SPEAKER_02

Good evening everyone.

Would you please take your seats?

We are about to start.

welcome welcome welcome thank you for again braving traffic thank you for everything that you had to do whether it is a sitter whether it is coming in from work to spend time with us on this important topic thank you and welcome to garfield high school would you please give dr terence hart would you please give dr terence hart and all of the garfield family a round of applause for the use of this facility We are greatly, greatly appreciative.

Before we get started, I would like to introduce our interpretation team so that they can make an announcement for anyone that might need some additional service tonight.

Interpretation team, would you please come forward?

Each one will make an announcement in their language and in our community's language, our top five languages of Somali, Spanish, Chinese, Amharic, and Vietnamese.

SPEAKER_04

As-salamu alaykum, habayin wana aksan, intakuwa ala sha'af Somali, mag'aigua Mahamud, kada alban fadya, imara, ma'at sanidinu.

SPEAKER_09

Nde mnama sha'chu, ene hayla wina heba lalo, ya ma'arina astar gwa minen, ya ma'arina turgu mutfalugu so wachka lachu, ya ta'u komen, amasag na lalo.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you to our team.

SPEAKER_02

Before we begin, it is important that we start with a land acknowledgement.

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

And again, welcome.

My name is Bev Redmond.

I am the chief of staff for Seattle Public Schools, and we are honored again that you are spending this evening with us for such an important conversation.

I want to say something to you to say that I know that this is a challenging moment for our entire community.

A lot of things are going through your mind a lot of questions are on your mind that this is a difficult topic, but our hope is to provide you with some critical information tonight.

As we prepare to present a full plan to our school board.

As we go on.

I want to say that we also made some tweaks to our program to make sure that we had an opportunity to hear from you this evening.

So with that, our agenda specifically, you're hearing the opening from me at this time.

And then we will hear from our superintendent.

We have a full agenda, so we will be taking most of the time.

And if we go just a little bit over, we hope that you will certainly understand that.

But he will be speaking for about 25 minutes in his presentation to us making the case for change.

And then we will go into some sharing ideas and questions with our own Dr. Pritchett.

And then we will have questions and answers from our senior leadership team, including Dr. Jones.

We will be here answering many of your questions.

I'm going to bounce back up to the sharing ideas and questions area.

One of the things that we heard on Tuesday is that one, you wanted to learn from each other and hear each other.

And then two, that you wanted to have a space where you can share your questions.

We are going to do all of that this evening and make sure that when you leave, it's not necessarily about technology or a thought exchange, but it's about being present in the moment.

Thank you so much again for being here.

We hope that we have a robust evening ahead of us.

Again, understand that it is challenging.

Thank you for your patience.

Thank you for your time.

And to begin our presentation this evening, please welcome our superintendent, Dr. Brent Jones.

SPEAKER_11

Thank you, Beth.

So, my goal, our goal is to really engage you all and give you information.

Tuesday evening, we had to make some adjustments.

We found that we had mismatched expectations from what we were trying to achieve and what the audience wanted to hear.

So, we made some adjustments.

We want to make sure that we give information, we give context, and then we get information from you all.

And so that's how we've been trying to move throughout this whole process.

And so I'll refer to a timeline a little later around where we are in the process.

But I want to repeat something that Bev said.

This is a challenging time for us.

We're trying to figure out how to deliver the information in a way that it's meaningful, that we can all understand kind of where we're going and what's being proposed on how we do it.

And so, give us feedback along the way.

Our goal is to really be educators.

And one of the things that we do as educators is we learn and we adjust so that we can make sure that the folks that we're trying to engage with actually have the right information, and we do it in a way that's meaningful.

And so, if you all give me that privilege, that'd be great.

And know that we heard you last Tuesday, for those of you who attended, or those of you who watched it, we've made a few adjustments, okay?

So, The board has given the superintendent, aka staff, a directive to come up with a plan that's going to bring us stability.

And one of the plans that they voted on on May 8th was to give me the charge to come up with a plan, and a plan to bring us into stability.

We're calling it a well-resourced school.

And so, today we do face fiscal instability.

That's not a question.

We are in a position where we have not enough resources to provide the types of services and programs to our students.

We're experiencing a rising cost of living, and that's evident not just in Seattle, but our sister districts in King County.

Our budget is not fully funded, and many of us have efforts and energy around talking to our folks in Olympia to make sure that education is fully funded.

And we're witnessing a reduction in school age population right here in the city of Seattle.

And we're, as a result of many things, we are experiencing declining enrollment, and our projections are saying that that's gonna happen for a while.

So we are making progress towards fiscal stability, and we've had a couple opportunities to get in front of our board, to make some proposals around how are we gonna tackle what's in essence $236 million over the last two years.

Last year, we tackled through our effort of funding our future, we tackled $131 million gap.

And we did that through a variety of means.

This year we're, excuse me, this year we're looking at $105 million gap.

And so over the last couple of years, we've had a lot of challenge for us to really reduce the structural deficit.

And so our board adopted proposals that my team and I prepared.

They voted to approve those.

We initiated our budget balancing process.

We got our budgets balanced in 2023, 24. and now we're in the 24-25 process.

Part of what we did when we walked through that process is we found, let's take a pause to make sure we're asking the community, what is a well-resourced school?

And so through this process of balancing our budget, looking at ways that we can reduce our structural deficit, we asked the community, what is a well-resourced school?

And I'll get into a little bit of that in a few minutes, but that's where we generated these ideas on how can we create a system that's well-resourced?

And it's gonna take a lot for us to do that, and you all know what's on the horizon, but this is what we're trying to share with you all, a rationale for how are we coming up with this idea of well-resourced schools and what are we gonna do about it?

So we are at a decision point.

And I think the decision point is somewhat binary.

And where we're maintaining a current system of schools right now, we have 105 schools, including 29 schools with less than 300 students.

And just a data point, none of our sister districts have any schools that are under 300 students.

It's hard, it's inefficient for us to be able to run schools at 300 students and less.

We're on the path to reducing school staffing again.

We're on the path to having to increase elementary and secondary class size.

We're on the path to have to eliminate preschool offerings.

We're also on the path to have to eliminate some of our extracurricular activities like athletics.

And we're also looking at further reductions, and this will be our fourth year of reductions in the central office, and maybe even curriculum adoptions.

And where we don't want to go is have to renegotiate contracts.

But if we go at this current pace that we're going on right now, mathematically, operationally, this is where it results in.

If we look at transitioning to a system of well-resourced schools, we're looking at facilitating the expansion of our educational strategies.

We can do more with less.

Our school is providing an equitable mix of consistent services to more students.

We're also looking at consistent, stable, and comprehensive school staffing.

We've heard time and time again around October.

October, some of our students see their favorite teachers, some of our schools are disrupted by the October shuffle that's caused by enrollment.

We can probably mitigate that with a consolidated number of schools.

Space for special education, intensive services, and pre-K in every building, that's what we can do if we think about how do we do this, how do we make this work with a transition to a system of well-resourced schools.

And equally as important, we wanna have stable budgets year after year after year.

We don't wanna have to do the draconian measures that we've had to do over the last couple of years to get us to a position of stability.

Instead, let's think about how we can consolidate our resources in a way that's meaningful.

So this whole effort around a system of well-resourced schools is about stability and sustainability.

It's not doing more, I mean, it's not gaining more, it's really holding on to what we have.

And I wanna be clear that Seattle Public Schools is a high-performing district.

Our elementary schools are high performing.

Our teachers are fantastic.

Our principals are doing great leadership.

And we want to be able to sustain that.

And to do that, I think we have to do it with a lesser amount of resources going to our schools.

So what I want to say is, This is a part of a bigger plan, a sustainability plan.

While we have school consolidation as a piece of it, these are all the pieces that we need to be looking at when we start talking about concepts like stability and sustainability.

We need to make sure that we're looking at governance and having stabilized governance.

We need to look at our funding.

We're actually coming close to being able to reduce our structural deficit.

We've had one-time funds that we've been using to plug the gap over the last several years.

Those one-time funds are gone.

Now we are left with a structural deficit that we're going to reconcile.

We need to make sure we pass our levies.

That's gonna be critically important.

We need to make sure that we have a push in the legislature to make sure, again, that we're fully funding education.

And we need to really start thinking about how are we working with our philanthropic partners so that we can make sure that the innovative practices that we have at all of our schools can be sustained.

As we look at staffing, this is the one thing that we think is really important, is how do we actualize predictable school allocations?

So how do we make sure that we have routine allocations of teachers, of educators, of critical professional school staff?

Music, physical arts, and physical education and art are something that's not commonplace at every one of our schools.

They have combinations of those, but they don't have music, PE, and art.

And we've heard that from our tour around our resource schools engagement.

Special education, having English language learner programming, expansion of highly capable access and mental health, these are all programs that we need to ensure have vitality and that they're well funded.

And as we look at operations, safety is something that's tremendously important for us now.

That's part of what we're, I wouldn't even call it almost an unfunded mandate, but that's something that we need to make sure that we're bringing stability to.

Transportation efficiency.

We have to even look at how we're using our digital resources in terms of artificial intelligence.

And then school consolidations is one piece of the puzzle.

It's a big one, obviously, but it's part of a whole system of sustainability.

So our current situation.

In 2024, our enrollment is approximately 48,000 students with 105 schools.

As we look at how we're serving our pre-K to fifth grade students, we're doing that through 73 schools.

And of 29 of these schools, as I mentioned before, are less than 300 students.

And so our proposed plan will be to consolidate schools serving K-5 students next year in 25-26.

So I'm gonna pause here for you all to get a look at this.

These are what's driving us in terms of our planning.

The plan that we're going to roll out to our school board in June is built on these guiding principles around making sure we have inclusive learning, special education and inclusionary practices.

enhanced services for multilingual learners, expanding access to advanced learning, strengthening and stabilizing our neighborhood schools.

We're looking at the building condition and learning environment.

We want to make sure we're aligned with our projected enrollment.

Looking at efficiency in terms of building capacity and service area capacity, and really allocating resources to achieve an equitable system.

And lastly, we want to make sure that we're considering regional population density and equitable regional distribution.

And so these are the criteria that we're using to come up with this, again, the system of well-resourced schools.

And so I want you all to sit with that a little bit because this is really the driving force behind us to be able to come up with an enduring system.

Complementary to that, we have policy 2200, which really speaks to supporting district-wide academic goals, placing programs and services equitably across the district, utilizing physical space and resources efficiently, and ensuring that our fiscal resources are taken into consideration.

And so this is the policy framework that's driving our guiding principles as well as our planning.

So when we look at a system of well-resourced schools, this new model will have fewer buildings.

That's the proposed plan.

Each building's capacity would be aligned with enrollment.

Schools will have more students but will not be overcrowded.

The school size that we're looking at, around 400 students, That's not a large school relative to other school districts.

That's actually a mid-sized school.

In some school districts, it's actually a small school.

Schools not in use will be secured and repurposed until needed again.

We're not gonna be selling our buildings.

We're gonna keep them in inventory.

So, what it looks like that this is what a well-resourced school looks like.

This is what, when we went to talk to community around what is this concept of well-resourced schools, They spoke to us and said, we want multiple teachers per grade level.

We'll talk about that in the Q&A session a little bit.

That means teachers can collaborate and do things to really enhance the grade level services.

Stable support staff.

We don't want to see that shift of support staff over and over again annually.

We want to make sure that we have inclusive learning for every student.

That's something that we pride ourselves in Seattle around our special education services.

We also have social-emotional learning support, making sure we have robust mental health supports for our students.

As I mentioned before, art, music, PE teachers, and having stabilized operational budgets, safe and healthy, beautiful school grounds, and make sure that our schools are neighborhood schools and they have connections to the community.

So...

But we're talking about stability we're talking about staffing in this in this context when we look at a school that has a 165 students that's on the left versus a school that has 515 students you can see the district distribution of staffing and.

These are actual schools in Seattle Public Schools right now.

So if you look from the left to the right, you'll see that the larger schools have more staffing.

And so, for example, if you look at the social-emotional learning support, you have one counselor or one social worker per school.

If you go across to the 230 and 165 person schools, they only have a half a counselor or half a social worker.

And so we wanna make sure that we have complete comprehensive staffing.

Again, we think we can do this when we consolidate our schools.

So another way to look at this, we have approximately 23,000 K-5 students in 23-24, served at more than 70 sites, 74 sites, 73 sites rather.

The current site utilization is 65%.

If we look at the transition to a system of well-resourced schools for 25-26, K-5 students would be better accommodated in approximately 50 sites.

And so this projected site utilization would be about 85%, and that would be consistent with our middle schools and high schools.

So why is school consolidation?

Too many schools serve our youngest scholars that are under enrolled.

Empty seats can lead to fewer staffing resources and more staffing adjustments.

Empty seats can lead to inequitable offerings from school to school.

If we maintain the status quo, we will need to reduce services.

So I think it's, I don't know if I'm making the case to you all or not, I don't have another plan that's more comprehensive for where we can go, but I think the case is that we're challenged with trying to provide consistency, predictability, reliability in sustainable programs and services.

So here's the timeline.

Here we are.

On the May 6th, we talked to the board around, here's what we're proposing to move forward.

We made the business case on May 8th, and here we are right now with staff community information sessions.

In June 3rd we have our board agenda, but June 10th is where we're aiming to have the preliminary recommendation to the board.

After that we'll have public reviews.

We'll have the board will need to approve a package.

The superintendent's recommendation will be to the board sometime in September, I believe, and then we'll have another 14-day review.

So there'll be other times for us to engage with you around this.

We are open to feedback.

We are open to your guidance around what we need to do, but this is a challenge in front of us.

And so, in closing on this piece, The bottom line is every student deserves a well-resourced school.

I think we all agree with that.

How we get there is where we might have some dissonance, but I think we all want to see our students have well-resourced schools.

And so, as I mentioned to the folks at Roosevelt on Tuesday, I'm with you all on this.

I understand how difficult this may be.

I understand there's different perspectives.

I understand where people don't wanna go, but we have to, we're disrupting business and we're gonna replace it with something better.

And we all need to come together as a community on how we do this.

And so if there's a way to do this differently in a comprehensive manner, Let's talk about it.

But I think that the way that we need to move right now is to think about moving from 73 schools to something less than 73 schools, probably about 50 schools.

And so as we move together, let's stay informed.

I was personally impacted by school closures as a kid.

I moved four times from...

From busing from the south end to the north end to my school being closed, I get it.

My parents had to do all kind of stuff to make sure that we got a good education.

But my education was unparalleled, unsurpassed in Seattle Public Schools because my teachers cared, my principals cared.

I think we can bring that ethic of care as we walk through these changes.

So I'm going to close now, but I'd like to...

INVITE MY TEAM UP TO HAVE SOME QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSIONS WITH YOU ALL.

AGAIN, ON TUESDAY, AS WE WERE CHALLENGED BECAUSE WE DIDN'T MEET THE EXPECTATIONS OF THE AUDIENCE, THIS IS OUR OPPORTUNITY TO HAVE A REDO, IF YOU WILL, AND GET YOUR INPUT, GET YOUR FEEDBACK.

I THINK THERE'S SOME CARDS ON THE TABLE, AND I THINK EITHER DR. PRITCHETT, PLEASE TELL US HOW WE'RE GOING TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN.

THANK YOU SO MUCH.

SPEAKER_14

Thank you, Dr. Jones.

For this next part, as Chief Redmond alluded to, we've made some changes between Tuesday and today.

We're going to ask you to do a couple things.

We have note cards on the tables.

We have pens on the tables.

We're going to ask that we take a few minutes for you to think about questions that you may have that you would like our senior staff to answer.

We will gather those cards.

We will be sorting those so that then we can get to our panel part of it.

Before we go to our panel part, and once we give about three minutes for you to write, jot down questions that you'd like us to do, we'll have some runners that are coming around.

If I can have some of those folks kind of raise their hand.

As you get finished with your cards, if you could please kind of hold them up so that we can get those and collect those so that we can have those questions ready for our panel discussion.

We're also gonna have some tabletop discussion, and we're kind of situated in clusters.

We have facilitators that are sitting within these clusters of tables.

Some of them have introduced themselves to you, but we're gonna also ask you to think about, as you listen to our presentation today, What resonated with you in the conversation that we had with Dr. Jones?

What resonated?

What are also things that you would like to know more about?

And so we're going to do a little bit of time talking about that within the table, and then we're going to transition to the panel.

We're going to start answering some of the questions that you've written down on note cards, okay?

If you have your note cards already ready, and if you have your questions, certainly you can have folks will start gathering those, but I will go ahead and give us about three minutes so that everybody has an opportunity to answer questions.

As we get to that three minutes, I'm gonna signal for our facilitators to then be working with you and talking within the table clusters around, again, one thing that resonated What are some of the other things that you'd like more information on?

Okay.

And so I'm going to go ahead and get that started with that three minutes for people just to be able to write their questions and their note cards.

If you do not have a note card for some reason, please let us know.

We have more.

If for some reason you don't have a pen at your table, we can certainly get that as well.

Again, as you finish with your cards, please raise your hand up just a little bit so that we can gather those.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay, all right, let's take about one more minute to get questions.

Facilitators, if we can start with our cluster groups, our table groups.

Again, if we can take a few minutes to talk about what has resonated in the presentation.

And what are additional things that you'd like to hear about?

What is additional information that you would like to hear?

And we're gonna take about 10 minutes for this.

SPEAKER_99

Thank you.

SPEAKER_14

Facilitators, if you have not started, please start with your table clusters.

Again, what are things that resonated and what would you like to have more information about?

SPEAKER_99

you Thank you.

SPEAKER_14

I just want to give a two-minute warning for our facilitators.

We have about two more minutes of this portion of our program.

Again, two more minutes.

I'm going to ask our senior leaders who are part of the panel to start making their way up.

It's always awkward to cut people off in the middle of conversation.

We've had a lot of opportunity to have some good conversations at our tables.

Thank you to our facilitators.

Thank you to our community members.

As we wrap up this portion of our agenda, we're gonna start to move into our panel discussion.

So as you wrote questions, we've collected questions.

We've dedicated about 30 minutes to this part of our presentation tonight.

As I'm gonna say one more just quickly, we have about 30 minutes for this part of our presentation tonight.

Question and answer panel will be about 30 minutes.

As you may know, we will probably will not get to every single question that we collected.

We tried to sort and do some groupings on similar questions, what we're hearing.

So we will continue to keep those questions.

We will answer those questions.

If we can't answer them this evening, we'll continue to use those as part of our FAQs and start to build those questions.

Our FAQs are on our website.

As we leave tonight, we'll give you an FAQ card that you can actually go directly to our website so you can start to see some of the FAQs that we've already started to build up.

But I would ask that our senior leaders come up to the front, make our way to the front so that we can start our panel discussion.

Again, this will be about 30 minutes of time to answer some of the questions that we received tonight.

Again, we may not get to all of the questions, but we're going to try and do a wide swath of questions that were asked tonight.

And again, we will continue Oh, okay, wait a minute.

Okay, this is important.

Somebody's getting ready to be told.

SPEAKER_13

So if you are the owner of a Navy Honda Odyssey parked in front of the Teen Life Center, tag number BDB6365.

At this time, can you please move your vehicle?

You are...

Some cars are being blocked in and the tours are coming.

So please move your car as soon as possible.

Thank you so much.

Again, that's Navy Blue Honda Odyssey parked in front of the Teen Life Center.

SPEAKER_14

Thank you, Dr. Hart.

All right.

I'm coming.

I'm coming.

All right.

SPEAKER_11

Yeah, please.

This is Dr. Marnie Campbell.

She's gonna be reading the questions.

Why don't you introduce yourself and what you do, and I'm gonna have the whole panel introduce themselves, please.

SPEAKER_99

Thank you.

SPEAKER_08

So I'm Marnie Campbell.

I'm a longtime school principal and leader, also have been in the central office, and a parent of three Seattle Public School students.

I had the chance to be my children's middle and high school principal at Eckstein and at Nathan Hale, and they're doing great, so thank you.

SPEAKER_14

Sarah Pritchett, Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources, graduate of Franklin High School, proud graduate of Seattle Public Schools.

I've been working with Seattle schools since 1992. All kinds of positions.

SPEAKER_11

Brent Jones, Hawthorne John Muir graduate, Superintendent.

SPEAKER_06

Art Jarvis, Deputy Superintendent for Academics.

SPEAKER_05

Kurt Bettelman, assistant superintendent for finance, a proud father of two graduates of Seattle Public Schools, Whittier Wildcats and Ballard Beavers.

SPEAKER_12

Good evening, everybody.

I'm Fred Podesta, the district's chief operations officer.

I really want to thank you all for coming.

I want to thank all the table groups.

And while you're all great, the people that are sitting at my table were the best.

And so thank you.

SPEAKER_11

All right, thank you.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you so much.

And I have the opportunity to read the questions tonight.

So again, thank you so much.

And I had a chance to meet with a group in the back and I appreciated having a chance to hear from you.

The first is more of a comment than a question, but I thought it was important to share.

Someone who's student attends West Seattle High School said, thank you for doing what should have been started years ago.

Half of empty buildings, half empty buildings are not sustainable.

So thank you for that.

Next question is, how will this reduce cost?

If you aren't selling the closed schools, how do you reduce cost?

Will teachers or staff be cut?

I'll pass this down to Dr. Buttleman.

SPEAKER_05

We can all answer this one, I think.

So with a building, there are fixed costs.

Your principal, office staff, maintenance, utilities, custodial staff, additional bus routes, food service workers all serving smaller schools.

that some of the costs that will be saved if schools are consolidated at the table I was at, which was also a very good table, Fred.

There was this need for more details on what those are.

And so just as the superintendent is working with the school board on coming up with a formal proposal in June, please be well assured that more details on that will come forward.

in terms of how those costs are being estimated, the cost savings that are being estimated, but just the cost of operating a building are significant for a school.

And so those are the operating costs that are being discussed as the savings.

There is not an assumption that the, $104 or $94 million deficit that's being projected for 25-6 is going to be solved completely by eliminating some school operational costs, but significant portions of that could be.

So that's the general buckets of cost that would be saved in a school consolidation.

Do you want to add anything?

SPEAKER_12

No, I think you covered it.

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_14

As Dr. Buttleman talked about, we do have costs that will be saved by reduction in staff.

He talked about a little bit of that around school leaders, around different costs with some of the fixed staff that are in buildings.

We hope that we can support staff though through, we have attrition that happens every year.

We have some other things.

So we're hoping that Again, the bodies of folks that will be able to keep as many people as possible.

But yes, some of those costs that we will achieve will be obviously through some staff.

SPEAKER_08

And one thing I wanna share, a really key part, and again, we wanna make this an upgrade, not just a cutting.

How do we build stronger, better schools and a stronger, better system of schools?

One of the things we designed for was ensuring that we have space in every single one of our K-5 schools for at least three classes for students receiving intensive special education services.

And I one of my departments is enrollment and so i'm very aware of this right now only 43% of our students who received this kind of service get to go to their home or attendance area school.

That means the rest of our students are going to a school that is not the school that their siblings go to that their neighbors go to, and I think about how we put a dollar value on that.

I think it's priceless.

So when we're able to add more opportunities for students to go to their neighborhood schools, there's some other aspects that are even more powerful.

So the question is, why do we not ask the state to fully fund special education?

We do.

That is a continual ask, but we also have some work to do to make our services more effective and more efficient, but that is a constant ask.

So a question from another community member here.

Have you considered staggering the consolidation over three years in order to hedge against unpredictable enrollment patterns And again, I'll speak to this one since enrollment is my department.

We are quite confident we have triangulated our enrollment predictions, our own internal enrollment.

We have two separate external agencies that have done demographic and enrollment studies for us.

We're quite confident that we have projected out and that the way potentially we have designed our schools with that 85% capacity, that we do have the capacity in case that there are any adjustments.

The analysis will be shared, but that will be shared with our school board initially.

That is the way that this process goes.

And we have run a number of scenarios.

Staggering, again, when we look at this kind of level of closure, um it is really dependent upon a full region so we have to think about what are the elementary schools that feed into those middles and those high schools so we do have to in many ways operationalize this um in in one group because there will be some adjustments um in terms of where students are going so i recognize that staggering it sounds like it might be better but we do have uh some inter interdependencies uh that make that difficult Will you be releasing a detailed line item forecast of the cost drivers that are expected to increase savings?

So I think we've spoken to that.

Any other questions about that?

SPEAKER_05

And I can just add, there's a lot of detailed information that the district tries to put out on the school budget and the process.

I brought not copies for everyone, but I brought my copies of the budget book and the purple book and the gold book.

And those of you who are really familiar with the processes know what those mean about how school staffing and the budgets work.

Today, we put the 24-5 budget book.

The proposal will be made to the school board on June 10th online, but...

ALWAYS WANT MORE AND MORE FEEDBACK ON HOW THE INFORMATION CAN BE MORE ACCESSIBLE AND WHAT INFORMATION IS NEEDED SO FOLKS CAN FEEL THAT THEY'VE GOT THE INFORMATION THEY NEED AS THEY'RE ENGAGING IN THESE CONVERSATIONS AND DECISIONS.

SO PLEASE CONTINUE TO GIVE FEEDBACK ON WHAT WOULD MAKE THE INFORMATION BETTER.

WE TRIED TO PUT SOME MORE SUMMARY LEVEL INFORMATION IN THIS YEAR SO THAT FOLKS WHO, LIKE ME, WHEN I WAS A BUSY PARENT WITH KIDS IN SCHOOL COULDN'T DIGEST ALL OF IT, BUT JUST SORT OF HERE'S THE CLIFF NOTES VERSION OF THE INFORMATION.

trying to make more information available for folks so you can engage in these conversations actively.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you.

Next question.

It sounds like more funding is needed.

How can we help Seattle Public Schools pressure state legislators to fully fund education?

And I'm gonna let, yeah, I hear that.

I hear that.

I'm gonna let the superintendent speak to that.

SPEAKER_11

So I'm gonna ask you all a question.

If we come up with a plan to approach the legislature that's a nice tight plan, would y'all join us in trying to make that happen?

Okay, so we are gonna commit to doing that.

We have other partners that are looking at how we're gonna increase our funding for our programs.

I mean, from our labor partners to our advocacy groups, we need to make sure that we're asking the right questions.

And I think one of the challenges is are we asking for too many different things, or how do we prioritize what's first and foremost?

We know that special education funding is really important.

We know that transportation funding is really important.

We know that our materials and supplies money is really important.

How will we come up with a strategy?

And I'm just seeing if you all are willing to join in that.

I think that's going to be an ongoing thing that we need to do.

However this turns out, we need to make sure that we're getting fully funded from the legislature.

So thank you.

SPEAKER_06

I guess my comment is I'd like to comment on the McCleary fix.

The McCleary fix started bringing money into the schools just before COVID hit.

So for the next three years, that was masked.

You really didn't see the full effect of what McCleary did.

McCleary did two major things that affect Seattle.

One is they limited Seattle's ability to take care of its own problems.

They said, this is all the money you can collect on levies.

And I understand why they fixed that or why they tried, but they left Seattle without being able to fix its own problems.

Secondly, they admitted that McCleary was, the prototype would need a lot of work They have been otherwise occupied for these last couple years with housing and affordable housing and some other issues, and I understand that.

But meanwhile, they've left special education, they've left transportation, they've left the basic ed prototype untouched, and that's not serving us well.

In case you wonder why you're watching this happen in places like Moses Lake and Evergreen and Blaine and Mount Baker and across the state, It is the same issue that the funding system has got to be fixed.

You cannot stop where they were in 2018 and then leave us where we are.

SPEAKER_03

I wonder who that was.

SPEAKER_08

I think I recognize that voice.

SPEAKER_05

Just as a point of context, and this is on the FAQs on the website, the K-12 spending in the state in fiscal year 2018-19 was 52.4% of the total budget, and in last year it was 43%, so almost a 10% decrease.

So K-12 is not retaining its share of the state funding.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you, our next question, how did you close this year's I think it's the Kurt show tonight, how did you close this year's $135 million gap and how much of that is multi year savings.

yeah.

SPEAKER_05

The ongoing savings of the 104 million was about $29 million reductions at central office, a few changes in transportation, increasing secondary class sizes was a part of that, some furlough days for nonrepresented staff, were a part of that.

So 29 of the 104 million was ongoing type reductions.

The biggest chunk of the one-time reductions is the school district is borrowing from its capital fund for next year, $27.5 million to sort of have a, quote-unquote balanced budget for 24-25.

And so the district needs to pay that back to the capital fund with interest by June of 26. But the legislature made a provision for Seattle and other districts, as Dr. Jarvis is indicating, that are having financial strife right now where they could, if they had the resources in their capital fund that weren't going to be impacting the capital program They could one time borrow that on a temporary basis.

Some other temporary fixes or temporary solutions were in there too, borrowing from our rainy day fund for another year.

But the district's making progress.

It went from 131 to 104 and projecting 94 into the future for next year on the ongoing deficit.

SPEAKER_08

All right, and I'm gonna walk this on down, I don't know, I think Fred might wanna answer this.

66.5 million is allocated by Seattle Public Schools to redevelop Memorial Stadium.

Could these funds be moved to keep schools open?

SPEAKER_12

No, we're making is leaning on our capital fund that again is our capital fund is Dr. Buttleman referred to we can borrow money on a temporary basis from our capital fund until we come to sustainable solutions.

We believe the best sustainable solution is this transition to a system of well resourced schools.

But one way or the other, we're going to have to resolve our ongoing expense align our ongoing expenditures to our ongoing revenue.

And that's all operating dollars that have to balance year in, year out.

Anything we do in our capital fund, whether it's improving school buildings or replacing Memorial Stadium, which is a 75-year-old building that gets used very intensely by our athletics and we hope to department and get used even by many schools.

And also...

the new venue being a better place for performing arts, that is a legally distinct set of funds that we got from the voters and made a promise what we would do with that money.

And we can't retool it to solve the general fund budget problems that we're talking about now.

And then as, no, and I understand the curiosity about this, but as Dr. Jarvis mentioned, in the McCleary fix, the state has kept our ability to ask the voters.

We are all, the voters always support our operating levies that directly address these problems.

And we are leveraging that to the maximum legal amount at separate, We're still gonna have football games.

We're still gonna have athletics.

We're still, we hope, and we're still gonna be able to support that.

So that project and other school improvements, security improvements, HVAC improvements, we will, even if we consolidate schools, we will still have many, many buildings and we will still need to make investments in those buildings.

But that is a whole separate financing scheme and you can't, we're not able to mix those revenue sources.

And one last, I think somebody made a comment about the interest.

We are able, in the cash pool, where we keep those capital dollars, we are able to repurpose interest that we earn on capital money that we have in the bank in the county's cash pool to help us with our operating, and we are doing that.

That is in the next year's budget, and we will hit that as hard as we can.

And we're looking at every possible solution to get to a balanced operating budget.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you, and we do wanna make sure, thank you for that.

We're getting to as many of these questions as possible.

Will closures result in children being bused long distances?

Will children be able to walk to school, or are kids assigned to the closest school to them?

So I can speak to that a little bit.

We've done an analysis.

Transportation is another one of my departments.

to see a potential with our different modeling out scenarios.

And students do not live further from these potentially consolidated schools than they do currently.

So we do not anticipate that students will be traveling much further.

Their access to attendance area schools will continue to be robust.

so the question is will they have to cross busy streets so we have provisions for that we actually have a student traffic safety committee that's a joint committee that meets with folks from the community from the city that we we do not want students crossing arterials so i hear that absolutely how much are we saving for each school closure

SPEAKER_05

between 750,000 and two and a half million per closure, but without sort of a formal proposal.

We don't have specifics on that yet, but that.

SPEAKER_08

So we're gonna continue with these questions.

Bear in mind that the analysis is going to go to the board in its fullness.

That is the process.

SPEAKER_99

So.

SPEAKER_11

Dr. Buttleman, will you just kind of break down what the cost would be for a school closure, how much we earn?

Just kind of walk through, give them some insight on that, where the savings come from.

Thank you.

SPEAKER_12

And I appreciate the frustration about not having the detail.

What Dr. Buttleman is alluding to is the exact savings are site specific.

And we're not, we haven't finalized on a specific set of sites yet.

So that's why it's a range.

And these conversations are about talking to the community about the considerations, the guiding principles that Dr. Jones alluded to before we finalize that list to understand kind of at the system level what the community's values are.

But we can't speak to exactly what we're gonna save until we have a specific list of buildings.

We haven't finalized that yet.

There is a lot of process left after that initial recommendation comes and many more opportunities for input.

But I know it's less than satisfying to hear this range, but until we saying, we're thinking about keeping these schools open and closing these sites in the meantime, we can't give you specific numbers, but we will when that recommendation is finalized.

SPEAKER_04

Okay.

SPEAKER_05

The rest.

Oh, so the legislature needs to be a part of that solution.

So.

SPEAKER_12

And we would very much like that assistance.

When we go make that ask, again, Dr. Jones alluded to, we're the only district in this part of the state that operates schools this small.

It's difficult.

It's not our strong...

We understand, and we love the schools too, but they are inefficient.

So as we're competing with other districts for that state funding, it is not the strongest hand for us to say, and we'd like you to provide that funding so we can subsidize schools with enrollment of 150, unlike every other state, every other district in the state.

So, I mean, again, we do need your help.

And if subsidizing smaller schools is the most important thing, that's what we wanna talk about.

But in the end, it doesn't lead us to the comprehensive set of services at a neighborhood school that we've been talking about.

It's less efficient and it's less effective.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you, so we wanna make sure that people who have asked questions have a chance to hear their questions heard.

Absolutely.

So the next question is what will we do with empty buildings?

And that's a question we hear quite a bit.

SPEAKER_12

So in the short term, we will keep our buildings in inventory.

Again, this is site dependent on what our ultimate decisions are.

We understand that they're important community assets.

We understand the green spaces around schools are important.

So we work as possible.

with each neighborhood community to come up with an interim plan and then keep looking at our long range forecast to decide.

So since our newer, more modern buildings have a capacity for more students and even with these 20 consolidations, we'll still only be at 85% capacity for elementary schools.

We don't believe, you know, over a longer haul of 40 years that we necessarily need all these buildings, but we want to keep many of them in inventory because Seattle is a growing Community and some of these over some longer period of time need may need to be reopened.

And so we would plan for the interim uses can is his potential for community centers event for parks are their community partners that might want to still use the building, but we will commit to keeping the buildings in good condition and making sure they.

remain assets in your community and that the green spaces are still available to neighborhoods.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you.

And the next question, when schools are consolidated, how does the expensive cost of bus transportation factor in?

So the state funds us depending on the number of students who ride buses and the number of locations that they go to in the average distance.

So the funding presumably would follow the students.

We would expect that we would have fewer destinations, but we would likely have more students traveling on buses.

So again, when we model this out, we find that there's a little bit of a savings because we are able to have more students on buses.

But again, students are not, by and large, living further away from their schools.

So what is the plan for under-resourced middle schools?

That's a good one.

SPEAKER_06

My quick answer to that is back to Olympia.

The prototypical model also affects middle schools, and it's going to affect middle schools hard.

Here's a piece that I want to concentrate on for just a second.

Dr. Jones used the words stability and instability.

The reality is we cannot stay where we are.

There is no choice to say we want to keep it the way it is.

If we don't get funding and fixes, if we don't take care of ourselves in the short run, we will be forced to do one basic thing, and that is continue to cut programs and staff.

It's the only option that we have.

If we can keep all the buildings open, that would be wonderful.

But to do that, if we stay where we are, and you saw the chart that Dr. Jones pointed out, that keeps us in the only option is to continue to cut people and programs.

And that one hits middle schools.

The next place we have to go if we have to cut additional staff will be at the high schools and the middle schools.

because that's the only place we have any staffing, for example, at the high school to fund some of our special programs that are not funded by the state and do what we do at our marvelous high schools.

So the next step would be to cut back to basic contract minimum, and that will hit the secondary programs because we've tried to do everything possible at the elementaries and protect the staff and the programs.

But I wanna emphasize, this is not stable.

We cannot stay here.

The next step is, that question is well-versed.

What happens to the middle schools?

What happens to the high schools?

They will pay the price of having too many elementary schools, period.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you.

Beyond enrollment size, what criteria will you consider when determining which schools to close?

So in the presentation, there was a slide, and I know it was hard to read, but it had the criteria or the guiding principles.

So when we think of creating schools that are well-resourced, we have to think about, first of all, the physical condition of the building and it's the way that it's constructed to support the kind of teaching and learning that is research-based and that we know is following best practice.

We fortunately have an external group that has done an analysis, so we have some scores for building condition, which is some of the physical, mechanical systems, structural systems, and then learning environment, which has to do with the configuration of learning spaces.

Those reports you can see on our website, but we used those scores.

We looked at the overall capacity of a building, so some of our buildings really could never, in their current state, become the size that gets us to where we think a school could and should be in order to provide what students need and deserve.

And then we look at the enrollment capacity.

So is the building we haven't, as we have said, we're at 65% usage of our buildings right now.

We are not filling our buildings.

So the next question says, are we going to have buildings that are bursting at the seams?

No, we will have buildings that are actually at the size that they were built to be.

to contain, and that includes adding additional spaces so that every building will have those intensive special ed services, which is not the case right now.

So those are the criteria.

We looked at the regional need in terms of the number of buildings that are in each region for the number of students, and we did that all with 10 and 20 year projections.

So there's the building itself, there's the enrollment, the number of students that are there to be in the building, there's the array of schools, making sure that those are distributed in a way so that all neighborhoods have access to schools.

So those are the key criteria that we've looked at.

Anyone want to add to that?

And then will increasing school enrollment require physically increasing the size of school buildings and will there be portables so again, where we have shared that we're.

Operating schools, by and large, there are some exceptions, but overall not fully utilizing our capacity, it will not, we will actually be using our buildings as they are intended to be used.

If you are keeping the buildings and paying to maintain them, how are you saving money without massive layoffs.

SPEAKER_12

You know, maintaining an occupied building is a lot different than maintaining a building just to take care of the building itself.

You have to take out the trash, you have to mop the floors, you have to fix the plumbing, even if you only have 10 students in the building.

And then all the other fixed costs that Dr. Buttleman talked about, offering meal programs, supplies delivered from our warehouse, the number of sites matters.

And those fixed costs is what we're trying to make more efficient.

I think I used the example with the folks I was talking to.

If you split your family and had to support two houses, those costs are much different.

And it relates to the building being occupied and providing all the services to serve, whether it's from security to custodial services to meal services, all the non-academic services it takes to keep a building open.

That's where we're looking for savings.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you.

And what are projections for elementary attendance, or I'm assuming enrollment as well, for the next five to ten years?

And how does this compare to current numbers?

So again, we have an enrollment page on our website that has some of the reports on enrollment.

We have, typically our enrollment reports have three lines that you can look at as sort of very conservative and middle of the road and then more optimistic.

But in all three of those, we envision attrition in terms of our enrollment that has to do with births in King County and looking at those.

And then we also calculate, we have a kindergarten, we call it kindergarten capture rate.

So of those live births, what do we typically enroll at kindergarten?

that five years later.

And then we also know grade over grade what the attrition rate is.

So we can pretty much identify quite accurately what our enrollment will be.

And all of those enrollment factors have us losing enrollment.

We are also working closely with the City of Seattle and the Seattle Comprehensive Plan.

We are aware of the housing that is being added to Seattle and are factoring that in as well.

We worked with an organization called FLOW, which has done a lot of our capacity and demographic predictions that work really closely with housing, housing stock in the city and housing that's coming into the city and the kinds of units we know where we tend to gain students from the different types of housing that are being built.

So all of those things are taken into consideration when we make those projections.

Yes.

So that's an excellent question and I will make that as the last, maybe the last question.

How do we get families to come back to Seattle Public Schools?

We absolutely see ourselves as a public service.

We are here to provide education and the best education we can for our students.

We're most often thinking about our students for whom this is the school system they will go to and making sure that they have what they need and deserve as students, as citizens within our city, in our communities.

So our best bet is to create the strongest, healthiest schools we can, which is what we've shared with you tonight.

Schools that have all of the options, especially in elementary, music, art, PE, those electives that we know we want our students to have.

That we have healthy, strong teaching teams at every grade level that are able to provide opportunities for support and extension for all of our students.

Those are the things that we're going to do to make our schools strong.

Moving into the future, those are the things we've been doing, but we're working closely with our instructional teams to make sure that our schools are providing the best possible education and supports.

And I will pass it along to other folks.

SPEAKER_11

Yeah, so that's a great question.

We don't have a comprehensive alternative model.

And so if there is a set of strategies that's comprehensive that recognizes our current state, our current instability, we are very interested.

We're looking at this in relation to...

urban districts across the country, we're all kind of faced with the same thing.

No urban districts I know of have come up with a formula to be able to reconcile the instability that they're facing.

And so we stay open.

We want to be in partnership.

We're figuring out how to do that with you all.

We're so glad that you're interested and you're passionate about this.

Right now, I have a bunch of smart folks here.

We have a bunch of smart folks in the city.

There has not been an idea that's comprehensive enough to say, this is how we can proceed to bring stability, predictability, consistency.

We wanna disrupt business as usual and replace it with something better.

If there is that comprehensive other idea, alternative, we are all about that.

And so, we wanna make sure we stay open to possibilities.

There may be something that we haven't unearthed, but at this point in time right now, this, frankly, is our best thinking, And this is the way we're going to get to, I believe, stability.

And it's not necessarily getting us to the perfect state.

It's just getting us sustained for the next several years.

So I just want to say thank you all.

And I'm curious, and I hope you all can give us feedback around those of you who went to the session that we had on Tuesday at Roosevelt, if this is a better format Let us know.

We're trying to be responsive and trying to make sure we are honoring your all's concerns, wants, wishes, desires, needs, fears, and we know that change is difficult.

But we're here, we're in it.

trust us if there was another way to go about this we would we would pursue it because we know how uh challenging this is how much it's going to disrupt uh our routines and our consistency but i think at the end of the day it's going to be our district is going to be better because of it and so uh i just want to recognize a few folks really quickly i know my staff is here i just want to give a shout out anybody who's a sps staff please raise your hand thank you for what you do All these folks that raised their hand are part of the team that's working on this.

And we also have a couple of current board members and former board members in here.

Please raise your hands.

We're gonna recognize you.

And so...

Between you all, us, we're in this together, and I'm just hopeful that you all will have faith in us to come up with the best alternative, if there is one.

For right now, we're all in on this, and our board will give us guidance around our next steps, but we're gonna keep you all engaged along the way.

And so that's our goal, and if there's ways that we can improve in terms of engaging you all, let us know.

So that's where we are.

So Bev, I know you have us on a clock, and I want to give you the opportunity to close us out.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you very much.

And before I pass it to Chief Redmond, we will be updating our frequently asked questions on our website based on these questions.

We want to be responsive.

So on your way out, we have some folks from our public affairs team that can hand you QR codes that will take you directly to the FAQ portion of our website.

We will be updating as we process these questions and hopefully be able to provide even more detailed responses.

So thank you for being here and for asking your questions.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you all again for traversing traffic, for coming here.

I know how important this conversation is to you.

Again, thank you for tolerating our tweaks to make this a better experience for you.

We are on our way next.

This conversation moves to Chief Sealth on Saturday morning.

So we will be engaging there, having this similar conversation.

So thank you again.

You also have an email from me.

Remember I said this was not about the technology piece, but if you have other thoughts, there is a link inside of that email that takes you to an idea exchange or that thought exchange where you can leave some additional comments.

I want you all to be safe.

Thank you so much for giving us your time.

We really, really do appreciate it.