In the year 2000, or sorry, 2020, our insurance costs were two point, Kurt probably knows, two point something million dollars.

This year they're seven.

So it has more than tripled.

And the allocation from the state hasn't changed.

And then they say, oh, but we've made all these more investments.

You shouldn't have any issues.

I mean, and that's just a tiny example of something that is an amount we have to spend that has tripled, that because it's not funded, it comes out of dollars that could otherwise be going into the classroom.

So.

Brent Jones

So next next slide.

I think this is going to segue really well.

So thank you President Rankin.

And to continue that thoughts how can we continue to collaborate with the legislature.

Do you have thoughts about how to achieve some of those things and we may we may not have time to go deep right now.

However I want to open it up for to get your boss feedback around what can we start to do please.

SPEAKER_08

I think a big thing that would be helpful for me is to have our lobbyist here to talk about what are the actual barriers that exist, right?

We have a fantastic liaison, but our liaison is not there every day.

and we are also paying a lobbyist to be there every day.

So I think that having context around and being very clear around what are the obstacles that exist in terms of advocacy would be super dope.

I think the other piece there is that we hear a lot about partnering with teachers and community and we legitimately cannot do that.

Correct.

Like we cannot direct like folks to advocate for a specific thing.

SPEAKER_21

We can prevent this happening in DC, too, with some folks from Bernie Sanders' office and a couple of other offices saying, well, we can't tell you how to advocate.

Because we were asking, what do we need to do?

What lever do we need to pull?

And they're like, we can't tell you that.

So to Seattle or Washington as a whole, if you work for an entity, you can't tell people, here's what you should try to make us do.

So we can provide information.

And we can certainly say, oh, well, we are going to, and that's why we do a legislative platform.

And I, you know, try to share and share with, like, Seattle Council PTSA, different things, and SEA, like, here's what we're watching this week.

kind of thing.

So we can collaborate in a sense of shared information and shared priorities, but we can't be like, hey, guys, we got a bus.

Everybody come on and let's go.

We can't do that.

SPEAKER_08

Right.

And so let me just make this super clear.

If you feel as though the deck is stacked against us, it's literally because it is.

And unfortunately, the losers in this situation are the state's children, right?

And I want to be super clear.

This is not just a Seattle problem.

This is a state problem.

I think that it is also going to require a coalition-based solution.

Seattle is a bastion in so many ways.

As a person who has arrived here within the last decade, being able to look at this from not necessarily an outsider's perspective but a perspective of a person who like two thirds of King County is a transplant.

This is a really messed up situation that we're not experiencing in a lot of other parts of the country.

So when we are having the conversation of like how do we engage with our legislature.

We get.

I'm sorry.

OK.

When we ask this question of how do we engage with the legislature.

I think.

A my question is like what do we need to do to level the playing field.

B I think that it's highly problematic that like we are in a position to where because we are Seattle we spend so much money on.

things that are different right.

Transportation costs like our teachers are literally like struggling to find housing.

Even MFTE apartments are unaffordable for most people by the time they actually get in them let alone families.

I think that the other piece that I'm concerned about or like when I think about like how do we collaborate with the legislature is like we inherit a lot of baggage when we step into these roles.

I hear so much about stuff that went down before I even lived here and it's like I am there's the reason I bring that up is not to be petty but to be like really real with the situation it's like it's almost like a like a prerequisite to hate Seattle Public Schools as a member of the legislature.

It's almost a prere — and the way that I hear like a lot of folks in Olympia talk about SEA as well is trash.

You know what I'm saying.

So I am really wondering what is it going to take for us to break past that and but that unfortunately is not something that we can do exclusively right we our Seattle delegation is great we have definitely made immense inroads into like building better partnerships, showing that we're good stewards of our money or whatnot.

But I do think that there needs to be a come to whatever higher power you subscribe conversation that is brass tacks.

It's like, look, I didn't make a lot of the decisions that y'all are upset about.

Y'all also didn't vote on them.

Half of y'all that are in the legislature given the turnover.

So like, why are we inheriting all of this like, he said she said baggage and drama from from 10 15 decades ago because it's 10 15 decades 10 15 years ago because another big piece of this is that like I think that's just a scapegoat for people not knowing how to solve the problem and it's a big problem admittedly and I don't know like how much humorous we can have on our end to just say like hey like this is like we get it this is a big problem but It's also not easy enough to say that oh the district or Seattle Public Schools because it's like that's so amorphous that everybody escapes blame from that because it's not on the superintendent it's not on educators it's not on the school board no matter how much folks want to say as dysfunctional as we have been.

I think that it's also really telling that no one can tell us exactly why there is some such an amount of disdain other than the fact that it's more expensive to do school the way that we've opted to do it.

um so that would be my question to cliff if we could get him at one of these i think that question would be better posed when he's at the table um to really give us a brass tacks indication of like what is it that we need to do who do we need to apologize to at this phase because it's like there's no more like building collaboration or like relationship mending that we can do we're we're out of money and like the reality of that situation is is that like We are going to be in a place where we're going to have to make some really tough calls.

And by tough calls, that means buildings may have to close.

Unfortunately, based on what we're seeing here, I really don't want to see that happen.

But like, let's call the situation is what it is like folks are going to be.

not even folks children's educational experiences are going to be vastly disrupted because of baggage that we have inherited and that is untenable and unacceptable.

And I think that is the conversation that I'm really interested in having as a board and as an individual.

And so like I want to know how can we prompt that up so that because before we even get and I know I'm like riffing at this point I'm just like heated about this because it's like this is by design.

They want our educators and our families to come like.

tell us this here so that we are the blockade for going to Olympia.

You know what I'm saying.

Knowing full well that we have no revenue generating mechanism as a school district.

We get an allowance for lack of a better word.

You know.

And like when the money's gone the money's gone.

And I just want everybody to be on the same page about like the reality of that situation.

And because it's frustrating to be in a position to where like I agree we have to pay for things things are important.

And the fact that like folks are doing without right now is challenging the fact that like folks are going to be experiencing cuts and loss is challenging.

At the same time I can't print money and I wish that there's only so many cuts we can make from central office.

There's only so many cuts that we could even make throughout our district.

Right.

I want to know what do we need to do to get to the root of this problem.

And if it's not possible, somebody needs to tell me that so that we can figure out a different solution and just call it what it is.

Because just pretending that we are going to go to Olympia next session and this is going to be fixed, it's not.

It's not.

And I just want to be super real with folks.

That is not a tenable option.

We might get something.

We might pull $7 million out of a hat.

don't great but that's not going to plug our structural deficit and like we will not be able to deliver services in the way that we are delivering them right now that's just not going to happen and i just that is the conversation i'm trying to have yes absolutely

SPEAKER_21

A little bit of good-ish news on that is some of the things that we really need to do are things that we are doing, which is showing that we can make hard decisions and that we're being serious about examining where we haven't been as efficient or really saying, okay, yeah, this was a choice.

Heard.

We can make a different choice.

Got it.

The more that we can share with legislators, and they have been very responsive to.

And OSPI, I happened to run into Chris Reykdal on the way out of Patty Murray's office.

We were both like, what are you doing here?

But I was talking to him about our budget and what I had talked to the senator's office about, and he was just like, really encouraging about what he was hearing.

And the thing that he said, too, is, and you have a superintendent who's on board with you, and you guys are working together.

And I was like, oh, that's new.

So us modeling also that we're, I think there's a long history of either not hearing from Seattle or hearing from Seattle, we just need more money.

And so saying, here are the ways in which this impacts our students, here are the goals that we share with the goals of the state, and here are the ways that we are unable to do this.

That strategy worked really well last session with special education funding.

Was it as much as we need?

No, it wasn't.

But it was a lot, and that was a lot of people, families, school board directors, educators, saying the same thing.

saying, listen, this is our deficit.

That was also from not only just Seattle, but from around the state.

We collaborated in WASDA and collected our information together and said, look, it's not just this district or that district or these four districts.

Here's the level of deficit that everybody has right now.

And here is the reality of the number of students we're trying to serve.

That made that made a difference.

So I think continuing to work with work across the state so it's not just just Seattle is really important and contextualizing our challenges because other districts are having I mean there are smaller numbers.

But proportionately, they're talking about, I was talking to a school board director from North Shore who was like, well, I got to go now.

I got to go get yelled at about how I don't want kids to have music.

Because one of the areas that they were going to make a reduction was in instrumental music.

They had a certain number of grades who accessed it.

They you know of all the changes that they didn't want to make this was One of the ones they decided they could make which was to reduce instrumental music for one grade Of course people are gonna be upset about that.

She doesn't want to make that decision, but that's the that's what everybody is Grappling with so the more we can Continue in that vein of not just saying You need a fully-funded education, but to say, hi, I'm here as a representative of this, or with these students, or with these needs, and this is what underfunding actually looks like.

This is what we need you to do.

But to your point, Brandon, not only is there a hold-on of past baggage, there's also, for representatives, they have to run every two years.

And the prototypical school funding model In 2009 was a huge project, huge project.

And it's going to take a lot to push people who only get two years to be willing to dig into that.

But they're the only ones that can do it.

So somebody's got to be willing to take on the long-term hard work.

at the state level, the way everyone at this table and around us has embraced getting really serious and making these hard changes, even if we're mad about it or we don't want to.

We're going to have to pressure, keep that pressure on.

Because also, as Brandon said, It's not about just asking.

We've been asking, and there's not going to be the one last magic ask that, oh, that person said it in just the right way.

We're going to fund it.

We have to stop imagining that this is easy, and we just haven't been doing it right.

Because it's actually really hard, and a lot of people have been working very hard for a long time.

We just have to kind of show our work.

SPEAKER_08

And to that point, I want to paint the context that for legislators, what they are also looking at the fact is that we spend, if I'm not mistaken, right at 50 or above 50% of the state's budget on K-12.

SPEAKER_21

So we used to.

But in that slide, it has declined to 43%.

That's still a lot.

It's still a lot of money.

And it's actually a lot of money that a lot more taxpayers should care about.

Because it's the I mean school board directors collectively were responsible for half the state's budget.

SPEAKER_08

Right.

Right.

Unpaid.

And so like what I what the reason that I bring that up is the fact that like we are already spending a very large amount of the state's budget on education.

And I think why student outcomes is so important is that we don't really have a ton to show for it.

The amount of money that we spend on our education system for the ranking that our state wholesale is in comparison to other states is misaligned.

And so we have to be able to show OK at Seattle Public Schools we are trying to inextricably link.

That's why these conversations on our budget are so important.

what our students know and are able to do and the outcomes that they're getting to the amount of money that we are spending to ensure that they have whatever option in life they want when they leave our care.

I think that in the long term that is the solution to being very clear not only at a city level but at a state level of how do we justify the amount of money that we are spending on public education.

Because if we're not getting the outcomes that match the investment let alone seeing a return on that investment.

How can we as a district continue to justify the amount of money that we're spending.

So that is just a really roundabout way of saying we are trying, and how do we communicate that?

And that goes back to this question.

How do we communicate our shared vision and understanding of how we are trying to augment our system to show those outcomes and link them to our budgets to our legislators in a way that paints a picture of where we are trying to head that could potentially be beneficial for the entire state if we are having the conversation in the right way.

SPEAKER_99

100%.

SPEAKER_21

And not only the state, I will say the entire Pacific Northwest region.

What I heard multiple times in DC was, oh, Seattle, you're here.

They have not seen us for a while.

And somebody did actually say, like, it's not just that you're the largest district in the state.

You're the largest district in the Pacific Northwest.

And if you're not here, so that was like a, oh my gosh, it's not just that that's an opportunity for us, it's actually, to me, an obligation on behalf of many more school districts that we're present in those conversations to say, look, here's what's happening in our part of the country, and here's what our students need.

Some of them are the same as yours.

But it's really a linking of arms across the country to connect what you were just saying, too, about being able to show our work.

That connects to your question about what can we do to further show alignment.

That's for us, but also so that we can say, look, legislature, here are the changes that we made, and here are the outcomes that we got because of those changes.

And if you continue to support, we can continue to do these things, and this is the investment that we need in order to do it.

We've shown we can do it.

We're not just saying, hey, we don't have enough money.

We're showing our work.

Brent Jones

I feel like we need to let that breathe for a second.

That's that's powerful.

And I'd be lying to you if I had a good transition to this next part of it because then we're going to get to the unfun part.

But we do want to show.

of what we're planning to do.

And go ahead, please.

SPEAKER_21

Oh, I was just going to say, I can say something a little bit unfun.

Brent Jones

Yes.

SPEAKER_21

Because the rest of this has been super fun.

So I can say something a little bit unfun if you don't want to be the one to.

The thing that really hit me standing in the hallway in the Senate building was that the Pacific Northwest region has so many natural resources.

and so much financial wealth that's concentrated into a very few number of people.

But we also have a tremendous amount of opportunity in industry.

And if we don't get serious as a state about the opportunities that we provide to students, all of the jobs that come with those opportunities will go to other kids who come here and Washington's kids will continue to struggle.

Not to say that those kids don't deserve, I'm not doing a whole borders thing, but just that the kids that live here, if they're not given an opportunity to participate in all of the wealth that's being created in our region, we're doing them a huge disservice.

Brent Jones

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Let's let's inartfully move on to the next slides please.

So the board in December adopted a resolution and this is essentially providing direction for the 24 25 and 25 26 stabilization plan.

Next slide please.

And some elements of those are authorizing use of an Interfund loan, include options to balance a budget, work with the board to explore legislative solutions that we just were talking about.

Directed superintendent to present a plan by May 8th and these solutions should include research and analysis of enrollment and cost drivers.

So you should see that we're we're working this plan to spec so far.

And if you go to the next slide.

So our job is to present and submit a balanced budget.

And I think it was important to kind of show some things that we've Considered and we're not proposing and then the items that we did we are proposing and these are aligned to the fiscal stabilization plan resolution so We considered leasing and selling of non-school property but we thought not as well as program adjustments and restructuring and the utilization of one time self-help funds.

These were considerations as we are going forward.

What we are proposing reductions and adjustments again in central office staffing.

and our expenses.

We're trying to find some efficiencies there as well.

Reductions in adjustment in school staffing allocations changes in transportation fees delayed repayment of our economic stabilization fund a.k.a. our rainy day fund fund reduction in our contingency balances.

and taking out see a loan basically a loan against our own cash and to find legislative solutions.

And so these are the tools if you will in a tool kit that we are proposing to move forward.

And so.

Let's go on to the next slide as well.

And Kurt I want you to jump in please around these proposed solutions and talk about the difference between the one time funds and the short term solutions.

SPEAKER_36

Sure.

These are organized in the slide deck.

We'll have details on many of these forthcoming in the slides that follow but just spread sort of tease the spoiler alert.

The proposal that's coming forward is to close that hundred and eleven million dollar gap.

About 45 million dollars in one time solutions about 30 million dollars in ongoing solutions and between 25 and 35 million dollars in that inter fund loan from the capital fund to be repaid by June of 26. And so the slide before us now is the list of the one time solutions.

I think we have talked about many of these previous budget work sessions or fund balance from the previous year.

Our carry forward was about $32 million, so that's a one-time tool that we will utilize to plug that $111 million gap for the 24-5 year.

Proposing deferring the first repayment of the economic stabilization fund, which was originally planned to be $6.6 million in that year.

We were successful again this year in receiving about 3.4 million in transportation safety net funding.

Assuming we'll be similarly successful in the 24 5 year and that's funding that the state provides for excess costs for special needs kids transportation.

The proposal is to continue the two furlough days and eliminating the excess cash, excess vacation payout for non-represented staff in the central office.

Utilization of some capital fund interest to pay for instructional supplies as part of the the solution here which is listed as a one time solution.

Other school districts have that in an ongoing category.

So consideration going forward and then like I said the balance there is this.

loan that we would take from our capital fund not impacting the capital fund in any negative way and returning that with interest by June of 2026. The the reason for that is to allow for more time and work around how to solve that 50 to 75 million dollar ongoing problem.

We can go to the next slide.

Here's a summary of the ongoing solutions and like I said we'll provide a little more detail on each of these in the following slides.

Potential changes to transportation reductions in central office staffing expenses of about eight million dollars.

We heard about many of the speakers were talking about the impacts of the reductions in school staffing allocations that's about seven million dollars.

Continuing to reduce the contingency balances in the district's budget.

This is a tool that was utilized in the previous year.

This is proposing using that again and then a couple of fees one a voluntary athletic fee and we'll talk more about that and then convenience fees for families that use school pay and use their credit card to make payments for school activities.

Next slide.

I think Fred's going to talk about transportation.

SPEAKER_21

Are each of the things you mentioned in further detail on each of the ongoing ones have more detail.

SPEAKER_36

Yes.

SPEAKER_05

Thank you Dr. Bartleman.

So we've talked about transportation changes as a big outlier in terms of our expenses versus state funding and one of those things that our colleagues in Olympia often bring up to us about decisions the district has made that lead to expenses.

The number of bell times directly relates to how many buses it takes to manage your transportation system.

The district, a few years ago, transitioned from having three bell times daily to having two, necessitating a lot more.

buses of the kind of 11 districts in our area.

We're the only one that uses a two bell system at the state level.

One of the key performance indicators that the state tracks is how many students per bus you do on average suburban districts.

are well over 100 students per bus that they use daily.

Dead last in Washington State is Seattle Public Schools uses only serves 28 students per bus.

We used to prior to going to Seattle Public two bell tiers.

We used to be in about the 50 range, the 45 to 50 range, which is what our neighboring urban-ish districts also do.

So we're definitely an outlier there.

We put currently 343 buses on the road daily.

If we return to A three bell system like we used to have with the reduce that by about 80 buses at least and bus costs us about one hundred and thirty thousand dollars over 180 day school year to operate.

So that gets you to you know pushing 10 11 million dollars.

We think nine million dollars savings is a fairly conserved estimate of what we could get here.

Now I mentioned earlier that to do big things do big system changes are not things we should necessarily subject students and families to and with low with a short lead time and do in a year.

So we're proposing that we work on this now and implement it because we may have other system changes as well for the 25 26 year because the fact is we went to that.

This wasn't just the.

an ill-advised decision.

We had goals about going to two bell systems and we still care about those.

So can we take the time to see, can we preserve some of those benefits?

Can we find other built-in efficiencies?

There are, I mean beyond just the dollars, I think we do want to demonstrate to our funders that we're making appropriate decisions.

It's also just the size of the overall system.

We use a lot of vehicles, we keep a lot of currently You know diesel vehicles on the road.

If we could downsize the system by having multiple bell times it would be easier to electrify and move to a green fleet.

We also have enormous bus lots that we occupy to have very big vehicles parked most of the day instead of being in service.

And if you haven't noticed we have housing and other land challenges in this community that would be nice to not be taking up space all over our city for bus lots if we could get by with fewer buses.

So I think in any.

future we probably really need to look at more bell times but we can find also other companion efficiencies and also find ways to mitigate the impacts on this on families if we take the time to do it right in the following school year.

So so that is a nine million in deferred savings.

But again we want to start thinking long range and that like to.

make a strong recommendation to the board and commit to this now and plan to implement in the following year.

And that's why Dr. Budelman represented a range of one to nine million I think it's actually one to ten because we think we can also save a million in skill center alternative transportation.

We have a distributed skill center model.

We spend a lot on passenger car transportation.

We're going to focus more on a kind of opt in for students.

We've applied it quite liberally and students you know working hard to make sure students actually needed and really focused on the midday transportation either getting students from the skill center back to their home high school or the other way around not a trip to their first high school a trip in the midday and then a trip back to their home high school is getting with the most expensive transportation we have alternative transportation that isn't at all funded by the state.

So we're hoping to get efficiencies in that system and I'll take any questions about this.

SPEAKER_21

Well, I just wanted to add another legislative piece of this is that the reimbursement formula from the state called STARS, don't ask me what it stands for, I can't remember.

Student, I can't remember.

The reimbursement formula is not based on do the bell times and run the routes that are the best for families and for adolescent sleep and good health.

It's do it the most efficient that you can and organize your bell times around efficiency.

to get funding, like the formula itself and the direction from the state and how we get funding is unfortunately, from the beginning, not based on providing the best service or the best benefits for students and families.

It's make it cost as little as it can.

SPEAKER_26

So I understand moving to three bell times is a is a big move and it does also I appreciate the idea of making sure we do it right.

But are you saying you could move this up this nine million up a year from an operational perspective if the board decided that this was there was a trade off here and we wanted to save something else.

SPEAKER_05

We we could where.

seeing that deferring this is something we would finance with our cash pool, and to me that falls kind of in bounds of the culture of this is that anything we're going to finance should be a bridge to something.

So we're taking we're giving ourselves a bridge loan from our own cash pool to put this system in place and then it'll be a sustainable savings.

Just buying stuff back from our cash pool that is going to be also a problem next year doesn't make any sense.

But this is do it right.

give families time to adjust, give our partners time to, because what we really did is eliminate the first tier, the early bell time, that's what we did, and that creates a big problem for lots of folks who need child care, and it's hard for our providers to just provide two hours of child care in the morning.

So if we can solve some of those problems, We can make this work and then it'll be a sustainable savings.

I think beyond you know I think there's value in demonstrating to Olympia that we're we don't want to be an anomaly on this.

We want to be efficient.

And I also just think we think on the ground is it smart to have a.

Whether diesel or electric bus electric bus is approaching half a million dollars.

You know that you use it twice a day in the morning and is that a smart use of resources.

You just take money out of it.

This is a smart way to run this system.

So I think we want to use these buses more efficiently and we'll get there.

But I don't think we need the shock to the system.

We need to allow time to do it right and allow times for families to adjust to it.

SPEAKER_26

And I guess part of that is you know next legislative session is a long legislative session and the one thing we do here continually is that we are an anomaly and is well well we could have saved nine million this upcoming year but we decided to defer it.

That makes the transportation conversation during a long session a little bit more difficult.

I think we should just be aware of that.

SPEAKER_05

That's why I think we want to talk even though there's mostly about 24 25. We want to talk about it here because it's very important to show that we're committed to this but we're also committed to mitigating the negative impacts we're going to have on students.

We're going to take the time.

We're not asking and we're going to fund this ourselves because of our good financial stewardship of our cash pool and our capital funds.

We can take the time to do it right.

But in the end we're going to get to a sustainable plan on this.

SPEAKER_21

Director Muthuswamy.

SPEAKER_03

With regards to transportation changes have we looked into partnering Metro to a larger extent to reduce the.

Maybe reducing the amount of buses we run for middle schoolers and making designated bus routes through Metro.

SPEAKER_05

We do lean heavily on Metro for transportation for secondary students.

They have been more open in more recent years.

I don't know maybe because there were staffing changes at Metro that they're they're more open to the idea of maybe getting into this youth mobility and student transportation market than they were in the past.

That is and so that's kind of a long term discussion.

Ideally it would be great that we're not running a little transit company that transit agency is running a little transit agency for us, but that's that's a long discussion and They're you know really challenged coming back with transit these post kovat, but those are discussions we've been having and You know the stay at state level Everyone 18 and under has access to transit now.

So we are hitting that as hard as we can.

That is actually built into this skill center reduction is since those are high school students can they can they leverage their orca pass more than the transportation that we're providing.

SPEAKER_21

Metro also has vans so that yeah we have a yellow school bus or not a yellow school bus.

Anybody else have questions before we move on?

All right.

SPEAKER_36

We can go to the next slide.

So by the order of magnitude the next reduction being proposed is further reductions at central office and you'll see that's 59 full time equivalent staff.

The district has had in place of hiring freeze or review the last couple of years which resulted in the majority of those positions being vacant at this time.

And so it's another further reduction.

I think Dr. Jones alluded to this earlier we're getting pretty close to the.

the meat of the folks here in terms of how they can support schools and the community that we serve.

And so this is another reduction that will be a significant impact for folks in this building who serve the school buildings.

Brent Jones

So I'd be remiss if I didn't throw this in here and central office exists to support schools.

I want to be really clear on that.

And lots of people are very cavalier about just cut central office.

There are impacts for that.

We take those into consideration but I want to just.

It's our mission here at this building to support schools and so we're trying to make sure that we do this in a way that's as surgical as possible.

But those FTEs may not have people in them but those services have been important.

So I just want to make sure that it's not as easy as those folks downtown are expendable because again we we exist to support schools.

So I wanted to just say that as an editorial piece.

SPEAKER_21

And central office also includes nutrition services and transportation, people who are in buildings all day long.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

It's not just a bunch of people upstairs looking at computers.

SPEAKER_36

Correct.

Right.

And a tangible example of what Dr. Jones is talking about is one of the positions in the central admin was in the budget department.

And so the impact of that is schools have less resource when they're trying to plan their budget.

And then as we transition to the next slide in the school allocations, HR and budget and the operations team of academic services partnered together to think of a different way of doing the school allocation discussions.

So there were some more efficiencies gained there and some more training up front with the principals.

As these reductions are happening there's also process changes happening in the background to try to support the schools with the diminished resource.

And so just a tangible example of this slide and how it supports.

We can go to the next slide.

Most of the folks in this room have already seen sort of the reductions that were proposed for the school funding allocation of monies that come through the weighted staffing standards model.

Many of the speakers tonight spoke about this.

I don't think I want to belabor the details of this too much.

I do want to share, like I was starting to talk about there, the schools right now are in these budget arenas is what it's called, where their principals come here, work with their budget teams, work with the HR team, work with the operations team on how to make their needs of their school fit within the constraints of the budget that they've been presented.

As of 3 o'clock this afternoon the first three days of the budget arenas 25 schools have completed the task.

So that means they've approved their budget their BLT has approved the budget and now they're moving forward with that for 24 25. There's the next six days I think there's the other schools come and work through that process.

And along the way there's more training.

The newer principles it's a very opaque process as you were describing the weighted staffing standards is a difficult thing to just understand on its surface.

And so they're trying to unpack that along the way so people have a better understanding of that.

Similarly Dr. Pritchett and I have started meeting and this relates back to some of the legislative conversation proactively with SEA leadership around just exploring the budget and answering questions that they have on how the budget works and what the different decisions have been made and how do we partner together on.

How we're approaching the budget conversations internally and in Olympia or in the community and so optimistic that providing that clarity for all both on the school funding process and the larger budget process to many of our partners is going to help us in the long run to partner together to to do what we need to do for kids with the resources that we have.

Are there any questions on this specifically.

SPEAKER_21

Director Harris.

SPEAKER_33

I was going to go anyway.

What exactly is a reduction in equity allocation.

SPEAKER_36

So there are two types of discretionary allocations that are in the weighted staffing standards model.

One is this per pupil dollars and so that's to support the supplies and other needs the copier needs things like that at the schools.

Some schools use some of that to supplement funding for staff equity allocation is a similar type of funding that's distributed based on their equity tier or their their poverty level.

And so it's additional supplemental funding at schools for schools with higher poverty.

So they're both discretionary allocations both were reduced.

Yes.

And those were the total amounts for the hundred and five schools.

SPEAKER_21

Director Topp.

SPEAKER_26

I don't think this will be any surprise to staff.

This will be the same thing I said to them earlier.

I think this the school funding allocations are the things that you know I hear you Dr. Jones central office very important critical task but the school the allocations of the schools are the things that you know really affect everyday lives.

The everyday school day.

And so I think that, you know, $7 million, I see other ways in which we could squeeze that $7 million out of this budget.

And I talked with staff a little bit about them, but I think this seems like one of the last resorts to me.

Brent Jones

We actually have reduced central office for the last four years, I believe.

So this isn't the first time that we've done this.

I think we did 18 million last year or 32 million.

What did it wind up being?

It was 32 32 million the year before we did some also some some reduction of central central office and so I I'm with you on that and I think our our attempts to do this have been just what how far can we go right now seven million is about It feels like our limit.

I get you on.

We could stretch it some more.

But we're getting to the point we're going to sacrifice a level of service to our buildings.

And so.

SPEAKER_26

And I guess I'm not saying it needs to come from central staff.

I'm saying, you know, where are there else like the contingency fund balance?

Is there an is there an opportunity there or is there an opportunity?

Where else is there or in the our loan that we're taking the Interfund loan, you know, is it worth the conversation of increasing that loan because 35 million is an arbitrary number You know, what's the difference between 35 and 42 at this moment?

SPEAKER_21

so We pay ourselves back that year whatever year we pay ourselves back.

We have to come up with that money twice that year.

I

SPEAKER_36

Yeah, the impact is twofold on anything that's taken off of this sort of proposal.

Brent Jones

So Dr. Buttleman, will you just kind of openly respond to the increasing the loan and you know what Why that why that makes you twitchy and we know that we've talked about it internally.

SPEAKER_36

Right.

If we were to take any of these things off the table right now the impact is it reduces our carry forward from this year.

So it's a cost that we didn't anticipate going forward so that tool.

is reduced a little bit and then we have to pay back that amount in the following year.

So we've lost that year of savings twice in terms of taking any of these things out.

So our 50 to 75 million dollar estimate goes up by picking the central office one just to change the topic a little bit goes up by 16 million dollars instead of just 8. So it goes to 91 million dollars.

Brent Jones

Just as demonstrating the math of what that would impact would be and I also want to be clear We we are still we are open for direction though So we want to lay this out and say here's here's what our proposal is.

And if you all say I go part and do something different.

We will try we'll try to make that happen.

SPEAKER_36

So just to be clear and Dr. Jarvis said this earlier part of the impact being felt at schools is also the enrollment decline at schools specific schools there are schools who staffing is increasing increasing in spite of these reductions.

So that's just another piece of what's going on right now.

SPEAKER_21

I have a question about one of the things that were not proposed which is school carry forwards.

Can you talk to us about why not school carry forwards instead of what's here the trade off so my from a like anecdotal way, if there's a carry forward, that's money that has not been spent.

That's money that was allocated to school that has not been spent.

So we historically have said, OK, that was for your budget for this year.

You didn't spend it.

You can carry it forward to next year.

I don't know if this is. accurate or not, but my reflection on that is that could that actually be increasing, is this a less equitable solution than bringing back, than saying you didn't spend it, that needs to come back to us, because I would assume, and it may not be accurate, but that it didn't get spent because it didn't need to get spent.

And so are we, like schools who haven't spent their money are keeping it, and then we're reducing funds from money that may have been spent every year.

SPEAKER_36

One of the things that's not on this slide because it wasn't a reduction but it was just a change in practice is the district typically held those carry forward funds until the school year started.

Once the final numbers were in the budget and everything was buttoned up from the previous year this year there is a change in that schools can staff on parts of that carry forward for next year to mitigate a little bit of this reduction or the enrollment reduction.

And so there's a little bit more flexibility.

that's happening with the carry forwards at schools next year.

And Linda Sebring is the expert on this so I may be a little bit misspeaking on some of that but the intent was to be more flexible to carry forward for schools.

SPEAKER_21

Which I guess I would really like to see how that aligns with how it's being spent and what that amount of carry for it is because as it's being described it feels like we're allowing flexibility for districts or for schools that might be able to be a little bit more nimble.

and reducing discretionary allocations that may have been, and this is again, maybe I'm just jumping to conclusions, but may have been used every year for reading intervention or something.

So I would like to know more about the trade-off there.

I'm not, yeah, I wanna better understand that choice.

Director Harju.

SPEAKER_33

Yeah I think so.

The fact that we're sort of going back and forth on this this this slide seems to represent the antithesis of what we want to do to students.

And I'm I'm in line with Director Topp and critically thinking about is there is this is this the only option.

It's I'm not answering asking you to answer the question right now.

Yeah I'm just not I'm not I'm not convinced and it's it's not because you haven't done a good thorough presentation.

I just this leaves me feeling very uncomfortable at this point.

Brent Jones

Any of you down this row here maybe can speak to just tradeoffs.

You know is there a is there a clean way to talk about tradeoffs.

I mean if we squeeze here it's going to have to do something over here but I don't know how to.

Talk about the tradeoffs of any of you feel confident capable to do that.

I want to represent it that way.

SPEAKER_05

You'd also ask Director Topol to ask questions about the timing of our transportation changes just in terms of scale.

That's a that's a swap because we could in fact get that savings.

Many school budgets are done so it probably isn't just as simple as.

You know unwinding the seven million but.

And again both those are difficult things.

Allocations of schools are difficult things.

Springing of bell times this fall is a difficult thing but that's trade off that at least in terms of the dollar amounts kind of works.

I do think it will have you know that also have a lot of impact on students too and and affects every single student in the system because whether you ride a bus or not if the bell times change it's system wide.

SPEAKER_03

to give some more context from this in the school lens on discretionary allocations because I've worked with them.

worked with my principal on making these decisions for discretionary allocations and what it comes down to is do we want 34 kids in our classroom next year.

We want to fully fund MLL next year.

We want to have a tier 2 counselor in our school next year so these discretionary allocations and the flexibility that they provide impact students on a day to day level and the actual staffing that they do have in their school.

So.

I would agree with Director Topp and Director Sarge that this should be at the bottom of our cut list because this actually does impact schools and students on a day to day level and the staff that they have in their building.

Brent Jones

So let me be clear.

These aren't great choices.

And so I want to I want to I don't want to represent that this is good for our schools for our system.

When we we have to figure out we don't have we're trying to have a spirit of abundance but we don't we right now it's like how do we reduce.

And so we've we've looked at different things we've looked at.

What we really try to do in this is preserve people and reduce dollars and that's that's the that's kind of what our principle was going into this.

And we know that sometimes discretionary dollars are used for services.

Sometimes those are services that are one time sometimes those are actual FTEs and then when you take the discretionary dollars away.

perhaps those FTEs are not available anymore or those services.

But what we've had as a kind of a working principle is less less keep as much of the staffing whole as we can and then use the one time funds that we've that were discretionary.

We'd love to be able to keep it all but I think we're just trying to be articulate about the tradeoffs.

That's that's where we are and so.

Antithesis of supporting schools perhaps yes.

But is it the worst thing we can do.

No.

So that's I want to be as forthright as I can about what we're thinking about.

SPEAKER_21

I do want to know more so that but in terms of trade-offs it was it's a Proposed decision here to not utilize school carry forwards and to and so I I think I want to know what the trade-off is like is the school carry forward just not going to yield the amount that this is or You know, why did school carry forwards not, why are school carry forwards not being proposed to look at, and this is?

And maybe it's like, oh, school carry affords is only $2 million.

Or maybe it's, I mean, so that's like, I think we understand that we can't just say like, oh, no, we don't like that, don't do that.

Because that's just not where we are.

But in terms of the things that are currently not being considered, I want to know a little bit more about why not.

What led you to say that's not what we're going to look at for reductions?

SPEAKER_99

All right.

Brent Jones

So team will try to put something together to show what wasn't considered versus what was considered and why we said 25 percent versus 0 percent or 100 percent.

I'm hearing some showing our work.

Director Rankin's line that we can show where.

just our decision making.

Maybe it's our our flow and how we did that.

So other other thoughts.

What I'm hearing is do some analysis more analysis on the carry over option.

I think that reduces a lot more flexibility for our for our schools.

It just.

Yeah.

So we'll work on that.

SPEAKER_36

Thanks.

We can go to the next slide.

One of the tools that the board sort of directed the superintendent to investigate was proposed fee for fees.

And so this proposal is for a voluntary athletic fee for high school sports of two hundred dollars per sport with a cap of four hundred dollars per year for families who choose and can pay that.

As background Seattle Public Schools used to charge fees for athletics was beneficiary of a significant donation that took the place of those fees.

That donation is no longer here.

And so this is a proposal and their estimates for if participants.

If 50 percent of people who are non free and reduced lunch students pay.

you would generate about $770,000 a year or if 75% it would be $1.1 million.

SPEAKER_21

Two things on this.

One, I wouldn't say we directed the superintendent to explore this.

I would say we were okay with getting information about this, but I think fees was something that made us all kind of, you know, not super excited.

Something that we're not gonna be able to answer right in this moment, but that we should think about is why do we not have a Seattle Schools Foundation in this city?

There's a Bellevue Schools Foundation.

There's an Issaquah Schools Foundation.

When I was just in DC, I literally had someone say to me, promise me before you're done with this term, you will have, and I'm like, well, I don't think it's really up to me, but I will try.

If we had a schools foundation, as many, many other cities do, we could stop all of this bickering over PTA dollars and fees and whatever.

We have people who want to give money and want to support our kids, want to support their own kids, but also want to support other kids.

So if we're talking about a voluntary fee, And I know this isn't up to us in this room but I guess I'm just putting it out in the ether that we should have a Seattle schools foundation.

We shouldn't have an individual high school foundation that provides transportation that provides access to theater trips that provides athletic fees.

We should.

This is a public school system.

All of our kids should have access to this.

It's bananas to me that we.

I don't know what the, maybe there's a really complicated history as to why we don't, but having a foundation that supports the students of a public school district with things like athletic fees that are not provided by the state is a very common thing, and for some reason, We're not doing it in in Seattle and I We should I don't know who's and I think you know the 2.7 million dollars Donation somebody I don't know who this was but somebody said yeah, I want to cover fees for athletics a lot of people would want to support our students in that way and And that could both help us with budget challenges, but also help ensure that all students have access to these things that we all really want them to have access to.

Somebody out there.

Do a fund.

And these typically will have the superintendent on the board of whatever organization so that it's not this other organization saying, well, we think you should do these things.

We want every school to have a fencing club.

We don't care what you want or don't want.

That's what we want to pay for.

No, there are organizations that exist to support the mission and vision and to support equitable access for students and participating in all of these things.

We could have these things.

We're talking you know this is seven hundred thousand dollars in revenue to collect because of it.

It's come on.

Brent Jones

So we have a few more slides and we'll keep moving but we do need to find ways to bring in additional resources and so.

want to make it happen.

Let's let's let's figure it out.

SPEAKER_36

The next one is the convenience fee for credit card users.

About five million was collected in payments made through school pay last year.

Charging what we get charged by the vendor would result in a two hundred about a two hundred fifty thousand dollar budget savings.

Currently we pay the fee on that just out of the general fund.

So that would be passing that fee along to the credit card user.

The next slide is related to further reductions in contingency funds.

This would get us down to about five million dollars out of the one point two billion dollar budget or less than half of 1 percent in contingency funds.

And so we're getting pretty close to the end of the line on that type of reduction.

There was a year two or three years ago 21 22 and the district budget was in the billion dollar range and the carry forward at that time was only 10 million dollars.

And so with an organization this large with that amount of funding this we're getting close to the to the edge there of prudent behavior on some level.

There are ways you can change direction during the year but with school staffing being the large large expenditure you can't just disrupt that in the middle of the school year.

So it'd be there some ways to mitigate things at the end of the year should this contingency fund not hold.

We'll watch that closely if we reduce this as part of the solution but just fair warning this is getting pretty small.

The rainy day fund was part of contingency that 42 million I think it was.

That's also now part of the solutions that are in play.

So.

Brent Jones

So let's get to the final slide or the final the roll up of these proposed budget solutions so you can see it kind of in the aggregate.

SPEAKER_36

Just ordered from largest to smallest it does this slide does include the million dollars in the transportation changes the skill center change primarily.

Not the nine million and that's where the thirty five million dollar projected loan amount comes from That's just a roll up of that information All right next slide please

Brent Jones

You all can go as fast as you want on this.

If you have thoughts around you know what do we need to be mindful of regarding the impacts of this plan.

Please please let us know.

It's a it's a lot.

And so we'd like to hear your guidance or your thoughts.

SPEAKER_21

Director Sargent or Vice President Sargent.

SPEAKER_33

That's my name my mama gave me.

So I want to be really clear about my statement because it's connected to this.

What I'm asking.

I mean this is this budget exercise is complex and complicated.

The language is is not always clear to those of us who are not in finance.

I think families with limited English speaking capacity should be able to understand this.

There are ways to present things.

You know when we think about we put out publications you know the general rule is third grade reading level.

So the reason why I'm bringing that up is I'm my head is swirling I'm spinning.

There's a lot of confusing stuff in here.

Some of it I did understand.

And at the end of the day I want to make sure.

You know that slide that had the reduction in discretionary funds the increase in class sizes and then whatever that third thing was.

I could look back on my notes but I want to put on my glasses.

You know is it possible that we could do one or two of those things on that slide.

Like I'm just asking for consideration.

I'm not I'm not criticizing at all.

The the work and the planning and the deliberation that you all did to to get to this point.

I'm also not asking for you to look at.

I honestly believe that our superintendent is doing his due diligence to ensure we don't have a lot of quote unquote fluff on the top you know in our central office.

But it does exist to support schools.

And so there's a balance here you know of not filling positions and letting go of other positions but still maintaining enough positions that the people who are here will want to stay.

and that they have the capacity to do the work like I get that.

And at the end of the day for me what I want to see is the least impact to students and maybe we will get to it this year and maybe we won't.

But I I want us to really wrestle with it.

entangle with it.

Because when I say at the end of the day it looks like the antithesis of what we want to do is because that's what it looks like and feels like to me I'm not saying that that's that that's the be all end all.

But there's a feeling a sense like gosh do we really.

You know and the same you know the whole pay to play thing we know who that potentially will hurt.

And yes I hear you say people students who can't afford it won't pay.

But how is that going to be enforced in buildings.

Because I have I have been here long enough to know for sure if you can't pay you don't play.

We're delusional if we think that that has never happened here in Seattle Public Schools.

It has happened.

And so how are we going to enforce that.

Right.

I mean it's a question.

So I'll stop there.

But I I don't want anybody to walk away from this particularly the staff who took their time.

Yes it's your job.

You collect a paycheck on this and but it's more than that.

This is our kids future.

And I I acknowledge that it appears that you did a lot of thoughtful planning and I'm asking is this it.

Right.

Is there something else that we're missing or not thinking of or that we could do.

SPEAKER_25

Can I ask a question that's related to this.

So given that that our number one goal is to keep cuts out of the classroom I was just looking at the list of things that we opted not to explore.

And can somebody remind me why we decided not to explore lease or sale of none of buildings that we're not currently using.

SPEAKER_05

This falls also in the category of things that need more lead time.

So legally we can only use rent or real property transaction proceeds to augment our capital fund.

We don't need that.

Our problem is not capital funds so we and our properties that we're not using are under contract so we would need to break or rewrite contracts we would need help from the legislature and others.

to leverage property to solve these particular problems.

We have we are not giving that up by any means but that's just not something we can do.

We can implement 24 for the 24 25 budget.

SPEAKER_25

OK.

Yeah I figured there was a good reason I just couldn't remember what it was.

SPEAKER_21

Director Topp.

SPEAKER_26

So I guess I guess my ask and I know the next section is community engagement.

If it is not too late and I'm hearing maybe it is too late to walk back some of the school allocation funding because of where we are in this process.

Is there an opportunity in our May listening sessions to get feedback about.

whether the community would prefer to see a three bell schedule versus what we see on the school funding allocation page.

Is that an opportunity?

SPEAKER_20

For the next three months.

Well so in the next three months.

SPEAKER_26

In the community engagement section in May it says the district will host well resource schools informational meetings for all families staff and community.

So as part of that can this be part of some of the information we are collecting.

Brent Jones

I'm thinking about that in the context of the session we had around community engagement.

Seems like it could be added without not a whole lot of difficulty but.

I tend to give Bev unfunded mandates but Bev why don't you respond to that.

I resend what I just said.

Bev go ahead.

SPEAKER_31

That is a hard intro there.

Concerning the May dates I'll just I'll go through and save us a little time.

Let's talk about community engagement what we have going on now.

What is active.

We promised that we would do well resourced schools too.

and make sure that we pressed in and received some more student feedback as well as work with our multilingual families to get more input so that is active and now we have a student survey for our high school students that's active we launched that this week I believe we're close to just for the start of the week over 400 responses, so that's great.

As a start, we want to keep pressing and keep going there.

Concerning the May dates that we announced, that was specifically attached to what would happen out of the May 8th announcement following that, believing we need to get out to community.

There's going to be a lot of need for clarification following that.

That said, we can do what we need to do.

And as we are advised and directed, if that is an option and we have that space, we can certainly create that.

SPEAKER_21

Nobody's going to like what I'm about to say, or I don't know, potentially.

So I would say, having been through conversations about bell times, Between now and May saying would you rather this or that is just going to bring just a battle where there's not going to be an outcome that we can act on.

Because some people are going to say you know it's like COVID should we when should we open schools there.

Like it was just there's there's I don't see having experienced this a productive way to get to a.

solution on would you rather this or that on this by in May.

That's I don't agree.

SPEAKER_26

I hate the would you rather this or that conversation.

This seems to be the like as the squishy room in the budget that we're sort of left with that we're we're battling or we're having not battling.

We're having a discussion about.

And so is there.

SPEAKER_21

So here's the other thing that people are really not going to like in terms of student outcomes.

I know that we all have a visceral response to oh my gosh what does that cut mean.

At the end of the day, will a reduction in those discretionary dollars, it will have an impact on somebody's relationship with a person that they know that may not be there anymore.

It will have an impact on having to make some changes.

So this is where Boo hisses, Liza.

Is it going to impact student outcomes?

Or are we having a visceral reaction to we don't want to change anything in buildings?

Because actually, we just talked about how we want to change a lot of things in buildings.

So I would challenge us to really And that's why I want a little bit more information about the carryovers, because I don't know enough about what the actual impact will be on that reduction, other than knowing that people don't like reductions.

So I would like to know more about the carryovers as, what's the real impact of both of those things, both in terms of what savings would it yield and what would it, What's the actual impact that would be had.

SPEAKER_26

And what I don't like more than well what I don't like more than the reduction in discretionary outcomes is the increase in secondary staffing ratios increasing class sizes.

That really sucks.

SPEAKER_21

Oh my gosh, number one hated person.

So also, my understanding, and somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, my understanding with those class size ratios, it doesn't necessarily mean there will be one more kid in every class.

It means that the overall ratio of the day is changing, and that it's still within contract boundaries.

I do have questions though about overage pay and what that expense would be that if we say, oh, well, we'll just increase by this much, that there's a daily limit and then if we're gonna compensate for that with overage pay, that's like a double whammy in that it's not a cost savings and we're overburdening already overburdened educators.

So I would like to understand more about that impact.

SPEAKER_36

Yeah the seven million dollars is net of anticipated overage pay.

Proof is in the pudding when the school schedules are put together.

SPEAKER_21

Right.

So what happens if the school schedules are put together and the counts for special education allocations are still under.

So we have a whole bunch of empty positions and then we owe compensatory services for students who are not receiving services.

And then we have overages in all of our high schools, and then we've ended up spending more money for less service.

Brent Jones

I'm not being sarcastic when I ask that.

Was that a rhetorical question, or was that to be answered right now?

SPEAKER_21

It doesn't need to be answered right now.

But I want to know what we actually, like if we're kind of assuming, oh, and then we'll absorb overage, how do you know the overage won't be?

SPEAKER_08

Is that possible to model?

SPEAKER_36

I don't know.

SPEAKER_21

And if it's not possible to model, why are we proposing it?

How do we, you know, just what are we basing that on?

And I'm really worried about the compensatory services also.

Brent Jones

So my knowledge of this is that the teams have done analysis these wouldn't be here unless there was some analysis.

We'll try to pull forward perhaps perhaps our modeling but there are some things that aren't predictable in terms of this.

We have we've we've run on a more kind of robust model that we didn't.

we weren't really sharp with our pencil for lack of better words.

And so now that we're doing that, we don't have experience with tightening them, tightening like this.

Looks like there's some healthy debate going on back there about what it is and what it isn't.

SPEAKER_36

Somebody's got the answer.

Brent Jones

OK.

SPEAKER_21

Yeah.

Let's.

Brent Jones

So let's.

Let's keep moving.

I know we're we're time strapped at this point.

Can I make that assumption.

So future considerations.

Is this me or is this back to you Dr. Bodeman.

SPEAKER_36

I think the next one is you.

Brent Jones

Okay.

Future considerations.

We're looking at as as Dr. Buttleman talked about 50 to 75 million going forward.

That's after we do this reconciliation if you will.

And then as we looked at the resolution that we did in December for twenty five twenty six the plan may include school consolidations to be implemented at twenty five twenty six in the year beyond grade level reorganizations program adjustments and restructuring.

I want you to pay attention to this slide because that's what was in that resolution going forward.

And let me be clear.

We are working on plans for particularly bullet number one and we're we're we're we're modeling we're doing more than modeling.

We are we are planning when we were making sure that we are doing due diligence in that space.

I haven't said that's where we're going because we have not had that conversation but that is something that we are we have a team working on this and they've been spending many many hours on it and so we're at a point where we're we have to think about this now if we're going to do anything in 25-26.

Please.

SPEAKER_03

You just do you know the number off the top of your head of how much the district saves in expenditure by consolidating an elementary school per se.

Brent Jones

Yeah so we we are rough estimate right now is about one point five to three million per per school on a consolidation.

SPEAKER_21

Speaking though when we talk about student impact.

For me, consolidation is not about saving money.

It's about ensuring we can actually provide services and resources to students no matter where they are, because we have lost the equivalent of how many?

14, did you say?

We've lost the equivalent of 14 school buildings of elementary students.

And so when some of the testimony, the enrollment reduction that one school can bear when it's under 250 kids is not very many.

The difference of a handful of kids can mean the difference of a staff person.

When you have a building that's 450, some fluctuation.

And again, I'm talking about a building that's also designed for that many kids.

I'm not talking about shoving a bunch of kids into a little tiny room.

We're talking about, we have a per pupil allocation.

So if we, as a community, want and expect every child to be at a school, and I'm talking about elementary school, to be at a school with a full-time Principal, a full-time librarian, a full-time counselor, classrooms that are not split classes.

We can't do it with 200 kids.

Brent Jones

So we we have some early credible data from our engagement with community around a system of well-resourced schools around what those would look like.

Ideally if a school consolidation were to happen it would have all of those elements that the that the community has talked about.

And so it's not just a budget reduction exercise.

In fact it's it should be.

Having more access to more service programs and utilizing space in a more robust way.

So that's that's really what that ultimately should be about.

Not not necessarily just cost savings because that's we couldn't proceed with just a cost saving measure.

I mean cost saving effort on that is too big of a it's too big of a deal to just save money.

It has to it has to show some upside to families and students and educators for that matter.

SPEAKER_03

I'm remembering correctly in a previous meeting was mentioned that a few schools expressed interest in consolidating willingly.

Is that something that's still on the table to test maybe as a pilot program to see how we do this right next year with these schools that want to consolidate so that when we have to consolidate middle down the line we know how to do it.

Brent Jones

Yes so we.

We really are grateful to the schools who started to talk about this and have forthright conversations about how they would be impacted.

And as we do our planning we've taken the information that they've provided us and said.

in our planning how do we consider what their experience was.

And so trying to bring a community along and to see favorably something like this is a big task.

And some of those principals who is who would engage with particularly Dr. Jarvis in a conversation about is this possible.

We saw some promising opportunities and so.

We're not planning to do anything in 24-25 so when we get to 25-26 I think we're just reusing those data and experience from those conversations to inform our planning.

SPEAKER_35

I would offer I guess a global statement.

Dr. Jones is a tough taskmaster as you have observed.

He's been very demanding to fix the system to make the changes in the system not just tinker around the edges.

I don't want to refer to a couple schools consolidating as tinkering but at the same time it is.

How are we doing this as a whole system?

I want to put it in the context of the conversation you've been having this last hour or so.

As we all know if 85 percent of our budget is in people and the remaining 15 percent is tied up most of it in have to's pay the lights etc.

There isn't much to work with when you lose 10 percent of your students.

That's just the last four four years.

So it really demands that the system be adjusted and the first time in a long time and a big change.

I think as we hit the conversations on transportation Fred Podesta and I have had a number of conversations do we.

How much do we disrupt the system in order to disrupt the system or do we disrupt it at one time as we make.

I want to.

President Rankin you were talking earlier about legislative and.

This I'm going to own this so you can disown it if you when it comes back at you.

The legislature this last session knows that transportation star system has to be fixed.

What happened was my opinion and I'm going to own this is the version that came out of the house the version that came out of the Senate.

They never could agree, so it died.

It wasn't a matter of not understanding that they needed to fix it.

They needed to fix the system.

There's an opportunity for us to say, by the way, we're the number one victim.

of not fixing that system with the number one beneficiary in our kids when you fix the system.

So I don't want to overuse and just beat it to death.

But what you're seeing in this one is how do we fix the system so that we're not just picking at pieces as if they were somehow one is less important.

We have no people in this school system that I'm aware of that I would say somehow they just exist and nobody knows what they do and they really don't have any value.

We're just the opposite.

We're talking about really talented people that have contributed whether it's from this office or wherever they are in the system.

So again I talk too much but I'm trying to explain that context that.

This leads us what we're doing at this point.

There's no question we have been avoiding the total disruption of the system till we have answers that are good enough to say this is how we want to go about it.

I have been encouraging people to step forward and volunteer and see if we get some early adopters.

But it also became apparent that that well if nothing else we've got some people who are salivating at the opportunity.

They're really looking forward because they know it will improve their schools and opportunities for their kids.

But we're trying not to do that in such a piecemeal fashion that it's which parents or which kids or which buses get affected.

let's take on the system and when we start doing attendance boundaries for the entire system.

I say that if that doesn't make you nervous and sort of start shaking it's going to happen.

It's going to happen as part of this system change or else we can't get to where we need to be with this level of change.

So thank you for listening to me but I I'm trying to put a context to answer your question and really take in some other pieces of there are things we could do but they're right now they're more piecemeal they're not part of the change system.

And in the case the reason I quote the transportation it's not even part of the changed transportation funding system yet.

So there are reasons to try to do this.

I can guarantee you on the academic side of the house Every one of these pieces is painful.

There is not a position there.

It's been multiple years.

So you're already have people doing work that somebody else used to do.

And we're trying to hang on to good people and not crush them in the process.

So thank you for listening.

SPEAKER_21

Pre-recession I think pre-recession 2008 Seattle Public Schools had a math department of I think 14. Now I think we have two.

So but also I mean if we do what we've always done we get what we've always got which has not been good for a lot of kids.

SPEAKER_33

Can you define what grade level reorganization means.

I think I know but I'm not sure.

Brent Jones

Give that back to Dr. Jarvis.

He explains that.

Can you.

SPEAKER_33

Can you do it briefly.

That.

SPEAKER_35

Very simply that would be if we chose instead of moving kids within the school to school to look at something that would change how long they would stay at the elementary school or the middle schools or go to.

Like sixth grade versus.

SPEAKER_33

Eight through six.

And then that well you don't do seven.

SPEAKER_35

And you will see systems that are looking at some of those right now.

If that's an alternative.

It.

Which one is more disruptive?

I'm not going to argue that one at the moment, or where ninth graders should be, or where sixth graders should be.

But that's what you would run into as an alternative that at least needs to be looked at.

SPEAKER_21

When Issaquah a few years ago opened a new high school, the way the numbers were, they opened it as a ninth grade only for a few years.

And then changed it.

Yeah, my friend was an English teacher there.

She said it was awesome.

SPEAKER_35

And I get one point for brevity on that.

SPEAKER_21

I'm going to suggest unless there's anything you critically want to bring our attention to in the next couple of slides that we can see where we're going on our own and you got it.

I was done.

SPEAKER_36

I just can we go to the spreadsheet.

I just want to make sure the context for that is provided.

Yeah hopefully a version you can read.

So this is just one scenario and I would call this not best worst or likely but pretty good.

So this is where the show your work of the seventy five million dollars and one ongoing reductions for next year twenty five six.

comes from.

So this math shows that taking all the reductions that we talked about over the last couple hours and three bell times and twenty five six still looks for seventy five million dollars in solutions.

in a year when our levies are on the ballot and our two biggest labor contracts are being negotiated.

And so just this context of this is important.

And if we get through that twenty five six year you'll see the numbers at the bottom are no longer negative and that's starting to reinvest back in the things that are important that we're talking about here at this table.

So just wanted to provide some context.

There's a lot of assumptions behind this but this is one version of how the.

we could get moving forward on this challenge right now.

SPEAKER_21

One more clarifying question.

When you're talking about the plan on May 8th, we won't yet have adopted the next set of goals and guardrails for the next strategic plan, so am I accurate in saying that's sort of another toolkit, a frame of things that might happen?

That's not the here's the schools we think should be consolidated, or here's the program we don't think should exist,

Brent Jones

Come back, say, ask the question again.

SPEAKER_21

The plan on May 8th, if that is a full-baked, here's what we're going to do, that's a bit cart before the horse, but I think, but is the, we're going to see what the sort of frame of proposal is?

Or are we seeing this is what's happening in 25-26?

Brent Jones

We talked about recently the introduction of goals and new set of goals and guardrails after we made this snake, this budget session planning.

And so let us think about how we readjust to do that.

And so I just want to make sure I was clear around your expectation for how we would the timing of that.

SPEAKER_21

So yeah, I mean, there will always be multiple things happening at different times.

And we have to, you know, adapt based on legislative blah, blah.

So I just I don't want anybody, you know, seeing the May 8th thing and starting to look at, you know, buying a house somewhere else.

Not that there's a house to buy, but.

Brent Jones

So I just want to thank the board for your engagement your attentiveness your inquiry.

It's it's helped us.

Our intent always on this is to keep you all well informed about what we're up to deprivatize what we're doing in the lab.

We're not sitting around twiddling our fingers but we want to be able to show you our work.

And so I want to maintain as one team that we're trying to make sure that we're going forward in a way that We do preserve student structures and systems for and resources for students to have great outcomes.

And so it's going to be hard to do that when you're talking about two hundred and thirty six million dollars over the last two years.

But you know it's the challenge that's in front of us and I'm glad you're on the on the road with us.

So thank you.

SPEAKER_21

Thank you.

We do have some action items that we need to do before we can go.

SPEAKER_17

All right.

SPEAKER_21

We have now reached the consent portion of today's agenda.

May I please have a motion.

SPEAKER_32

I move.

SPEAKER_33

I move for the approval of the consent agenda.

SPEAKER_25

I second the motion.

SPEAKER_21

Approval of the consent agenda has been moved by Vice President Swarju and seconded by Director Briggs.

To any directors how many items they would like to remove from the consent agenda.

Seeing none.

All those in favor of the consent agenda please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

This motion has passed unanimously.

Thank you.

We will now move to the action items on today's agenda.

Which I.

SPEAKER_33

Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_21

Yeah, give me a motion.

Let's have a motion.

Yeah.

Getting my papers mixed up.

SPEAKER_32

It's the motions.

The.

The amended provisions motion.

SPEAKER_24

Yes.

SPEAKER_33

I move that the Seattle School Board approve the negotiated amendment amendments to appendices C and D of the CBA between the district and local 3 0 2. and authorize the superintendent to take the associated actions necessary to implement the changes including implementing the rates specified on the identified salary schedules retroactively effective to September 1st 2023. Immediate action is in the best interest of the district.

SPEAKER_21

I second.

Well done.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_18

Tina Mead at the podium.

Is it on.

Yes.

Good evening.

Tina Mead director of labor relations.

I don't have a big presentation because I think a lot of all of the information is in the board action report.

I think the essence of this is that reasonable people will disagree and reasonable people will come together to come up with a resolution.

This was the result of restructuring to specific salary schedules in the look for the local 302 for our safety and security team where we were finding and local 302 rep representative Shelly Phillippe is also here.

So I want to thank her for her presence as well as her time and her colleagues time in coming up with this.

The essence of this is we found that in these two salary schedules, people were getting stuck.

And so during bargaining and during negotiations, we reconfigured how that happened and developed a new salary schedule that simplified it, made it a little more efficient, but we had a disagreement as to where people would have been placed.

So rather than go through a whole dispute resolution process we came together had further discussions saw where people were landing saw how it benefited certain people and then came to the resolution of let's have just an equitable across the board 1 percent increase that matched the one the wage rate increase across the other work groups in local 3 0 2. And so that's what this comes up with.

And so I'm happy to answer any questions that the board members may have.

SPEAKER_21

Any questions.

And this is introduction and action tonight.

So if you have questions ask them now.

SPEAKER_18

And it's more math like you've done math all night tonight.

SPEAKER_21

OK.

I asked for a roll call vote or can I.

Yes.

Roll call please.

Vice President Sarju.

SPEAKER_19

Aye.

Director Topp.

Aye.

Director Briggs.

Aye.

Director Hersey.

SPEAKER_08

Aye.

SPEAKER_19

And President Rankin.

Aye.

This motion is passed unanimously.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_21

We have one introduction item on the agenda.

which I believe we'll be hearing from Director Hersey.

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_08

That's right.

Do we need to read anything for this or can I just start.

SPEAKER_21

No we don't need a motion because there's an intro.

SPEAKER_08

Right on.

OK.

As a sponsor I'll first tee up with background.

This project started while I was your board president.

We began with a focus on updating health policies in the 3000 series to accurately reflect our practices and address the needs of our students.

We were able to identify and include additional topics and policies as the work progressed.

We have more than 270 board adopted policies and procedures and with this package we will get to about 5 percent of them.

We need to do this for legal compliance but also need to do this so that these policies remain a useful tool for staff and students.

Director of Policy and Board Relations Ellie Wilson Jones will introduce the item with additional detail.

But this item reflects the work of numerous staff across many district departments as well as best practices and guidance from the state.

So Ms. Wilson-Jones please take it away at your leisure.

SPEAKER_19

Thank you president.

Thank you Director Hersey.

Good evening directors.

This item would update 13 of your policies.

It would adopt one new policy as legally required and it would repeal one outdated policy that is already addressed elsewhere in the policy and procedure manual.

I won't cover all of these individually but we're here tonight for introduction.

So if there's any additional information you do need prior to action I will make sure that you have it.

Under President Rankin's leadership the board is in the midst of a policy manual review so I want to situate this board action report within that broader context.

Directors have described that one of the outcomes you're seeking in your review process is that you have more coherence in the sections of your policy manual so that you kind of open with a governance section largely you know focusing in your 1000 series and covering things like how you collaborate with the superintendent and your relationship with the community.

And then you have a set of operational policies which are concentrated in the remaining sections of your manual.

The operate operational policies are sometimes at a more granular level covering topics and including language required by state law plus other areas for which policy adoption helps support effective sort of operations in our schools.

Today's policy package consists of policies that are very much in that with that operational focus.

So things like how to support students with specific health conditions background checking successful applicants for employment and how timelines may apply to non-residents applying to enroll in Seattle Public Schools.

So that's just kind of a sampling of the type of topics covered in this package.

The focus and structure of these policies doesn't make them less important to the day-to-day experience of our students or their outcomes, but it means that the approach that we might use to developing them and maintaining them and revisiting them might be a little bit different, as President Rankin has kind of helped shepherd through the policy manual review process.

You have in this packet track changes copies of each of the policies proposed for revision.

I'm not going to review those edits but we'll spend just a quick moment giving you a kind of high level picture of some of the things that prompted these changes that are before you.

For instance, we have several policies that are proposed for revision based on changes in state law.

So we have a newer state law requiring districts to provide comprehensive sexual health education.

So we shouldn't have policy language that sort of divines our own local intent to offer that, right?

So we just need to align with the current state law.

So there's revisions to your corresponding policy, which is 2025. We also had a new state law requiring that the board adopt a board policy for serving, accommodating students with seizure disorders or epilepsy.

So that's one of the new policies.

That is the one new policy proposed for adoption.

That's 3409. We also have policy updates in the package that aren't necessarily required by state law, but are prompted by state actions and guidance.

For instance, there are several health policies that are revised consistent with recommendations from the Washington State School Directors Association.

and the health office of the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

And then finally we have policies that propose for revision based on our own district reviews or reviews that we had commissioned by our district.

So you've got policy revisions to 5000 included the packet.

Those are related to recruitment and selection of staff and those are in response to the external performance audit by Moss Adams.

So there's a Those are just a few examples of the types of changes in there and if you have any additional questions I'm not going to get to all the technical detail.

It was a very large team who worked on this but I will be sure to follow up if there are pieces the board needs to support your decision making.

SPEAKER_21

Do directors have any questions on this item.

All right.

Thank you, Ms. Wilson-Jones.

And again, we have some time, should anything arise, before we need to take action.

Done?

Oh, I was gonna give a typed up legislative review of the whole session, and I don't know why I thought this, but I thought I would have time while I was in D.C.

to write it.

Yeah, I know, so it's not here in case anybody was thinking, like, where's that thing she said she would make?

It doesn't, but it will be coming.

So there being no, oh, sorry, Director Topp.

SPEAKER_26

There we go.

I'll be super, super fast.

I have office hours on Saturday from 10 a.m.

to noon.

There is a link to sign up for a session of office hours on our board calendar.

So please sign up.

SPEAKER_21

There being no further business on the agenda, this meeting stands adjourned at 8.33 p.m.