Seattle School Board Work Session - Feb 23, 2021

We will be calling the board meeting to order in a moment.

Could we please hold comments while SPS-TV takes this live.

After a five-second pause I will call us to order.

Tansi.

Okimao.

Pii Sim.

Nitsisi.

Nikason.

Hello my name is Duran.

Director DeWolf thank you for being here.

I'm now calling the board special meeting to order at 431 p.m.

I'd first like to acknowledge that we are on ancestral lands and traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish people.

For the record I'll call roll beginning with President Hampson.

Here.

Director Harris.

Present.

Thank you.

Director Hersey.

Here.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Present.

Director Rankin.

I'm here.

Thank you.

Okay.

Superintendent is also present as well as staff will be presenting as we move to the agenda.

This meeting is being held remotely consistent with the governor's proclamation allowing meetings such as this one to be held remotely.

The public is being provided remote access today by phone and through SPS-TV by broadcast and streaming on YouTube.

Today's meeting is also being recorded To facilitate this remote meeting I will ask all participants to ensure you're muted when you are not speaking.

There will not be a public comment opportunity and staff will be working to administer the meeting and may be muting participants to address feedback and ensure we can hear from directors and staff.

We will begin with a work session on transportation today.

And so moving into our work session on transportation I will hand it over now to Chief Financial Officer JoLynn Berge to begin the staff presentation.

And in about about slide 11 slide 22 and at the end I've reserved some time for questions.

And so just hold those until then.

And at the end we'll check in about kind of next steps and where do we go from here.

And so with that Chief Berge I'll turn it over to you.

Thank you Director DeWolf.

Good afternoon everyone.

So on the agenda slide I just want to Let everyone know that we'll be talking about some transportation expenditure and financial information.

Discussing what the financial impacts have been from the transportation formula over the last few years.

We'll provide some option school data.

We'll quickly touch on legal requirements.

We'll then move into some efficiency by program information data.

And then last we'll touch on where the legislature is on transportation funding.

and some of the COVID-related impacts as well.

Before I turn it over to Chief Podesta for his opening remarks I would like to extend my thanks to our staff who have worked tirelessly those last two weeks to do an infinite amount of data gathering for this work session.

That includes Ellen Reyes and Hunter Maltese in the Transportation Department.

Ashley Davies and her staff.

Sherri Johnson and Linda Sebring in the Budget Office.

This has been a great example of cross-collaboration between departments.

So with that over to you Chief Podesta.

Thank you Chief Berge and thank you directors for your time today.

I was noting that almost a year ago to the day I came to the board at a regular legislative meeting to introduce transportation service standards for the following school year.

And that's something that occurs every year and is usually a discussion about changes at the margins because we're opening a school building or we're moving students to an interim building in support of our capital program.

And I think this discussion today is really welcome Even if it's under the duress of budget challenges it's still talking about our service standard and how we can deploy our transportation resources most effectively to deliver the best outcomes for students particularly students furthest from educational justice.

And so this is a great discussion to have even if it's under challenging circumstances.

And the funding issues and the expenditure issues are complex and the operational issues so.

You very much appreciate the board's time to dig into the details to think about how we can best administer this program.

I'd like our new transportation manager who joined the district in September Hunter Maltes.

Thank you JoLynn for thanking his effort or his team and yours and Ashley Davies' work as well has really dug into this work and I he's had an opportunity to speak to the board at operations committee meetings but I'd like to introduce him Tonight he joined us from with experience from other districts and has helped us look at some of these issues in new ways.

And I will turn it over to Hunter now to start getting details of the transportation funding and the structural issues we're trying to address.

Thank you Chief Podesta.

Good afternoon Superintendent Juneau President Hampson members of the board.

I'd like to go over if we can go to the next slide please.

Just kind of give you a 30,000 foot elevation idea of how the transportation funding model looks like.

OSPI we use something called STARS which is a Student Transportation Allocation Reporting System and it's essentially a count system that we do three times a year.

We have three periods spring fall and winter and that is how our allocations are determined.

And it's also based off of one of two things.

We are either paid based off of our prior year expenditures or whatever our actual costs are that the STARS model.

We are we're paid the less of the two.

Generally the rule of thumb with the way STARS is is we are usually compensated for most districts around 80 percent.

However Seattle's one of those outlier districts.

We don't really fall well within the STARS funding model.

So we are never fully compensated.

But the way STARS is heavily weighted is really the number of riders we have that we're transporting to and from and also the number of destinations.

Built into that formula we also put the stops and the calculation works in a regression analysis between the distance between the stops and the destinations.

It does not take into account any buses or equipment that we use.

So if we are able to route more efficiently or reduce the number of buses it does not fall into how we get funded.

Our funding is basically purely off of the number of students we transport and the number of destinations we have.

And next slide.

That will be mine.

This is Linda Sebring District Budget Director.

So as Hunter mentioned our funding from the state is based on the number of students we transport and the number of trips we provide.

And as you can see from this slide we've shown this one before.

Sorry I keep hearing somebody's feedback.

Our ridership and our number of trips have been going down.

So this does not include Any taxis or other services.

This is all yellow bus and metro transit ridership over time.

So we've added in here our district poverty percentage which also shows that we think these two may be linked to some extent that the district's poverty percentage has been going down and the number of students riding the school bus even though we had an increase in enrollment is going down.

The special program student trips that is Again Yellow Bus Service for special education students.

Bilingual programs.

Gifted programs.

Homeless or early education programs.

So anything that is not to from school for regular ed students.

Next slide please.

So we've shown this slide before as well.

This is As Hunter had said we receive funding based on the STARS calculated which is in the gray shading or prior year expenditures whichever is less.

So the last time our prior year expenditures was what the funding basis was for the 15-16 school year.

From 16-17 to now we are funded based on the STARS funding formula.

And as you see on that bottom line percent of prior year expenses And this is prior expenses.

So for 2021 that 70.8 percent of funding from the state would be 70.8 percent of the previous year's expenses.

So next slide.

Here's a new slide that we have not provided to the school board yet.

And what we're showing here is our budgeted revenue and expenses and how well it lines up with our actual.

And also see that there's some big changes.

So in 17-18 our revenue expenses our shortfall we had budgeted to be about 1.9 million short in revenue covering all of our expenses and we ended up being 4.5 million.

There were some changes made to our contract I believe.

In 18-19 we were almost covering our costs by .9 900,000 and we ended with 400,000 overspent.

And then 3 million for 19-20 and ended with 2.5 million.

Then we jumped to 2021 where we budgeted a shortfall of 17.7 million.

And we know that with COVID that is going to be a much different number.

The budget or the actual will not align with the budget that well.

But what I wanted to explain was how we jumped from almost covering our expenses to being significantly underfunded and having a structural deficit here.

So as you can see from the top the major revenue changes was the legislature in 18-19 and in 1920 gave us some bonus money if you will.

When the McCleary decision came through to fund districts we received a one-time funding increase for transportation of nine million dollars.

The next year in the legislative session the legislators said oh that was a mistake.

We shouldn't have given that to you.

I'm paraphrasing.

But we all said wait we can pass those increases through to transportation as well.

And then they came back and said okay we'll hold you harmless for 5.9 million of that.

But that's only for one more year.

So we had a significant increase in 18-19.

We had almost half of that two-thirds of that in 19-20 and then that was not repeated.

As At the same time we had some expenditure changes happening to us in 19-20.

We were having some challenges with First Student being able to attract and retain bus drivers and it was affecting our service standards so we agreed to an 11 percent contract increase.

And we added five additional transportation services staff some transportation specialists and two field staffs to help resolve our problem in getting students to school in a timely fashion.

And 2021 there is a 10.3 percent increase in first student contract cost as well as 8 additional bus routes that were added.

Next slide.

So this is a slide you've seen this one we've provided it before of our first student contract increases and what is driving the contract costs.

We've had an increase and most of it had to do with labor and being able to get the service provided to the level we need it.

So in 17-18 when we switched to two tiers and started providing higher levels for first student.

It added you know 32 buses at 2.4 million cost.

Then in 18-19 we had a cost of living increase come through for first student.

19-20 again we had a significant increase in the contract cost of 11 percent.

And in 20-21 we had a 10.3 percent additional contract cost.

So all of these things are contributing into pushing up our annual cost for transportation in its current form.

Next slide.

And this is back to Hunter.

Thank you Linda.

So for the 2021 cost for a bus based on 180 day school year all the equipment we use is through chartered through services.

We are right now using First Student.

Our anticipated costs for this year is $98,500 for the bus and approximately $3,500 for the $3,500 for the fuel.

So $102,000 is going to be the average cost for the bus.

On a regular school year prior to COVID we were operating around 367 routes and we had roughly a 10 percent standby.

So we were covering the cost for roughly 400 buses.

Next slide please.

This shows a breakdown of the costs for fiscal year 19-20.

And in the first set of columns we have the bus transportation which last year was provided by both First Student and Durham.

As you can see the general costs for bus and fuel with the busing for general ed education was $15.6 million.

We served transportation for 6,831 students.

And the average breakdown cost is $2,283 per student.

When we look at our special education transportation total costs were $19 million.

We served about 1,367 students and a breakdown cost per student is around $13,900.

For ORCA cards which we have pretty much for all of our high school and a good portion our middle school students the only ones that we're providing transportation On those two sectors would be for special needs homeless and transitioning.

We spent $1,703,000.

That covered for 7,392 students and the per-student cost for that was $230.

Our alternative service providers were Zoom HopSkipDrive and ALC.

These are basically vehicles that would transport students.

For our Gen Ed we transported 207 students on average for a total cost of $296,000.

And the per-student cost for Gen Ed was about $1,400.

For special education students we covered 376 students for a total cost of $1,568,000 and a per-student cost average of about $4,172.

Next slide.

Thank you Hunter.

So JoLynn Berge Chief Financial Officer.

I just wanted to talk about that there's really two pieces to transportation that we're talking with you about today.

One is before COVID.

So the transportation formula has issues even before we put COVID issues on top of that.

We know that the transportation formula is providing less funding compared to total revenues.

Linda talked about that a moment ago.

This is an issue for many districts across the state not just for Seattle.

So that's before COVID impacts.

There is a common understanding with OSPI and legislators that the formula needs to be redone but you know it's moving slowly.

It's moving too slowly.

They haven't started that work.

They did a study.

That study really just got shelved.

They they haven't done anything with it.

They really have got to get moving on re-looking at the formula because districts are falling further and further behind each year.

And the formula continues.

That gap in that formula and actually what districts need can needs continues to grow year after year.

And then we have the COVID impacts on transportation.

So we are incurring costs for meals and instruction and individual students as well as to maintain core staffing.

So we'll talk just a little bit later about what the outlook is legislatively for funding for the school this current school year and for next school year.

So on the next slide we have some information about the financial impacts of eliminating option school yellow bus service.

So we just kind of wanted to you know we're going to start building out on the option school data that the board asked us to provide.

So depending on the final school board decision financial savings could range from 1.1 million to no savings depending on what is moved forward.

There is significant costs by providing multiple bus routes with small numbers of riders.

So right we know that if we do a lot of routes with a few riders that's a high cost kind of situation.

So our initial proposal would have saved about $740,000.

And then the rest of the bullets on this slide just kind of walk through the history of how we got to this work session where we're talking about transportation in a larger way.

But it really it started out as a board idea about option school yellow bus service.

And then we kind of went through some equity lens review.

The board asked for some more refined data.

It was about you know South Shore K-8 and Licton Springs should be set aside as schools that should not be impacted.

And then we're having further conversations with the board tonight and those conversations will continue about how they want to move forward with either option school transportation other ideas for transportation and just the budget in general.

So on the next slide I'm going to turn it back over to Hunter.

Thank you JoLynn.

So on the data on option school transportation for the 2020 school year we had 7,029 students enrolled in option schools.

Oh wait a second.

Sorry Hunter.

We were supposed to pause at slide 11. I messed up my own recommendation.

Back to you Director DeWolf.

Thank you so much Chief Berge.

So I'll start with we'll go in alphabetical order.

So we'll start with President Hampson.

I have actually But you know sit on the edge of my seat and I don't have any I don't have any questions yet.

Sure I will but I don't have any questions yet.

Understood.

Thank you President Hampson.

Next is Director Harris.

I would like to listen to the conversation from my other colleagues and round back if I could please sir.

Thank you.

Understood.

Thank you to Director Hersey.

No questions for me at this moment but could you please loop back to me.

Director Rankin.

I have questions right now.

Just a couple.

One.

is well first of all a huge huge thank you to staff for getting this data together.

I know that as Chief Podesta mentioned at the beginning in the meeting the circumstances under which we are having this meeting was you know not super ideal but definitely appreciate the information here and the opportunity to have this discussion and for the public to understand what the different factors are and why this is something that we're looking at.

So big big thanks.

I am I have questions about the STARS compensation formula at the state.

And if we or the state have identified the factors that need to change to make that formula work better for districts.

And then also Seattle being an outlier we are the biggest district in the state by a pretty significant amount by we're a third again as large as Spokane which is the next largest.

And then I think after that is Tacoma maybe.

But we're significantly bigger.

So in terms of scaling up the formula I'm wondering if there is any consideration or movement on the part of the state legislature to understand the different impact that are like that we are truly outliers not just in what we're asking for but the impacts of the formula isn't isn't actually adequately serving us And it's short for everybody but it's even more of an impact on Seattle if there's any kind of conversation that takes that into consideration.

And then a comment that I want to make about who rides buses is that there are so many reasons to provide more inclusive education for students receiving special education services.

One of them is the cost that it takes to transport students away from their home school because we as a district relegate services to locations instead of serving students where they live.

So I'm just kind of throwing that out there as part of the larger discussion about the impacts the the but the budgetary impacts that serving students in you know saying we don't serve some students at some schools is as has has a budgetary impact as well as not being best practice for students.

So that's it.

Thanks.

So Director Rankin I'll I'll try to answer some of the questions and then maybe Hunter might want to add his his thoughts.

I think that there is a realization that the regression analysis and the black box of the expected cost model is likely what's not helping.

Right.

So so you have this expected you know you're funded at the lesser of your prior year costs or the expected cost model.

So when our ridership goes down what does the expected cost model tell the state's formula.

It says oh your cost should be going down because you have less riders.

Right.

So your cost should be decreasing.

And what the formula the model that the state uses does not increase your revenue relative to the actual increases that we're experiencing in districts.

Particularly for contracted transportation So there's a disconnect between the actual revenue growth to mat — and this is across our system right.

Not just transportation but the revenue growth that we're experiencing from the state is not keeping pace with our actual expenditures.

So I think that they're the regression analysis that they're using for the expected cost model we are a peer group of one.

So they're only using our data.

When we look at other peer groups and other expected cost models for other groups of districts say like Renton or Tacoma they do have peer districts across the state.

And so basically they're funded at whoever is the most efficient at the time which is probably the person who had the last negotiated agreement.

Right.

It kind of all fits together like that.

So Hunter do you have thoughts that you'd like to add quickly for Director Rankin.

Yeah you make thank you JoLynn you make a very good point about the fact that we we are a standalone.

We have no cohorts to be judged against.

And it's interesting that based on the STARS regression model that they they literally will underfund us every time because of this because we do not have any other districts to be compared against.

Also the the demographics of Seattle you know we're relatively small square miles of of of a district with a hundred and four or six school sites where we have multiple services all over the city and that adds to our cost for the transportation because they're where do we send students for their best especially special needs students for their their to best meet their needs.

That adds to our costs as well.

Also the fact that a lot of our schools don't have a large bus ride zone.

We have a one-mile walk zone from the schools so that also impedes our funding because we are not able to have the density of ridership that we'd like.

So there's a lot that we can do to look at that see about how we can have more efficiency by possibly having combined routes changing bell times at schools.

We'll address this later on but there's a lot of things we can look at to reduce costs because if we do combine routes right there we eliminate $102,000 by eliminating the bus

Any more questions Director Rankin.

Not at this point.

Thanks.

Okay.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Thank you.

Yeah I have I have several questions actually.

So I'm going to go back to slide 3 when you explain that the funding is heavily weighted on two factors.

This is slightly different than what we heard from Linda back on February 1st at the Audit Finance meeting.

There was three factors at the time then.

There's number of riders number of destinations again.

But there's also how long our bus routes are.

Is that still has that changed or is because that's not bulleted here.

I want to just see if there is that still something that we should think of for that formula.

That is that is actually the distance is a calculation.

It's not one of the really the heavy factors on how we are funded is ridership and destinations.

Distance does play a role but it does not play as great of a role.

Okay but it is part of the equation still.

Correct.

There are a lot of things that play into the STARS funding model but the big ones are because we also have all the number of stops we have in relationship to the destination the school that we're serving plays in how we're funded.

But what seems to be the most heavily weighted factors in our funding are number of students we transport and the destinations.

And when you say destinations does that include each individual stop along the route to pick up students or are we just counting their stop at the school.

That's a school site.

A school site okay.

And it has to be served by a yellow bus.

So we have to have a destination that's served by a bus.

Okay.

And then on page 4 this this graph was also shared this slide was also shared at the Auditor Finance meeting but the numbers were different.

The numbers for regular education students and special program students on this slide they're about half of what they were.

at the Audit and Finance Committee meeting.

Is there what is what made the change there.

Back then it was 24 versus 10 and so on.

I'm sorry I don't mean to interrupt.

So what we were asked to do is the previous numbers were trips that students took.

And so what we did is we changed it into number of students.

So if you're going to school from home to school in the morning that's one trip.

From school to home that's another trip.

We we thought of looking at it from a different perspective which is the students impacted as opposed since we were looking at district poverty.

Okay.

Now that explains why they're cut in half.

Okay.

Thank you.

Next question on page 6. Expenses for 2021. It's 50 million dollars.

I'm wondering how do we have that for this school year considering we were not really in service.

Was that projected.

Was that last year actually that we're counting as 20 as 21 2021. I'm just confused at how we.

So.

So that was what we budgeted for 2021 before COVID.

Remember we were putting together budgets last February and March and we got shut down the end of March.

So we still weren't sure whether we were coming back or not.

So that was that is normal operations.

The reason we're still continuing to show that number is because when we get back into school we have some structural issues with our transportation program that will Bring those numbers right back where they are if we don't change our programs.

And I guess that explains the next page where it says we increased 8 additional routes.

Now that was also with the expectation of what we were going to need.

Correct.

That's correct.

Again when we built the budget we were building this budget usually towards the end of February first part of March and it didn't align really well with COVID and all of the unknowns that it has brought.

Okay.

On page 8 where you talk about how much a bus costs it's like the bus is 98,000 fuel is 3,000 total.

How many students typically fit on a bus.

Is it how many.

Our type C's I believe can fit up to 72. But again remember that's with 3 per seat.

So a lot of times we're not going to have 3 per seat.

Also with the nature of how our the way our schools are set up being so close we generally don't have a lot of buses that are a full capacity.

With our Type A buses which are special SPED buses those are 20-seaters but if they are wheelchair lift buses they're generally anywhere from 10 to 12-seaters.

Okay.

Last question on page 9. You went through the first student Durham ORCA alternative.

What was that in lieu section for about.

The in-lieu section is where we have families decide to transport their students and we pay them in-lieu charges per mile charge basically based on the federal rate per mile.

And then they take their own children to school and we reimburse them.

And that is all my questions.

Sorry.

Thank you.

Thanks Director Rivera-Smith.

I'm going to go back to Director Harris.

Start there.

Thank you.

Been brought up before if we're still in the process of school and and are we I want to clarify here.

Are we talking about potential elimination of bus service for year 2021 or 21-22 And again how do we keep the trust with our families that are signing up for schools with this unknown sort of Damocles hanging over their head.

As opposed to addressing large-scale changes in our transportation standard formula and also addressing how to make option schools more diverse.

which are two huge pieces and then we can talk about dual-language programs etc.

But can we put this off a year so that we are not breaking trust with a whole lot of folks that are signing up for option school potentially without knowing that transportation does not come with it because we have not done engagement.

Chief Berge did you understand.

A question in there.

Yep.

So Director Harris it's really up to the board to decide that.

It's up to the board to decide that.

For 2021 if we return to an in-person model there I'm not there could be impacts on how many students we can put on buses.

That would still have to be worked through because of social distancing requirements.

The same in the fall.

Those are kind of COVID-related issues.

But the actual service components is a board decision.

It may be a board decision but have the other and I guess maybe this is a better question for Superintendent Juneau.

Have the other impact of our families signing up for option schools without the knowledge that these services may not be available and how have we communicated to those folks and have we set up a meeting with the option school principals pursuant to their requested letter.

Thank you.

Okay.

And just one clarification Chief Berge.

Can you clarify because I think there's some conflation happening here.

My understanding is that the conversation is about the prioritization.

So folks like students receiving special education services McKinney-Vento students in out-of-home care slash foster care however we terminate EL students tier you know students that go to Tier 1 schools or FRL students that the vast that those students would still be served based on our kind of fiduciary and legal responsibilities.

The the conversation I thought was about the the students that are using options schools transportation but do not fall into those categories.

So maybe some clarification would help.

Yep just really quickly.

There is a slide coming up.

So we're legally required to provide transportation to Foster McKinney-Vento and then students special ed students who in their IEP.

So maybe not a speech-language student who's who's qualified for special ed for speech-language but a student who in their IEP is determined that we need to transport them.

All of those are protected by legislation.

And then if she could Pedroza might be able to address the other question just kind of about how we notify Adoption School families.

Yeah that's what I was going to do JoLynn is just see if Concie's on the line.

Yeah we sent out a communication through our communication through the regular channels when we advertised all of the information regarding the extension because that was a request from the board to extend the open enrollment period.

So we did extend that by two weeks and within that we embedded transportation updates and information within that communication.

So just to clarify before I move to Director Hersey.

Legally required MKV students receiving special education services and requiring their IEP and foster but not required to for students with EL services or FRL.

That's correct.

And I think that Chief Narver is also on and will answer.

There will be a slide for that that we can speak to in just a moment.

Sure.

And I think that with respect to the conversation.

Sorry I'm up.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I understand we'll have some conversations about equity too and I imagine that that might be the overlay with our FRL and ELL students.

So Director Hersey over to you.

Excuse me.

Might I get an answer from.

Superintendent Juneau about a meeting with the option school principals please.

I think we can get to that in our community engagement and next step.

So I'm going to get it over to Director Hersey because we're at 5 0 8.

Yeah for the sake of time.

For the sake of time I can hold my question.

Let's keep moving.

Okay.

Let's go back to you Chief Berge.

All right.

So I believe that we were on slide 12. We'll move to slide 12 and back to you Hunter.

Thank you.

So this data is about the option school transportation that we provided.

Last year we had 7,029 students that were enrolled in option schools.

For the 2,353 of those students were within the walk zone 2,973 were eligible for transportation.

The remainder of those students that aren't listed here are ones that were outside of the boundary area or the walk zone so they would have to be transported by their families.

Now one of the issues that we have that's been brought up was about option schools and the attendance area.

And generally they should be limited to the middle school attendance area.

But I'll give you a perfect example.

If we take a look at Louisa Boren and Pathfinder Well Pathfinder as I understand was there first as an option school so it served both the Denny and Madison attendance areas.

Then Louisa Bourne was was built and they also served the Denny and Madison areas.

So that's one of the reasons why we have some of these overlays.

Some of the stuff is just grandfathered in because there weren't others option schools available at the time.

So if you looked at Licton Springs that covers Eagle Staff and Whitman and also some Eckstein and Jane Addams.

But TOPS also covers Meany and Washington.

Hazel Wolf Wolf covers the Janes Addams.

And then there's some grandfathering left over from Eckstein.

So it's not just always going to be the middle school attendance area that these schools are in.

There there are some overlays with other previous attendance areas as well.

So I just wanted to make sure that everyone was clear on that.

And next slide please.

Hi this is Ashley Davies Director of Enrollment Planning and going to talk a little bit about option school diversity and some of the enrollment and capacity implications as it relates to discussions around transportation.

So in the materials provided for this session there is a a chart that compares the overall district demographics race and ethnicity as well as EL and special education and free and reduced price lunch percentages compared to all of our option schools.

And so generally speaking our option schools are less diverse than the neighborhoods that surround them.

And that is shown in both this chart and then there are school-by-school tables.

And so these school-by-school tables the dark color will show the geo-zone for a particular school and then the light color is the actual enrollment at the option school itself.

And so we have that for each and every one of the option schools.

Again this is just as a whole.

If you look at each of the option schools there are differences between them.

Additionally the district free and reduced price lunch percentage is 32 percent.

Five of our option schools have a free and reduced price lunch percentage that is greater than the district average and those schools are listed here.

Cleveland South Shore Orca Boren and Licton Springs.

On to the next slide.

And so as we have talked about option schools we know that option schools don't have an attendance area just like the rest of our attendance area schools.

That means that every student based off of our enrollment policies is assigned to an attendance area school and they have the option to apply to an option school but If we were to make any changes to the option schools that would mean that families always have the option to go back to their attendance area school.

And so one of the things we took a look at is what could be some of the potential impact on some of those neighborhood schools.

So this next slide shows the number of schools and again these are attendance area schools that have over 100 students currently attending an option school.

And for each category of students have included the elementary middle and high school.

So Green Lake over 100 students who are assigned to Green Lake again meaning Green Lake is their neighborhood school meaning that at any point in time if they decided they wanted to go back to Green Lake they could apply to go back to Green Lake.

So 100 students who live in that over 100 students who live in the area are attending option schools.

And then the middle school level you have Madison Jane Adams and Denny.

High school Rainier Beach.

And then for the 76 to 100 students that's John Rogers Roxhill Wedgwood Lowell.

Middle school Whitman Aki Kurose Nini.

High school is Franklin.

And then Olympic Hills Olympic View and Sandpoint all have 50 to 75 students attending option schools.

And the next slide.

And so building off of that if students did decide to return to their neighborhood school who are currently attending an option school we looked at how that would impact capacity.

I do just want to note that.

As you all are aware most of our schools are crowded across the district.

And so we've kind of categorized into different buckets how different schools might be impacted.

But for the most part many of these schools and each each of these lists are already close to if not over capacity.

So the first column indicates the schools That if 10 percent of the transportation-eligible students decided to go back to their neighborhood school these schools here would be overcrowded.

And then the next is if 25 percent returned back to their neighborhood schools these schools would be overcrowded.

And then of course you would include the column previous.

And the last one is if 50 percent or more students decide to return then these schools would be overcrowded.

Again just want to clarify that many of these schools are already overcrowded to begin with.

Next slide.

Thank you Ashley.

Chief Berge had mentioned this earlier but we are mandated by federal and state law to provide transportation to students whose IEPs have designated transportation as a related service.

We're also mandated to provide transportation for students who are homeless or in transition.

Outside of that we transportation guidelines are set forth by the state.

We are provided funds for transportation based off the STARS model but it is a privilege not a right.

So what we are mandated to provide transportation for like was mentioned earlier are our special needs students with IEP's McKinney-Vento and homeless and transitioning students.

Outside of that we are not federally or state mandated to provide transportation services but we do based off the fact that we do get reimbursed.

But that's not we have the ability to set what transportation standards we are going to offer within the school district.

Next slide please.

One of the ways we're trying to determine on how we can improve transportation efficiency we are exploring school bell times.

Now everything that we're saying here is going to have to be done with modeling which will take time.

But a perfect example is let's say we have two elementary schools that are abutting one another but we don't have capacity to fill buses for both schools because of the limited number of available riders in those areas.

If we were to change the bell time say 15 or 20 minutes between the two schools we could pick up students from both locations drop one set of students off at the first school take the other set of students over to the next school.

That right there would eliminate a bus saving the district potentially $102,000.

We've also are going to model on extending times between the tiers from one say 1.25 hours.

That allows us to go out and.

pick up more students.

One of the things that we do have to contend with in the city is our traffic congestion and we cannot really build some routes to be as efficient as possible because of the constraints of going between one and two tiers.

So that's another way we could reduce costs.

Again I'll go back to the fact that we are our funding is based off of really ridership and destinations.

How how we get those students there.

The calculations don't factor that in.

So if we can do it with 2 buses or we can do it with 1 bus or we do it with 4 buses we will not change our funding that we get from the state.

The biggest way we can really save money is if we were to look at the possibility of going back to a 3-tier system we project at the minimum we can reduce the number of buses on the street by between 35 and 70 buses.

And again for each one of those numbers that's $102,000 in savings per bus.

So we are conservatively calculating that we can stay between 3.1 up to 5.8 million dollars a year.

By doing that we reduce the number of buses that we have stuck in traffic.

We'd reduce the cost for our athletic program which has been going up year by year since we've gone to a from a three down to a two tier system because we don't have the availability of equipment for athletics.

So athletics has to go and charter through outside agencies for their buses.

Another way is routing.

If we do a situation right now all of our routes are built on eligibility so routes are built based on who is eligible to ride within a zone not who rides.

So if we find a method of having families enroll their students to ride buses we can actually build our routes based off of a known commodity of who we're actually going to transport.

If we can modify our service standards maybe for longer bus runs right now the states Again the state asks that we try to keep it with under an hour but there may be some extended waiting circumstances where it might be an hour and 10 minutes that student may have to be on the bus.

These are all things that we can explore.

Also we want to take a look at our boundaries on unsafe walk zones.

We had a meeting last week and come to find out that we have a lot of latitude on how we set our district boundaries.

So the state asks that it all be within a one mile walk zone.

But there are exceptions to where we can actually bring that into less than a mile walk zone if conditions are deemed not to be safe for students to walk.

And I think we can look at a lot of ways to to explore that be it topography crime a number of things.

And then we're also looking at expanding the ORCA card program.

Right now we serve a portion of the middle school students but if we were to bring all the middle school students on board with ORCA There would be a potential of savings there but we would have to look and do modeling because a lot of the transportation we're providing for middle school students we're also providing through K-5's.

So again this is stuff that we'd have to explore.

There is no set hard number we can give at this point until we do some modeling which will we're in the process of doing right now but it will probably take a month to get that information put together.

Next slide please.

And we've had questions asked about limiting bus service to low-income ELL say SPED McKinney-Vento SFF EJ for the gen ed ridership.

We can do that we can explore it.

But remember our funding is heavily based on the ridership that we have.

So when we limit service and we reduce students that we transport that has a significant impact on the allocations we receive from the state.

The same applies if we were to basically roll up Gen Ed Transportation Service altogether.

So we had a cutoff date we'd still have to have those students age out of the system.

And year after year we'd get less and less funding because we would have fewer and fewer students newly enrolling to get transportation.

So I don't know if that would be best served the district.

One of the things that we are really going to be working on this spring and over the summer is to look at our special education transportation and see what we can do working collaboratively with special education to build the most efficient routes that serve our students best.

Next slide.

And this basically is for the general education.

This is kind of a breakdown.

For general ed again we served 600 6,831 students.

We had 574 routes.

Now a route can be a.m.

and p.m.

it's not just set as you know 574 routes altogether but this is kind of in general what we had.

Some of these are mid-days.

We had an average cost of two thousand two hundred eighty three dollars for the gen ed students for our highly capable We had 947 students on 102 routes costing $3,288,000.

Average cost per student was $3,472.

And for our option schools we had 1,137 students receiving transportation on 136 routes costing $3,472,000 with an average cost of $3,053 per student.

Next slide please.

This is the breakdown of our special education routes and ridership for fiscal year 19-20.

We transported 1,367 special needs students costing 19 million dollars.

We had 801 routes which comprised 205 buses and the per student average cost was $13,901.

For our alternative providers that was Zoom HopSkipDrive and ALC.

We serve 376 students for a cost of $1,568,000 and the average cost was $4,172.

The reason why we see the alternative providers is that we had to use them because it was either directed by the student's IEP or we're not able to embed these students into existing route structures and as a result we had to provide alternative transportation for them.

Next slide please.

And then for the fiscal year 19-20 for ORCA bus passes for the high school we had 5,237 ORCA cards that were distributed with the remaining 911 eligible.

Those were students that were eligible to receive the cards but they didn't ask for them.

We had middle school we had 1,419 ORCA cards distributed with the remaining 345 students that were still eligible but did not choose to receive them.

And per mail excuse me per metro ORCA card usage for the 2021 school year is only around 10 percent of what it was last year.

And then right now we are in the process of distributing ORCA cards to middle school students that used to receive Yellow Bus.

Right.

As of today I believe we've gotten about 370 cards distributed and I think we have a request for about 75 more this week.

And if we were to basically eliminate all gen ed transportation for the middle schools we'd have to adjust the transportation to for some kind of a tier for there to be an actual cost savings because again most of the middle school students that we are providing current busing for elementary school students are also receiving transportation on the same buses.

So the cost savings as it stands right now could be negligible.

Next slide please.

And this one is mine Linda Sebring Budget Director.

So we also wanted to help share that our switch in bell times and tiering had an unintended consequence on our athletic transportation costs as well.

Because when we had shortages of yellow bus services available our athletic department in order to get students to practices and games has had to shift to charter buses which run about twice as much as the yellow bus.

service.

So we've added almost a million dollars of cost.

Now granted the 19-20 is a budgeted number and starting athletics late we will not be spending that much this year I hope.

But just wanted to be very transparent about we have a conflict now with our bell times and athletic when they need yellow buses we're using them to transport students on our two-tiering and the shortage also pushed us into the private market.

Next I think this is a question a break.

Break for questions.

Director DeWolf back to you for questions.

Awesome.

Thank you Chief Berge.

Let's start with Director Rivera-Smith and we'll move our way up the alphabet.

Director Rivera-Smith.

Sorry.

Trying to get to my notes.

I actually don't have as many questions as last time but I'm I did want to just thank you for all this.

This is kind of the meat of what we're trying to get at to make this decision.

So thank you for all these numbers here.

I I am you know I'm I guess I'm just going to comment on the unintended consequences we are seeing from our bell time switch years back and and also the what could happen to our neighborhood schools if option school students return to the neighborhood schools and I'm wondering if that's what your recommendation is regarding that because you're showing us somehow even if 10 percent go back you know all these schools are going to be overcrowded.

But there was really no kind of anything else given with that.

Do you do you see that as a problem.

Ashley.

Hi.

Ashley here.

So as I was explaining for again most of the schools Many of them are already overcrowded.

I think some of the big ones that we have pretty big concerns about are a school like Green Lake that already is significantly overcrowded and there's a significant number of students who would go back.

I'm trying to look at some of the more specific data so I could kind of get a better sense of those particular schools.

So let me go back to the sheet here.

Yeah so Greenlink is a big one.

I think you know Maple would probably be another big one that we'd have concerns about.

Some of them in terms of overcrowding.

The overcrowding you know we basically just said anything that's over capacity of its operational capacity.

We have to look at things like repurposing some spaces within the building.

But there are a handful of schools where we just know that's not possible.

You know I'd say Green Lake is probably our biggest concern.

Maple would be another concern of ours and maybe one or two others that we'd have to figure out what we would do in those situations.

Thank you.

And then I saw that there was that if they go to the neighborhood schools they might just need bus service there too so it might be a negligible savings.

Yeah so I think it would it would just depend on which students.

It's really hard to tell.

So.

I think I mean I think you're right.

This is all very individual case by case.

So I'm wondering I mean I don't know if we're getting to ideas right at the time later for any comments but I'm wondering if if it would be valuable to survey the option school families and ask about like whether or not they I guess this is of the overall one of the recommendations here about doing the opt-in kind of service to find out so we can make our routes more efficient.

I mean I think that extends from option schools to all of our all of our district schools is to try to make it more efficient.

Those are definite steps that I think even that 2019 audit we had recommended those things and definitely I'm glad to see that that is on the list there.

The bail times I think is a huge conversation clearly to have.

But I think there is an argument for.

Going back to the three tiers not just financially but in just how some of our students how it did affect the after school times they get out and maybe some kids some need to come home high schoolers need to come home to watch younger students to have jobs.

Athletics all those things were affected negatively and that's all part of a bigger conversation not tonight.

But but I do think it is one we should be having.

So thank you.

I'll pass for now.

Thank you Director Rankin.

Yeah I can feel my blood pressure rise about bell times.

So I just I guess for context can we go back a slide please.

And one more please.

I'm sorry.

Maybe it was one more.

Well that's not okay.

Well I okay I have a few questions I guess.

Oh I was looking for the bell time the bell time slide.

Maybe that was several back.

So I mean a couple of things I'm noticing are that we bus I believe We have more special education students on buses currently than are necessarily outlined in their IEP because we don't serve students at their home school again.

And I know that's not something that can we cannot change service model pathways and locations of services obviously for next year but that's that's a big factor is that maybe the the legal the state legally mandated requirement is if it's in a student's IEP but because We as a system direct students to schools that are not their home school.

That is essentially part of their IEP is that they have to go to a different school.

So that becomes in their contract.

So I would be curious to know in the bigger conversation what not busing students away from their home school for special education services looks like.

I feel like that would be a significant impact.

The other thing I am noticing is basically anywhere anytime we have a specialized service so highly capable that's what three and a half million dollars.

Those are also students that are being bused away from their homeschool because we won't or can't or don't or haven't served them at their homeschool.

Option schools is a is a is another one that's again part of a larger larger conversation is what is the oh gosh what is the role that those schools play.

What what what is the transportation need for and then the accessibility and equity of that.

But that's a bigger conversation too.

So my my curiosity is about the context for right now for next year's budget.

Is Belltimes a a realistic consideration for next year or is that a bigger picture thing further off.

Most of these things are 22-23 types of ideas.

Okay good.

Yeah there's there's some.

Right.

I think that there are some things that we can recommend that we implement this summer like Tell us that you need bus service.

Let's not plan around eligibility but have families say I actually need the bus service.

Maybe we can re-look at some of the maybe not for next year but the grandfathering that's been in place that's old.

Does that still make sense and could we phase that out maybe after next year.

So those are some of the things we'll talk about in just a little bit.

Something to look at for both next year and longer term is you know instead of setting individual bus routes every year based on student address setting certain routes within a attendance area zone and then allowing anyone to go to that bus stop and get on the bus who goes to that school.

That would be probably a non-COVID kind of thing.

So just setting you know Okay there's there's this many students who are eligible for service.

That means about this many routes.

We're going to place them where I mean maybe maybe that's where low-income data could come into.

So the routes are like closer to where I mean we have all those heat maps of where low-income students live where students receiving EL services live and all that stuff.

in terms of equity set the routes to that but then allow anyone to opt into riding the bus.

That's one thing.

I think Hunter wanted to make a comment.

Hunter.

Thank you JoLynn.

Director Rankin you're correct.

One of the things that we're doing with a lot of these suggestions is these have to be modeled out to see if there's any real cost potential.

So these are these are being floated out there.

If we can be given time.

to allow my team to model these to say where the savings are.

But one of the things we are exploring is your very idea about having those set stops where we have basically have routes like a Metro would have but also staging buses out there for over for the overflows that we have strategic areas that if a bus is you know Assuming that the bus is not going to be at full capacity but if it does that we do have the ability to send another bus out in a geographic region to go and pick up the overflow of students to get them to school.

Like everything we're trying to do we're trying to provide the most service we can to the students but do it as efficiently and cost effective as possible because you're correct where the the disproportionate amount of our resources are going to in transportation are for the special education which we have to provide.

But we can definitely look at how do we do that that best serves our students and our community and also try to do it as cost-effective as possible.

And so we're looking at exploring all those those areas.

Yeah I would think that would be good for option schools as well because there is a geo-zone and so within that geo-zone if we say okay here are the you know here are the here are the routes that serve this school and anybody can can hop on it so that we don't have a situation of like I know one of our K-8's has you know I can't remember how many routes but basically five kids to a bus which is like really inefficient.

And that's one of the things we're looking at is we're looking at the exploring something called micro-transit.

Being able to offer there are certain areas to where we don't need to have a big bus.

So it's going to be modeled on how do we we provide the services to our students away from educational justice.

But do it in such a way that it's not drawing on resources from other areas in the district.

I guess my my last sorry my last question really quickly is I'm starting to lose the thread a little bit of what we can talk about in terms of next year's budget and what is part of a larger conversation.

So we'll talk about that at the end.

Okay.

That's coming up.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay next up Director Hersey.

Hey thank you.

So I've had a few families reach out to me and ask for some clarification on the tiering system.

Can we do a really quick walkthrough about how that works and what are the times associated with those.

Right now we might need to.

Get some data.

Okay.

That's fine.

Well if we could find a different intersection to get that information that would be great.

The other question I had is if we could go back to the slide really quickly that gave us some information on ridership between our option schools and our highly capable students.

That's slide 19 Leah.

Thank you so much.

So out of these students how many is there any way to know like how many of these students we are required to provide transportation for and are highly capable in our option schools as opposed to the students that we are providing transportation for regardless.

I think that we could do some data sifting like that because it really would be so this isn't these aren't serving special ed writers right.

So this might be MKV students McKinney-Vento students or foster students so we could get those populations in those schools and identify is that 5 is that 3. That sort of thing.

And we could follow up with that.

If someone on our team can take a note.

That would be really great.

And then also being able to see like out of the folks that we're trying to prioritize excuse me out of the students that we're trying to prioritize Black and Brown students students who are in support for medical educational justice and the like.

It would be really helpful for me to see when we have those requirement breakdowns if we could see like if it's possible and it's not you know too much extra work.

Being able to see what are those breakdowns by the demographics we're trying to support as well.

Just because when I'm looking at this I only see like highly capable students.

Though for many students you know knowing that we have students who are highly capable who are in who spread you know throughout the spectrum of the students that we serve being able to see that more in detail would be really helpful for me as we are making this decision.

So if that's possible I would really appreciate those numbers either in a Friday memo or if we could bring it to either Ops or A&F whatever the next opportunity for that would be would be appreciated as well.

Yeah I can add some data to the budget work session.

I know that for option schools we do outline kind of their who attends option schools as part of the packet in the back.

We'd have to add MKV and kind of foster to that list and then we could do the same thing for high cap.

That would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

That's all I've got for now.

Thank you.

Okay Director Harris.

Thank you.

My question is for Ms. Davis.

Davies excuse me and slide number 15 please.

I don't see on slide number 15 the middle schools and some of our option schools are in fact K-8.

And I'm not sure if you were to cut off option school bus service to Boren and Pathfinder District 6 which I know well whether you could fit one more child into Denny and Madison.

And I'm wondering why the middle schools are not listed on this number 15.

Hi this is Ashley.

Thanks so much for that question.

So I we do have middle schools listed on here.

Denny is not listed on here but there is a big impact as shown by the last slide because we do have a lot of if we can scroll back to the last slide real quickly.

Another one before it.

Sorry.

There we go.

So you see that at both Madison and Denny there's a large number of students who would be returning to those schools.

And on the next slide though Madison is included in that last column in the 50 percent.

And then Denny based on its operational capacity is not included on this list.

But again there would be a big impact because there are a lot of students who are coming from Bourne and from Pathfinder who would potentially go back to those middle schools.

Okay but do we have room in the middle schools would be my question to you ma'am.

So again currently because of where Denny is with its operational capacity there would be.

I'd have to pull up to see the exact numbers.

It doesn't meet one of the cutoffs that I've identified here.

But then in terms of Madison again if if 50 percent of those students did return again the return is of students who are transportation eligible.

So we didn't say all students who are at an option school because the assumption is that if they are either eligible to walk or if they're providing their own transportation that they're not impacted by transportation changes.

So we only looked at those who are transportation eligible as we evaluated the potential impact on students return.

Okay.

So if you have a 6th through 8th grader in say South Park and they're attending Boren an option school they would still need busing would they not to Denny or Madison for that matter.

And how do how do those numbers.

I'm sorry this doesn't have a granular detail that that helps me.

The next question that I have is what does the waitlist from the last 2-3 years for the option schools look like.

Because there's obviously a demand.

Now whether or not.

We are as diverse as we need to be and I am not going to argue that point.

I think we need to have a much broader conversation.

There's obviously a screamin' demand for option schools and or K-8 as based on our waitlist.

And that's a that's an issue that needs to be included in this.

presentation to my way of thinking.

Okay.

I think we should move to Director Hampson unless anybody wants to close that out.

Okay.

Director Hampson.

Okay.

Let me see if I can quickly get through these and these don't all have to be answered on in the moment.

So just let me know.

which ones can and need to be pushed to another time.

So the walk so the number of eligible students I forget which slide it was on but there was a slide earlier on that showed the eligible for walk versus bus.

How does that compare for option schools.

How does that compare to neighborhood schools.

Do we know that question.

Do we know that.

The breakdown of eligibility for walk versus ride.

That would have been.

So I think that's slide 12.

So you want us to look at option school walks and eligibility versus neighborhood school.

Yeah I was just curious what the you know average what what I don't know where it is but what what that looks like.

Yeah.

So.

I don't know that we have that information today so.

Okay.

So and then there's if we made that adjustment on the middle school pathways that you talked about the grandfathering what's the prospective savings with that.

We would have to figure that out.

I think that the big we would have to look into that and see what that would look like in a little bit more detail.

Okay.

And then.

So one thing that I just want to note is and I don't know Director Davies if you want to respond to this but the kind of sum of some of the slides where there's where you see this sort of flow of students in terms of capacity and schools that are that still have a relative amount of capacity even when schools come when when students revert back.

That's not surprising to me I guess given that there's sort of we have to talk about this issue of schools that are seen as less than and from which there tends to be flight and option schools being a place to which there is that that flight and that quote unquote demand.

And so therefore they also have tremendous capacity and still there to even absorb a fair number of students if they were to come back.

And you know what what it is that I think historically in the district we've given well you know this this school isn't doing well so we'll just give parents the options of going to another school.

And we just kind of went through that with the the the difficulty of changing the boundaries with Kimball now going to going to Washington Middle School and the importance of supporting Washington Middle School and making sure that that is a loved and respected middle school institution.

And the same for Aki Kurose.

Those are some some things that I I see coming out of this data that I think are really important that we don't want to lose that opportunity.

I don't know if you have any comments about that in particular.

So the only thing that I would say is that in some cases that could be part of why students may apply to one of the option schools.

Another another possibility too is just proximity.

You know we for some of these areas And I'll give the example of the Green Lake attendance area that has both John Severn and McDonald really close by.

You know those families have the option to apply to two other schools that are close by.

Right.

So any family that happens to live in the geo-zone can say well I have a high likelihood of getting into one of these schools.

And so you know our option schools provide another option for families.

Many of them have particular a particular focus that may be different than their neighborhood school or may have a different size.

You know some of our attendance area schools range from really large attendance area schools to some really small.

And so the size could be a difference for those families as well.

You know I would say that as we see as families go through the choice process you know families often start with I'm looking for these things.

You know what schools can provide me these things.

And in most cases the neighborhood school can provide those things.

We do have some option schools that do provide some different programming that other schools don't and so that may also influence you know the way families make choices.

And and just overall walkability.

So for some families they could actually live really close to a school closer to a school than the school they're assigned to.

We also know that's an impact.

Thank you.

I was just going to echo the relative to Director Hersey's question I'm not sure if this is exactly what he was asking for but I would like to see in terms of sort of transportation that results from choice what kind of that demographic breakdown is for that where we are as a district.

And I also wanted to just highlight that that the slide that talks about I think that there was a bit of a miscommunication about the idea of providing transportation for only students that are qualified for FRL or or receive McKinney-Vento foster services but that it was about as was discussed relative to the route design that it was about prioritizing access to transportation for those students not making it exclusive for those students because that doesn't make sense from a ridership standpoint but that that is that those are the students that we should be prioritizing first when when we have to to make some of these hard decisions.

And then I know we need to move on.

Yeah and I would just say that I think that that's a helpful equity consideration right if you center those students furthest from educational justice and create the routes based on them.

That I think to that point President Hampson might might give us a creative different output on our on our data.

I just need to underline one thing which I hope helps dispel some myths.

And I think honestly makes me feel really uncomfortable is what Ashley Davies mentioned which was the data illustrates that option schools are less diverse than the neighborhoods that surround them.

So I look at schools like Boren STEM K-8 the geo zone has about 17 percent 17.9 percent White population.

The school population is 49.6 percent.

students who identify as White.

These to me feel like we are we are that we have transportation to these educational islands.

And I think that that we need to really reconsider the the line that option schools are more diverse because the data does not necessarily support that.

So I just want to clarify that that has been something I've heard in the community and certainly by emails.

Chief Berge I see we have Director Rivera-Smith I'm going to ask Director Rivera-Smith just to hold it we're almost done.

If you could just get us through these last three slides and then we'll end with some final questions.

Yes so on slide 23 I won't go over it.

We know that we need some state funding to help us with COVID.

That's Senate Bill 5128. And then we need the legislature to work on the transportation formula.

Next slide please.

So this session the bill that's out there Senate Bill 5128 would give us either 70 percent of the district's estimated allocation for the school year.

That does assume in-person instruction is occurring and or if 50 percent of our enrolled students are coming at least partially in-person then that would be an 80 percent calculation.

So there's going to be some potential disconnect still and deficit next year even with this help.

And then Fred you have slide 25.

Thank you.

Of course it's difficult to model what the impacts on transportation would be without understanding what the educational model is exactly going to look like if we're talking about the 21-22 school year.

But in general to be the most simplistic if we're looking at some sort of hybrid in-person model because our buildings can only handle half the capacity of students the same would apply to vehicles.

For elementary school transportation if of our we stick to our operating goal of one student one rider per seat buses would be operating at about a third of their physical capacity.

And for grades for middle school grades and above buses would be operating and one student proceed at half their capacity.

As we've heard over and over in this discussion talking about the efficiency of our bus routes our buses typically aren't operating at capacity now.

So that in the end at the bottom line that pretty much balances out that the existing fleet can probably accommodate our load if we're operating on a A-B hybrid type schedule.

The current funding allocation though is based on sampling to get average daily ridership.

So if we're only transporting half the number of students with the same number of vehicles we would run into a funding problem that our account for the STARS formula we discussed would be reduced by whatever the physical distancing requirement ends up being but we would be operating the same number of vehicles at the same cost.

So again we would need a solution.

from from a financial perspective.

On the next slide just I probably should have put this in some snazzy diagram but we understand that the pieces that we have to balance are the equity issues the service level standards that the board wants to provide and that we need to provide to our families.

And then what our financial requirements or limitations are.

So those are all competing interests that need to be balanced.

Obviously.

with our focus on equity that needs to be our number one priority.

Next slide.

This is the final slide before we go back to questions.

So our next steps and we're recommending to explore these for 22-23.

I will talk about a couple items that we may be able to do for the next year in 21-22.

Obviously shifting bell times for maybe option schools or skill centers back one hour.

to create another tier that potentially could reduce costs.

Moving to a three-tier system we know would save us significant amounts of money.

We know that opt-in transportation process instead of routing by eligibility is something that we are looking at for 21-22.

The walk zone changes I believe we can look at for 21-22.

And then the idea of transferring more middle and high school students to ORCA is also something we could do that analysis and potentially look at that for 21-22 because they would still be getting transportation just a different way.

And then I would say depending on what the data shows to us that grandfathering list for 4-option schools we could also look at potentially for 21-22 and making some small smaller shifts.

And maybe it's not for 21-22.

I don't know.

But that is something that we also need to look at.

is so the two schools in West Seattle that was something that just wasn't fixed at the time that that second option school opened.

We just never changed the pathway so we just made it all of you know all of West Seattle basically could opt into either and get transportation for either for either option school.

So Cleveland still has yellow bus service.

Could those students Go to ORCA cards.

Does that make sense.

So some of those options are available for us.

So next steps we want to hear back from the board as to which items you want us to do further work on because there's plenty of work here and if there's things you don't want to look at we should not spend more time doing that.

And then we could come back at the work session.

We have a budget work session next week and we'll come back around with this is what we heard.

This is what we've been able to develop.

and kind of firm that up the board is going to have to decide how they want to complete the budget for 21-22.

We still have that seven hundred and something thousand dollar hole that we do need to the board needs to identify how they want us to fill.

So with that back to you guys for questions.

Director DeWolf.

Thank you so much Chief Berge and thank you Chief Podesta and really all of your staff for this incredible work.

I know we're all under immense stress and strain both personally and professionally.

So I just thank you for a quick turnaround and being responsive to the to our constituents and the conversation.

So I'm going to start again with Director Rivera-Smith we'll move our way up and end with President Hampson and Director Rivera-Smith I think you had a question too so this would be the time and I think if we can keep this to about 15 minutes I just don't want to keep people too long.

But if folks can't answer questions right on the spot today just let directors know if it's if it would be easier or more helpful to just put it in the Friday memo.

So over to you Director Rivera-Smith.

Thank you.

I was going to ask earlier I was going to go back to the slide or page 18 just to get clarification because if I want to I just want to make sure I'm hearing this correctly.

In the middle section there about the rolling up no gen ed bus So basically the reason is it would negatively impact the STARS funding since ridership is a key factor.

So are you basically saying should we generally take it as overall cutting to a generic bus service is actually going to negatively impact and would not be recommended recommendation from you.

Is that what I'm doing or John.

I think that there is probably some rerouting.

Obviously where we have very little few riders and a whole bus we need to re-look at that and see how we can refine and make corrections to that.

Where we have full buses it makes financial sense obviously right.

And so that's what we need to work towards is rerouting in a way that we heard addresses equity addresses students furthest from educational justice first and gets full buses.

So it may mean routing changes but I don't think it means walking away from service in totality.

Okay.

Thank you.

I just wanted to get clarity on that to know what we're looking at going forward.

And regarding so I'm going back to slide 21 The recommendations for next year.

The last slide basically.

Next steps recommendations.

Which ones then are you saying are we should look at for next year because this is 2022-23.

Which ones would have a sooner impact that we should be probably want to be the guidance.

Yep.

So Hunter make sure I'm not misspeaking but rerouting.

Making sure that so doing some rerouting efficiency work and maybe changing some bus stops or that sort of thing.

Making sure that instead of we have an opt-in transportation process instead of routing by eligibility kind of connected to that.

Walk zone changes potentially next year.

And then looking at ORCA cards for middle school and high school students.

And then that list of grandfathering for option schools I think we need to look at that a little bit more.

I'm not sure what's possible in 21-22 but I feel like there may be some things that might be possible there.

Hunter is that.

Anything else you'd like to add or Fred.

That's correct.

And the other thing that we'd really like to look at is working closely in collaboration with special ed to ensure that we try to build as if you reduce redundancies that we have and inefficiencies in the route structures.

which I think if we were able to really I think this would be something that we will need to tackle and it will take some time but I do think that there's a lot of potential savings if we can work collaboratively with all the stakeholders involved.

There is a lot of redundancy in services that we can eliminate.

Again we have to model this and find where those redundancies are and see if we can reduce the number of buses we have on the road.

Yeah I definitely agree with the points that were highlighted there for looking at next year.

We definitely want to you know send to our students hopefulness and educational justice particularly when it comes to this the bus service.

Thank you for all this information and I will pass to the next director.

Thank you Director Rivera-Smith.

And just as a reminder too I know that if folks have been paying attention to Director Rivera-Smith and I for a year we've been talking about our climate resolution and In that resolution we talk about electrifying our bus fleet and obviously that's a larger conversation but I would hope that I'm hopeful that there are opportunities in the future for electrifying our bus fleet and hopefully reducing some of our fuel costs just as a connection to that work we just did.

So Director Rankin next.

Is there sorry I'm digesting a lot of information.

Is there a specific ask that that we need to respond to right now in this moment or okay.

Any burning questions before we close out our meeting tonight.

I will just go on record as saying the idea of changing back to three tiers makes me very unhappy.

I see the numbers there and I understand the attraction of that that that's sort of a oh well that would be you know an easy way to save some money.

But I'm remembering the switch to two tiers and how much the health and safety of students was a part of the conversation about the later bell time for high school students and then subsequently the importance of sleep for younger kids as well.

And you know anecdotally now with an 830 start time I can't tell you how many families I have heard say like oh my gosh I can never go back to 755. So the idea of starting of adding a third tier that would be even earlier than that which was what the discussion was several years back is that's a tough one.

That's a real tough one.

So you know.

That's the point.

I think it's the point to put these at our feet and just say as far to do tier 1 legal and.

Yeah I'm curious I'm curious about you know we talk a lot about the tiers if you know what and I don't expect an answer on this right now but the implication on like a rolling schedule as opposed to like tier 1 tier 2 like does is there Is there more flexibility we can find within the bell times that's that's less rigid that would allow us to accommodate more routes to schools without pushing you know pushing the the window of of start times any earlier.

Wondering about that.

I like the opt-in process looking at walk zones.

I mean I think there's a lot of good options here to explore.

Um, and, uh, I guess I'll just reiterate my appreciation for bringing this information so that we can have the discussion as opposed to sort of, uh, um, you know, uh, a platter of bad choices at, you know, at the point in which a decision has to be made, um, is always really hard.

And I just thank you so much for engaging in this conversation and letting us think about these things and kind of help the, anyone who might be listening or watching understand all the different pieces that go into, um, that there's trade-off for everything.

And so having all the information now is is just really really appreciated and in very short notice as well.

And it's not like there's nothing else going on.

So just big thanks to staff.

A lot more to think about.

Thank you.

Thank you Director Rankin.

Director Hersey to the Vice President Hersey.

No worries at all.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

I actually do not have any questions at this time.

I think all I'm going to say is as we look through these potential solutions I hope that we as a community can really come together around figuring out what is going to work best primarily for our students furthest away from educational justice namely our Black students our students receiving special education services our McKinney-Vento students and realize that there is a immense amount of intersectionality between all of those categories as well as some students who are attending option schools who are coming from areas where they might not you know be able to receive the educational service model that is best for them.

But as we are moving forward I think that the conversation has shifted so much away from centering the students who really need to be centered here.

And that happens often when so many of our adult issues bleed over into these conversations.

But I just want to continue to refocus us that.

Primarily as we are returning from this pandemic potentially this year or whenever that might be we need to continue to focus on what are we doing to provide as much as we can for the students who desperately need it.

And if we can get there as a system if we can get there at a shared understanding as a board and provide that direction I think that's going to send a really powerful message to our constituents about what the rest of this transition is going to look like.

So we just really need to make sure that as we are having conversations especially among leadership that we are coming from a place of where we are centering the students who need to be centered and are basing our entire transition off of making sure that those students are the ones who we are prioritizing in these conversations.

So that's all I'll say about that.

Thank you for the time and I look forward to our budget conversation next week where we can hopefully continue to push these measures forward.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you Vice President Hersey.

Director Harris.

Thank you so much.

I have several questions and some comments.

Still waiting to hear from Superintendent Juneau as to whether or not the option school principals have been granted a meeting to talk about the unintended consequences on the potential of eliminating transportation to option schools.

I would very much like to hear from the option school principals and others with respect to multi-year unintended consequences.

We have not talked about K-8 smaller schools that many of our voters communities and families find to be more appropriate for their students and children.

And I wanted to respond to a comment that CFO Berge made about the fact that we're still sending yellow buses to Cleveland.

My recollection is And having been a graduate of Cleveland High School and ridden the Metro bus and walked more than two miles to get there is that Metro does not service Cleveland and that's why we have yellow buses there.

Last piece and I'm sure this will raise some eyebrows but I'll put it out there anyway.

Such is my want in life.

I'd like to talk to Greg Narver about exploring suing the state of Washington a la McCleary for both fed funding and for the outrageous inappropriate inequitable STARS formula.

We were not made whole in McCleary as many of us that have been around for more than a while and We can't get our friends in Olympia to recognize that we here in Seattle Public Schools are in fact special because we are far larger than any of the other 295 districts.

So I'll wait for answers.

Thank you.

Director Harris and before you go Greg just as the two former presidents on this board I think it would behoove us to remember that we should not be taking legal advice during a public meeting.

So I just want to be thoughtful that if you have a question for Greg or legal counsel to just.

I'm not asking for legal advice.

I'm asking whether or not it can be explored.

Thank you sir.

And my only response in this meeting is that it sounds like a great subject for an executive session.

Thank you Greg.

And how soon can we have one.

I'll let you talk about that often because we have to go to the next person.

It sounds like you're interested so please collaborate on that and get back to the board on next steps.

President Hampson you're next up.

Excuse me.

Excuse me.

May I have an answer from the superintendent with respect to whether or not the option school principals have been granted a meeting that they requested and they copied the entire board on.

Thank you.

Yes thank you Director Harris.

I dug back into my emails and did find an email that was not specifically addressed to me but to address to 27 people.

And I believe that Dr. Pedroza and Rainey are working together on setting up some sort of meeting.

So that it looks like it will happen.

Thank you.

Okay.

President Hampson please take the next moment here.

Thank you.

First I do want to say thank you so much to all of the staff people that worked on this and I didn't get everybody's names written down.

I know Ellen Hunter Ashley Sherry JoLynn Linda were the ones I managed to to get down but this has been an incredibly informative work session.

And I'm so grateful to all of you for the immense amount of work that you have put into us to this because it it really opens up the kind of the world in terms of what we can do to improve and support staff in improving our transportation systems towards those goals of of being equitable efficient and there are three there's three and cost-effective.

So I think my primary response to the next steps the recommendations for to explore for 2022-23 I believe it's imperative that we do consider all these options including 3 tiers.

I want to make sure that per Director Hersey's and Director Rankin's and others comments that When we are looking at that that we truly have an equity model at the center we did not when we did the the bell times adjustments.

There's some initially there's some really important science sleep science behind wanting to make sure that kids get the best start the best opportunity in terms of going to school.

I don't think that we fully know what that is.

And we have some more work to do and some more collaboration in order to get there.

So I I hope that that in doing so that we still keep in mind that we're we need to optimize for the health and safety of our of our students and not necessarily for you know I think that there was a lot of issues with Director Rankin said with high schools and athletics and how that gets pushed late.

We we're going to have to make some hard choices again but I hope that it's a bit more open.

And then I just wanted to I wanted to confirm that you said for 2021-22 that kind of the the next set of things are possibilities shifting bell times to accommodate multiple schools on one route on down for 21-22.

Is that correct.

Yeah we're going to keep looking at those.

Yes.

And then so I appreciate all those and would support those.

And I think just as we move forward for not just 21-22 as we try to come back but also 22-23 that we're building around you know an investment in our neighborhood schools.

I think it's pretty pretty clear as we have tried to you know sort of in many cases force students out of neighborhood schools to get services elsewhere.

We've we've incurred a tremendous amount of cost associated with that.

And I hope that this is part of that that shift to bringing back and investing in neighborhood schools and that in the process of doing redesign we are in fact optimizing for our communities in terms of as we have done with our equity tiering for capital projects that we're focusing on on those highest needs communities and that we're optimizing for students furthest from educational justice where they live and the services in the schools where they live and therefore investing in those those communities and those neighborhood schools.

And that we have that in mind so that it's I mean it's not incredibly difficult to change a route.

It is much more difficult to change people's habits associated with those roots once we've already started providing them.

So I think that's all from me.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

Thank you President Hampson.

And thank you directors for your great questions.

I guess the only thing that comes up for me right now is two things can be true.

We pay our superintendent.

about $25,000 a month.

I think that when we have issues like this our our superintendent needs to run towards the issue and listen and learn because this is kind of to me a softball issue in the grander scheme of things.

So I think that was a missed opportunity.

As well what can also be true is I don't necessarily agree with Director Harris that we need to prioritize principles in this conversation because what I think Director Hersey Vice President Hersey says is true.

We should be designing and centering our decisions and centering our design for our students.

I think the principals will have an important bit of feedback and information and insight and expertise to provide.

Ultimately it just goes back to equity and making sure we're focusing on our students regardless from educational journey.

So I would say just thank you for understanding some of those intersections I was already thinking about Chief Berge I appreciate that slide.

And I will look forward to a conversation at the budget and just continuing to following this up in either Operations Committee or Audit and Finance.

So if there is nothing further on the there's no further business on the agenda tonight this meeting will stand adjourned at 620 p.m.

Thank you very much.

Thank you again to staff for pulling this together.

This was amazing.

Appreciate it.

Thank you all.

Thank you.

Night all.

Thank you.