Seattle Schools Board Special Meeting May 6, 2026

All right, good afternoon.

This is President Topp.

I'm now calling the board.

Special meeting to order at 4.33 p.m.

Please note that this meeting is being recorded.

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

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

Don't see her but I know she will be joining later online.

Director Lavallee.

Here Director Mizrahi.

Here.

Director Rankin Here.

Director Smith is not here.

Director Song Here.

And this is President Topp.

All right we have two things on our sort of work session for this evening.

First the larger chunk I think of tonight will be on our budget study session and then we will go into sort of a community engagement update from the superintendent.

So that I will pass it over to Superintendent Schuldner.

Thank you so much, President Topp.

Good afternoon, everyone.

And of course, for those listening, happy Teacher Appreciation Week.

We've had a lot of fun with some teacher appreciation moments.

And I just want to thank, of course, everybody for their hard work in service of our children.

So, I know many people were excited about this presentation, many people probably yawned, but the important piece here is that I hope what people are seeing is that as we really start to get into our cadence of these quote unquote special meetings, that we really want them to be study sessions, learning sessions, sharing sessions, so that not only the board knows what's going on, but the community knows what's going on.

we do know that budget is a very, very big and important topic for us to discuss and so I'm really thankful to be here with Dr. Buddleman and the two of us will try to give as thoughtful a presentation as we can.

We look forward to all the kind of great questions that I know the board's going to come with and then of course this is not just a one-off.

We want to make sure that we are sharing the budget repeatedly, every probably three or four months, really trying to make sure that folks know where we stand.

And what we've done in this presentation, we've tried to be as clear and direct as transparent as possible, but we also know that there's many people at home who have spent a lot of their time, their volunteer time, trying to really help us with this.

And so for those of you who are so kind of in tune to this, please feel free to email us, reach out to us, point out any mistakes that you think we might have made or any clarifications that you think you would need from us.

But here we are with our budget study session.

Okay, so the agenda is to talk about the fund balance and our goal and how we got there, then to talk about the 26-27 preliminary fund budget, then to talk about schools' budgets, central budgets, and then next steps.

Again, I really want to thank Curt for his wonderful work.

probably too often for him.

I love it.

We meet probably three times a week to go over this kind of stuff because it really is driving us.

So this is the first and probably most important chart.

I will defer to Kurt after I try to explain it from my standpoint.

what you see in front of you is the reality that we are facing.

The orange line, if you look at FY22, 23, 24, and 25, that is reality.

So in FY22, we started at, I think it's 175, there you go.

So just so you know, these are the numbers that make that line.

So if I just toggle back and forth so I can get you exact numbers, it's the same thing that you're looking at in the graphic.

So by FY22, we had a fund balance of about $175 million, which for a district of $1.35 billion is actually okay, not even that substantial.

Many school districts in other states will run anywhere between a 15% fund balance to even a 20% fund balance.

10 is a nice safety valve, so 10 would be 135 million on the 1.35 billion, but again, that's where we were in reality.

Then you see a drop, and then you see a drop again, and then you see it drop again.

This is the real fund balance.

This is what is left in our books, left in our bank account.

So you can see that over the last four years, we have lost a significant chunk of change.

We went from 175 to 134 to 121 to 97 and we are projected at 28%.

and change.

That is where that blue line starts.

So that 26 projection, that is at 20 and change.

But I want to be really clear here.

The moment you hit zero, the game is over.

You are not allowed to have zero fund balance because that means you have to borrow.

And if you have to borrow, the state is not very thrilled.

So sometime next year, somewhere, we would, if we did nothing, would cross that zero threshold and it would be really significant.

We would have to borrow.

We'd probably have to go into the state's version of receivership and all that kind of stuff.

But the good news is we do think that we have a plan to not get to that zero and to continue on an upward trajectory after about a year and a half from now.

We're going to go down because we have to.

We can't just cut everything right now, but we're going to go down where we still have some money left in the bank and then start to build up.

Now, I want to, especially for those listening at home, I want to be clear.

It is true that sometimes what happens is the district will project a larger deficit than is reality.

And as we discussed the last time Kurt and I did the show is That's because you have to show full funding.

You have to show no vacancies.

You have to show the way that we project using the budget.

We know that the reality is sometimes when we project, it's actually a little bit better.

But remember, that orange line, that's the real line.

We really are losing 30 million one year, 10 million, 20 million, it really is going down.

And if we hit zero, the game is over.

So what you can see from this chart is that we are projecting around 28 million if we do nothing, but we're already projecting, we think, with the things that we're doing, and this isn't even all the things we're doing, that we're going to stave off a little bit and see go from 97 to 55 to 40 and then start to go on the upward trajectory.

Now you'll see that, again, there's going to be more detail, but some of the things that we're doing to balance the books this year are one-off.

and some of the things that we're doing to balance the books are kind of repeat ways to save money.

So the one-offs will show the savings this year, but we might not be able to show savings next year, and so that's why we're gonna kind of dip a little bit more and then go on the upswing.

So, Dr. Buddleman, is there anything specific you wanna talk about with this graph?

This is the one that we look at all of the time.

No, just want to say one sort of clarifying thing.

The orange line, or the blue line, I'm sorry, in the chart on the next page where it goes to 28 million fund balance projected for the end of this year, that was a projection we did about this time last year that's in the F-195F that's out there on OSPI's website.

The 55 million is what we're projecting now based on the new information we have, what's happened this year, what we're looking at, so it's a more real number in terms of it's more informed by information that we have this year.

Superintendent Schildener has, like you said multiple times, we talk about this a lot, and so we're really trying to hone in on the better projections at this point in the year so we have better information as we're developing next year's budget.

Not relying on what we projected last year, because that was last year and a lot has happened since last year.

And so this is a better number.

It's not gonna end up at 55 million with six zeros following it.

It's gonna be something in that range, but we're trying to work now to hone in on what that will really look like.

And again, just to be clear, the moment it hits red, that's the game, right?

So we can't hit red, we can't cross that zero line.

So those projections, we are projecting around a $72 million loss by FY31, but it, we want to show you because that's the math, but the moment you're at zero, things change.

And the math in there assumes sort of the average reduction fund balance, which is about $26 million over that period of time.

And so we're using that as the proxy for the initial projection.

The other thing I wanted to add if you will allow me is Ben said multiple times we've been talking about this a lot so we debated how best to exemplify this in terms of what the goal should be and we landed on this fund balance instead of restricted versus unrestricted or what OSPI says or what the rainy day reserve says and landed on this because it's hopefully simpler and understandable and if you get to this, you will also on the way be replenishing your rainy day reserve fund, you will also be compliant with what OSPI floated in the legislature last year.

Ben pushed me and I think it pushed a little bit back and we pushed each other towards what this looks like right now so.

Yeah I mean I think people in this building throughout the district can understand we should have a hundred million dollar fund balance.

It's actually a little low I'd like it to be at like one you know probably 135 because I'd like it to be at 10% of the of the budget but if we can get to a hundred million by FY 31 we that will mean we will have solved our structural problem.

and that is why Kurt and I kind of ended up at this number because we know that some of the money that we're making are these one-offs.

We know that those one-offs aren't going to continue.

That's why we were continuing to lose this like 20 to 30 million every year.

But if our true projected fund balance, our true actual fund balance that we end up in the bank with 100 million, it will mean that we have solved our structural issues.

And let's hope we get there.

and just a little math behind that.

So if you do the spreadsheet, someone out there is probably doing that actively at home right now.

So it assumes an additional $5 million reduction in next school year on top of what we're presenting tonight.

It assumes something in the neighborhood of 30 to 35 in the following year and then five in the subsequent year.

So those add up to 45. The difference between 45 and 26 or 30 is about what you're seeing in growth across the continuum there.

Yeah, no, thank you.

All right, so.

Again, we have a structural deficit.

What that means is we are spending more money than we are taking in.

It's as simple as that.

So I appreciate that people want more, I want more.

It is fair.

But right now, our structural deficit is such that if we just continue to do what we do, we will go insolvent.

And so you can see, not that I need to read bullet points to anybody, but for multiple years SPS has planned and actual expenditures have exceeded revenue.

And that's why we have dipped over and over again from our fund balance, meaning we are spending more than we are taking in.

And that cannot continue.

Now there are some reasons for that.

One, inflation increases continue to outpace revenue, meaning that the state is giving us X and inflation is X plus a couple of percentage points.

And on a budget of $1.35 billion, those couple of percentage points equal a lot of money.

So again, inflation is increasing and it's outpacing our revenue.

But that's really not the crux of it.

The crux is that the way we are funded by the state is not how the district has structured itself.

I wanna be really clear here, and I don't mean to be so pedantic, although I guess I am pedantic here, is we get money based on formulas from the state.

The way we spend money in Seattle is based on different formulas.

and those formulas are much, much more generous.

And because of that, we are in deficit and we will go bankrupt.

So, for instance, SPS spends more on compensation, staffing, special ed, transportation, culinary services, multi-language services, legal services, facility needs, security, substitutes, school administrative staff, central office supports, and more than what we are funded for.

So the state gives us X for transportation, we spend a lot more for transportation.

The state gives us money for special ed, we spend a lot more on special ed.

The state gives us money for culinary services, we spend a lot more on culinary services.

So by definition, the structure of our district is causing us to go bankrupt.

So, and I know this is sometimes a little bit difficult to talk about, that's why SPS can't just simply enroll its way out of the structural deficit.

If every decision we are making is more expensive than the money we are getting, it doesn't particularly matter how many students you have, because if you have more students, you're still gonna be spending the same formula on transportation and culinary services, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So I'm not, saying that one extra child doesn't bring in extra money.

Of course it does.

But the way that we have structured this district is that just increasing enrollment isn't going to solve this.

We have structural issues that we have to address and we have to be honest about it.

Now, as I presented to this wonderful austere group last time, I do want to increase enrollment.

I want us to get to 52.5 because I think that's good and it shows that people want to be part of our district and it will help, but it will not solve the structural deficit unless we do other things as well.

Dr. Butterman.

I think you've covered that one well.

Thank you.

I should bring him to all of my meetings.

So this is where I probably should talk a little bit more and then I'll give it over to Kurt.

Just as a reminder, our academic priorities, you know, we have the third grade ELA where it looks like we're really going to lean towards the eighth grade math.

We've got graduation and graduation plus, which is important.

As a principal asked me this week in a meeting, it's like, but Ben, what about math for third grade?

Yeah, look, we know what the reality is.

The reality is every grade, every subject, we want kids to do well, right?

And so if these are our priorities, it doesn't mean that we're not also caring about other stuff.

But we do have to think about when we believe that our goals are these, are we investing the money, the limited money that we have in the right way because we have two things we've got to solve.

One, the structural deficit.

We have to stop spending the money we don't have and we have to spend the money we do have in more thoughtful ways so that we can actually reach our goals.

So we are going to refocus staffing investments on direct student services.

more money or moving the money to people who are in schools, in front of students, in classrooms, wherever in the school.

It could be in the hallway.

I've seen wonderful learning happen in the hallway.

But the more important thing is we're gonna refocus staff investments onto direct student services.

We're gonna prioritize professional development aligned to the new curriculum implementation.

We know that fidelity to curriculum is one of the soonest ways to move the needle.

because we have an adoption, thank you board, we now have a high quality ELA curriculum, we now need to make sure that our teachers are given the supports to teach them.

That will move the needle, I promise.

Reorganization, aligned departmental structure to improve services to schools and students.

We are not a jobs program.

We are here for children.

We wanna make sure that all of our decisions are about what's happening in schools and serving students.

And then we're gonna realign centrally funded programs and positions to again, focus on school level things.

Okay, I am gonna turn this over to Kurt to talk about some of the money and of course, I will chime in as well.

Thank you, so this is sort of a summary of what we're gonna talk about the rest of the presentation within a little bit more detail, and so you've heard the $87 million budget deficit that was projected, so the objective of our process this year was to do what Ben said first, focus on those priority goals and just take a little privilege in terms of the meetings and we'll get into this process we use for central office, but the previous slide is kind of what guided all those conversations in the central office discussion and boils down to is what you're doing required in some way?

and if we get rid of it, will a third grader cry?

So that was kind of the metric we were using.

Like are these things gonna help kids graduate from high school when they get there?

Or is it required in some way?

And so we'll get into more of that detail later.

So as Ben said, there's a number of things, a couple of which have come to the board for consideration at your next meeting.

One time solutions around capital fund interest.

this continued delay of the repayment of the rainy day fund.

The third thing on the list there, some of you may remember last year we had some energy tax credit although we don't pay income taxes as a public entity.

There's an energy rebate that the Inflation Reduction Act offers for school districts and other entities like us that are building facilities with geothermal or solar.

because we have a couple buildings coming online next year we think we can capture up to 12 million or about 12 million in a one time payment to help balance next year's budget from those and use it in this way.

the Interfund loan that we took back, we had planned to use it when we took it out.

We ended up not using it, and so we had planned to pay it back next year.

Since we didn't use it, we won't pay it back, so that $87 million assumes $16 million in repayment.

We're not gonna do that, so there's $16 million that's no longer a part of that deficit.

and then we're going to, so as we're refining that fund balance, so the 28 million that Ben talked about earlier, we're refining it to this 55 million.

We think we'll have, so this is gonna get a little more complicated than I want it to be, but we use $49 million to balance this year's budget out of the fund balance.

We don't think we're gonna use all 49 million of it that we originally projected.

We'll use, 29 to 39 of it, so that'll have 10 to 20 that we can use for next year's budget.

So we didn't end up, just wanna say that one more time.

$49 million was used out of fund balance last year at this time to balance this year's budget.

we're not gonna use all 49, we're gonna use some of it, not all of it, and we'll have 10 or 20 for next year's budget.

And I'm gonna offer Ben a chance to explain that in his way as well.

So again, as Kurt's saying, we have these one-time solutions.

capital fund, the rainy day, tax credits.

Some of these are one-time, but we can repeat sometimes too, which is nice, but some of them are really just one-offs, like the tax credit.

I'm not sure we'll be able to get the tax credit next year, I don't know.

Repaying the rainy day fund, we might ask you to do that again, but eventually we're gonna have to pay the piper, and that's why the original thing is what we are, that's why it's not a huge jump up, is that we're starting to think about making everything right, and that would be including repaying a lot of this stuff eventually.

But you can see that these one-time solutions are going to be really helpful because remember, we cannot show an unbalanced budget.

Sorry for the double negative.

We have to show a balanced budget.

and the way that we're gonna do it for this year is all these things and we're probably gonna still have to use the fund balance of 10 to $20 million and then again if necessary we're gonna dip into the fund balance again.

What Kurt was saying and again it gets confusing and please don't think we're trying to obfuscate it's just when you're talking about a $1.35 billion budget it can get a little bit dicey is we had planned on using 39 to 49 million dollars of the fund balance this year.

We've had some good savings just through some better decision making that we think we might be able to not have to use all of that we had said we were going to use so we can then use it this year.

that doesn't mean that we think we're gonna get to full zero.

That's why we still are gonna have to dip into our fund balance or possibly dip into our fund balance.

But please remember, this is still not a true zero budget because we're dipping into our savings, which means we are still spending more than we are taking in.

That's the structural deficit.

If you continue down that road, the game is over.

So that's our one-time solutions.

and then the work that we have really been doing hardcore here in this building is the ongoing solutions, which is savings that will continue because these are structural savings.

Those one-time savings, not structural.

The bottom are structural and this is like the better money saved.

This is money that we would continue to save.

So Kurt, if you want to talk about the ongoing.

Yeah, so we're gonna get into detail on those, but I'll just preview.

You'll see the school staffing changes is approximately $10 million.

We'll get into the detail.

The central office changes is a similar number.

Central office and centrally funded.

We'll talk a little bit about that in the rest of the presentation.

We're doing some, the two transportation providers are right now renegotiating contracts for next year.

not to get into negotiations at this table, but we're anticipating some savings as a result of those negotiations.

And then the last bullet point there, it's got the, should have the biggest tilde, because we're still working on some of that for next year's budget.

There's some sort of things that we're in process right now, and we're still at the preliminary stage in terms of trying to nail it all down, and I've got a chart that'll show later what that is.

And not to belabor the point I've made since even before I was hired is there is stuff in central office or people that are funded out of central office that we could be more efficient with and my promise always is going to be cutting central before schools and even though those numbers are similar, although I am very proud that our central office changes is .2 larger, remember that the total dollar for school is 3X central.

So the fact that we're actually cutting more from central, even though it is only one-third the total of what the school staffing is, I think really shows, and I want to thank senior staff and just people in this building, there was a understanding and a willingness that the harder, the bigger, the more deep cuts happened here to save things at schools.

Now that doesn't mean that schools don't take a little bit of a hit, but it is in essence a third of a hit proportionately than what Central did, and that's fair.

Okay.

So just a little bit about there's a lot of interest in the school staffing process especially this time of year.

So just a slide that kind of walks through what the process looks like.

It's highly informed by the projections obviously in February.

The one change I want to highlight to this year's process is the district did not pre-mitigate schools and so by that there were a certain number of schools that for whatever reason over time we decided we're gonna give them an extra 2.0 FT or some other additional resource above and beyond what the formula would have normally provided.

This year we said here's what the formula provides for you if you need more in order to meet your master schedule or to make sure that the school works.

here's the process for requesting those and then Ben met individually with the regional executive directors and the principals to review those requests as they came in and so that's the only sort of change that's substantive for this year other than we will be doing some revisiting of the enrollment information as it gets closer to the end of the school year and the beginning of the school year to make sure that the enrollment projections aren't hampering schools in certain ways and make the appropriate adjustments along the way.

Yeah, and I really appreciate Curt highlighting that.

We have to use the formulas we have and then see what needs to be changed.

To pre-mitigate was, in essence, a learned helplessness.

It was, oh, we're just going to get saved even if we don't need it.

It can't happen like that.

Here's the formula, here's the budget, and then I thank the regional executive directors.

I thank the principals.

The principals came to the regional executive directors and said, look, I think we need this.

The math doesn't work out for us.

We dug deep.

We took a look.

And sometimes we said, oh, yeah, actually you really do need it.

And sometimes we said, eh, and we were able to move and figure it out.

And so there's a couple of instances that I can think about where a principal said, here's my enrollment, here's my schedule, here's what I need, this is why it's important.

We kind of stress test it and we said, you know what, you're totally right.

You need an extra FTE, here you go.

Sometimes a principal would come and say, well, this is our numbers, this is what we need and we would go, well, and actually look at your schedule.

You could move this over here, this over here, and move this over here.

You actually don't need it.

And the principal goes, okay, thanks.

And then they can move on, right?

And so that's why you don't pre-mitigate.

You wanna make sure that the folks that need the extra money really can articulate why.

And then the other thing that Kurt highlighted, my promise to everybody is we don't just do this once.

and forget about it.

We're gonna do June adjustments.

We're gonna do October adjustments.

We'll do, again, winter adjustments.

We wanna make sure that the money follows the child because we are here to serve children.

and so if there's more kids somewhere, we have to make sure that the money follows the child.

If there are less children somewhere, we want to be thoughtful about the impact on that school, but again, we have to be thoughtful about what is actually happening in those buildings.

Want to take this one?

This next one just is a tally of the results of the changes that we made to the model for last year.

We previewed a slide like this with estimates in January at your meeting.

This is what actually happened when you factor in the enrollment changes.

Two things I want to highlight here, the mitigation process, you'll see that number 28.9 FTE, that was what was sort of restored to schools.

as part of that process that Ben was just describing.

And then the employment commitment that the superintendent made for people that would be impacted by these changes on this slide, we're still trying to resolve what that will look like in the end through the displacement processes.

As people resign and retire, it'll have impacts.

And then we'll try to make sure we'll reposition those people.

into the right places in the schools so they can continue to provide that education in the places where it's most needed.

So this one is still kind of a work in process, but this is the results of what the model change and the enrollment change.

And as a reminder, the model change, so like the big one was going from 31 to 32 to 1 for the kind of ratio.

Again, that's a funding model, that's not a class size model.

And as you can see, you're only talking about a couple of FTE.

You're talking about 12.3 with the CTE change, and then of course a much larger number, the 37.7 for the increase for the 6.12.

But even the change from the 4.5 staffing to the 28.1 was a 7.2 FTE change.

But remember, my promise was for the teachers, for the people impacted, the certificated folks who would be the teachers that would be impacted by a change in this, we are going to take care of them.

And what has happened is I knew we could do it because, A, we have people retire, we have vacancies, and we also spend $20 million on subs.

It's a lot of money.

So if you have a displaced teacher who has a wonderful certification in high school, let's say, I know I ran a high school for 10 years.

I don't remember a day that at least one person wasn't out.

So you know that we will be able to help support the needs of these schools and support our employees, our teachers, our certificated folks because, again, the formula changes.

We wanted to take care of those folks because, again, going from 31 to 32 is the right thing to do for the funding model, but I don't want to lose a great, you know, chemistry teacher will want to make sure that they're doing something for our kids.

Now, I can't speak to next year, because there's structural deficits that are going to continue, but that's where this is.

So I just want to be really clear here about the certificated folks, the teachers.

The model change saved us money.

It saved us about $10 million.

But we mitigated 28.9 FTE because we knew that a formula isn't always perfect.

And we also have committed to these folks, again, the certificated folks, that we will find a place for them, be it in a sub pool or wherever.

And it's only May.

People retire between now and September 1st.

So I'm feeling pretty comfortable.

And I want to thank the HR department and the budget department working really, really closely to make these numbers actually real rather than just mitigate everything and say, oh, it was too hard.

So good job, everybody, for making this happen.

Just two quick things on that.

The 57.1 is just a number.

It's the number of FTE who are produced through this model or allocated to schools is around 2700 people that are doing basic education work.

And if you add ML and special education it's about 4300. And so just for context what that number means in terms of the grand scheme.

And then the other sort of point of context around the the mitigation and the teachers who've been displaced and HR's work going on.

The budget that we'll be bringing to you on July 8th is a fairly conservative estimate in terms of what we will spend on that and so we've tried to mitigate any changes or things that we don't anticipate.

So we're being fairly conservative on that.

I think Ben is right, there'll be lots of opportunity there for folks but just wanted to highlight that.

Yeah, and again, this is certificated folks.

These are the teachers in the classroom.

There are other changes that are happening that do mean other folks that are, let's say, not in the classroom or people that are not certificated.

That's different, and that's other money, other things that we're doing in terms of trying to really tighten our belt to try to make the numbers are still in deficit, but less so.

All right, so you wanna take this?

Sure, and I'm gonna speed myself up a little bit, because we got a lot to get through.

I see the board president giving me the speed it up a little bit.

So as we went through this process with the new superintendent, here's some of the takeaways we had.

One, the current model is super complex and not very transparent or understandable to people.

There was a few weeks in March where Ben would ask me a question about the model and how it worked.

And the answer was hard to spit out because it's really convoluted and complicated.

And so one of the objectives going forward is to simplify this model.

So part of the next steps here.

There's too many hard edges.

So there are occasions where one kid leaves the school or one kid comes to school and suddenly you have half an assistant principal and the next day you don't.

And so trying to work towards softening some of those edges.

Enrollment projections are complex.

There's AAFT, there's headcount, all those things.

I'm working in the future to try and simplify that information not just for school leaders and staff but for the community who relies on their schools in that way.

The earlier open enrollment we're hopeful is providing for more refined enrollment projections and so the choice process sort of changed a little bit this year as well.

So our objective to try to not have many or any June adjustments is probably not gonna be achieved because there's a couple different things going on at the same time.

But I think we all agree that we have better enrollment information as that choice process was resolved in January.

We talked about the non-traditional school funding and some of the archaic and antiquated formulas and they need to be revisited and lots of conversations around that.

And then the next series of slides just shows there's this wide continuum of per pupil funding across the district and there's not really a here's what we're trying to tell you thing but just it's more informational and here's how the model currently works.

So as we start to work on a new model going forward over the next year or two that information is available to you.

and we talked about the ability to make substitutes models in progress and working towards this per pupil funding model and including all of the costs of running a school.

So right now it's confusing to everybody what's centrally funded versus central office versus the schools.

because custodians show up in the central budgets but they actually work in schools and so we have a goal next year to identify all or almost all of the things that are actually happening in a school so that you and the community and everybody has a true picture of what it costs to run that school and what all the different parts of that are.

That was another takeaway and next step from this last process.

I just want to reiterate the thing about hard edges and a per pupil funding model.

Because of the way that we currently do our funding, if one child leaves, or two children leave, or one teacher leaves, that creates this kind of bizarre cascading effect of, well now you lose a librarian, or you lose a counselor, or you lose a half a AP.

That's half a million dollars, if not more.

Or you change the structure of a school.

that shouldn't occur because two kids left or one teacher left.

And so what, again, revenue equaling expenditures, there's money that we get, it's based on kids.

So if we could just start to say the money follows the kid, then you know how the school should be funded.

And the next couple of slides are gonna just show what happens when you don't do that.

Now, I am all for coming up with formulas that say special ed might need more services or ML might need more services.

Absolutely.

But what we can't do is create a funding formula that says two more kids are now half a million dollars of expenditure.

Two less kids are a half a million dollar less of expenditure.

Doesn't work that way and it's not right for kids and it's certainly not right for schools.

So here's where it gets really important and granular.

Elementary dollars allocated per AAFTE.

And remember, AAFTE is how we are funded.

So this is without special ed, without ML.

We have a school that we spend more than twice as many dollars per child than we do others.

I know we love to talk about equity, and I am a big proponent of equity, but we have to understand what our definition of equity is.

It cannot be whatever we want it to be to prove what we want it to prove.

If we have schools that are literally three standard deviations away from how we fund other schools, we have to be honest about what is going on.

I can't zoom in, but you can see that there are schools that we are spending $20,000 per child and other schools that we are spending $10,000 per child.

That's just not fair.

And we're not talking about special ed and we're not talking about ML.

We have to just be honest about what is actually going on to our schools.

Yeah, it includes all the grants and levies and PTA funding as well.

So here's some other ways to think about it.

If you have an average dollar of AAFTE is around 11,008 and you've got a school with 685 students and they're getting $9,000 a kid, and a school with 116 kids, they're getting $20,000 a kid.

That just doesn't feel right.

And then if you look at, even if you hold poverty constant, you have schools that are twice to 8.8 more than where they are.

So a school that has more than 50% poverty getting 20,000 and a school with, let's say, less than 10% poverty getting 13, okay, I get that.

But if you have two schools that are both under 10% poverty and one is at 9,000 and the other one's at 13,600, That's your structural deficit right there.

We are, again, funded by the state at a certain way.

When we are using that funding formula, because the state gives it to us, and we are running a district school that is way off of the way we are funded, this is what you get, 9,320, versus 13, 6, 4, 3. And again, these are the same or very, very, very similar.

They're like exactly the same poverty level.

So this is apples to apples.

Same poverty level.

We're excluding ML and special ed, so we're not including that dollar figure.

This is just regular funding.

one school at 13.6, the other one at 9.3, the only difference is the size of the school.

Poverty we get, that's equity, that makes sense, but we have to be honest about our numbers.

Here's a bunch of numbers everybody at home can read, we're not gonna go through them, but what you can see again, that you have schools that have a poverty level of 50, at 71, poverty level of 50 at 69, poverty level of 44 at 33, but then you look at the allocation, there's a lot here, folks.

So again, we're happy to go deeply.

But again, if you include special ed, if you include ML, that starts to get a little bit funky because again, there's extra services for that.

But if you just look in terms of the regular allocation, without special ed and without ML.

You have some schools at 20 and almost 15 and some schools at nine.

How do I say to a kid at Salmon Bay or a kid at Hazel Wolf that they're only getting 9,000 bucks a kid, but yet a school at somewhere else is getting 12 or 13 or 14?

I know we have to think about equity, but our kids are our kids, and it just doesn't seem right in this.

So middle school, same thing.

It's actually pretty consistent.

What I really like about middle school AAFTE is that the AAFTE top and bottom are actually quite tight, which is really good.

But again, look at our middle schools.

they're at least at a level that the state funds us at.

The smallest one you got is $462,000, I think.

Yeah, the state funds us like that.

That's okay.

That's why you've got between $8,000 and $10,000.

High school, is similar as well.

It's a little bit Lincoln.

Again, size really helps here.

But again, you have a smaller variance.

You do have some variance, but you have a smaller variance.

But most of it is based on poverty, which one could articulate actually makes some sense.

But size does matter a little bit.

But now, again, I'm not saying it's wrong here.

but please, please, please understand that interagency, we are spending $51,000 per child.

$51,943.

So when we hear about we're not treating our Alt-Ed programs fairly, just remind everybody that we are spending $20,000 more per child at interagency than at any other school in Seattle.

I've never seen $51,000 per kid unless it is in a very different kind of school.

So you could take a look at this.

Middle College at $25,000 a kid.

Sugiyama at $31,000 a kid.

and then you've got Cascade at 10,000, at Nova at 12,000.

So again, this is a big reason why we are going bankrupt.

Okay.

I'm gonna turn it over to Kurt, I just wanna make sure, because we've gotta go to other things, but again, just as a heads up, we did cut 69.3 FTE from Central, which is more than we cut in schools, and then we do have some revenues and efficiencies that I really wanna thank Kurt and the team for, in terms of what we've done.

and then we've also got some other dollars that we think we can save for some other things.

These are smaller but important and I wanna give a big shout out to the non-rep staff for furlough days.

Thank you, I'm sorry.

I hope very soon to get rid of that because that means that we are actually taking salary away from non-rep people but that is another thing and thank you for being part of this.

it's really important.

And again, if we do go with the middle college consolidation, that'll save us, actually it's probably gonna be more than half a million, but we're being a little conservative there, and some preschool site consolidation, just because we have classrooms with no kids in them, that we're gonna save about 800,000, and then some workshop substitute costs, et cetera.

Kurt, I know we are kind of running up against time, but I wanna make sure that you tell me what slides are the most important for us to go over before we, I mean, we still have nine minutes, so I just, I wanna be thoughtful about everybody's, so that they can have questions.

But yeah, so that's where we are.

Let me just go through to see anything else.

or you want to just go through the wall?

I think we did cover most of it in summary earlier in the remarks.

So I think the details are there if you want to look at them further.

But I'll turn it back to you and the board president for how you want to approach the next part.

And just there's a lot of appendix.

And I can just let me highlight one thing on the appendix.

There's six schools that are italicized in bold.

Those relate to the graphs that Ben showed earlier.

And so if you're trying to figure out the magic code, that's the magic code.

and then just the last thing, just to walk you through the timeline, July 8th is the presentation of the public hearing and recommendations and then we hope on August 26th we would bring this for the vote.

So I want to thank Kurt for all of his work and everybody who's had a hand in all of this.

So thank you very much and I'm sure you have lots of questions.

I'm getting a reputation for being really stickler on the time.

We've got a little bit of flexibility.

And the community engagement presentation will be much shorter, I promise.

Yeah, but giving time really for the board to have questions or discussions.

I want to open it up for questions or discussion from board directors.

And do we want to just go around the circle?

All right.

Director Smith, do you want to start?

or I think I just have Not too many questions.

I just want a bit of clarity when we've been talking about the fund balance projections.

There's the red line on the graph, that's the goal, and then the status quo.

When we're talking about we're dipping in the original, I thought, plan was 39 to 49 million dipped into the reserves, and now we're looking at 10 to 20. Where do those land in between the projection and the goal?

So that 55 represents the latter of the two scenarios you described, so the fact that we won't dip into the full 49 this year, but rather we'll have 10 or 20, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 20 remaining in forms at $55 million, $55 million estimate, sorry.

So the goal is kind of based on what we have so far.

Yeah.

It's updated information.

Once the budget's presented and approved, that will get clearer, but just wanted to see that.

And then just once we update the next year's budget, the one that we're talking about now, the other numbers, 27, 20, 29, 30, will also change because we'll have better information than what we had a year ago at this time.

sorry I have a couple notes I'm trying to flip back through.

One of them on the staffing one of the changes was rounding to the nearest .2 FTE which oh good you've got it there.

And so I was just wondering for the counselors what that does to the staff ratios.

I know that's something I've been hearing that we have counselors in schools with like much higher than recommended ratios of counselors to students.

So I was wondering about that.

Yeah, so the professional organization of counselors has a ratio that is what the professional organization thinks is best.

The reality is that we have a strong ratio when you compare it to other schools, but not necessarily we don't hit the recommended one by their professional organization.

The rounding is really about not inflating or deflating what should be happening.

What we were doing was we were rounding up by like a .5.

now or a .2 within, and we're just trying to get it to be more accurate.

So I think it adjusted the F4 FTE, but in terms of how it impacts the number of counselors per child at a school, that is a number that I'm happy for us to get to.

And there's ratios in the CBA, 350 to one and 375 to one, and we're still compliant with that.

Yeah, yeah, and that's actually something I'd want to highlight.

In the union contract, they have ratios.

We are still well within those ratios, and that's what we're trying to make sure that we follow.

Yeah.

And just, I don't think this is something to answer on the spot, but talking about interagency and other alternate programs and the current cost per child, is extremely high compared to others.

And so I'd like to know what we can do to still support those students while saving costs.

Yeah, and I just highlight it because I know that sometimes we'll hear like, you know, we make one cut at interagency and it means that we don't care about equity.

know we're spending $50,000 per child there.

We care deeply about supporting that program and in fact show how much we're supporting because we're spending $20,000 more per child there.

And so it's not that that $50,000 is right or wrong.

I think it's just important for us to know the reality, which is that we're spending $20,000 more per child there than anywhere else in this district.

Now, could we be more effective, efficient?

Possibly, but I do know how hard their jobs are there, and I've spent a lot of time there, and talking to folks, I know how difficult it is, but we also just wanna make sure that we know what the reality is, which is we're spending $50,000 per kid there.

Director Mizrahi.

I do have a question, but can you come back to me?

Yeah.

Vice President Briggs.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you.

I actually don't have a question at this.

I'm still thinking, so you can skip me.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

High level, the way this information is being presented is very clear and very helpful.

And I could maybe cry out of happiness a little bit because some of this stuff is, you know, we have to operate within reality.

we have had challenges understanding even what the reality actually is and end up having a lot of conversations and debate around things that are sort of theoretical or anecdotal.

And this is a very clear and I would say also non-judgmental picture.

We're not trying to figure out whose fault something is.

And like you said, interagency, nobody's saying those kids don't deserve more resources, but we have to think about the reality in order for us to make any kind of changes or assessment.

And so to the structural deficit page, yeah, so I just wanted to say thank you.

I found this very understandable.

I would love to hear from members of the public if this feels more transparent or not.

For me, it feels very clear.

So on that structural deficit page, the current state funding model is not aligned with our structure and does not fully support the system SPS is operating.

I just want to add to that that also the system that we're operating is not giving us the results that we want.

So if everybody was super-duper happy, if everybody was graduating, if everybody was having such a great experience and highly successful and really, really happy, and we were outspending, that would be a different conversation about like, wow, where do we get more funding to continue this or where can we reduce?

But we don't have the outcomes that we want, and we don't have a system that I believe is the best system we can have for kids, and it costs more than the state is allocating.

So I think just adding that outcomes piece is important, that this is not just a budget exercise, and our only problem isn't we don't have enough money.

We also have to look at how and what is it we actually want to achieve for kids and are we doing that?

The overspend based on the allocation, is there anything in our budget that actually we spend what's allocated?

I mean, I defer to the man who's been here longer than me, but I would probably say probably not.

That's a good question.

but the principles cost more.

So that's just a curiosity.

And it might be interesting to show to legislators as well.

We'll bring that information to the next finance.

Is there anything that here's the allocation and we spend what we have allocated?

I really appreciate the clarity on that last point.

and I worry about when we talk about other people's children as revenue for our children.

Well, if we could only just bring more kids, then my kid could have X.

Kids are not revenue, they're the purpose, they're why we're here.

We're here to spend money on children.

and we would like more and we want Seattle Public Schools to be the place that people choose.

But I appreciate the clarity on that, that kids are not revenue.

They're the why of what we're doing.

Just a quick note on the academic priorities.

I'm sort of surprised to hear a principal saying, well, what about third grade math?

Do we not care about third grade math?

Mainly because these are the board's summative assessment of the kind of, you know, what we've decided to measure to see in total, is the district successful?

Is the district making progress?

And so I want to,

Oh, no, and I want to defend the principle that we were saying, like, you know, we were talking about these are the big goals.

And it was like, well, what about everything else?

And it's like, of course.

And it was just about how we're going to think about what we're focusing on.

But you're right that we as a district.

I fully expect you to be looking at and asking your staff about all these other things.

But for that, like, summative assessment, for us to say, how's the district doing?

The district's doing great.

That's right.

These are how we're going to use to describe at that high, high level the district's doing great.

Not that we don't care about all the other things, because that's only three goals.

Just one other thing I just learned is that at the federal level, they finally did pass a and despite all of the talk about different grants and different things, for at least the 26, 27 school year, education grants, like title grants, are still gonna come from the education, from the Department of Ed.

Their talk of going to Department of Labor and other things may or may not surprise people.

They haven't figured out how to do that.

And so hopefully we'll have no interruption of the distribution of those funds for at least this year, because they will still be coming from the Department of Ed.

And the other stuff, I'll just say thank you.

Thank you very much.

We have one superintendent and the allocation model has one superintendent in it.

That's one thing that we don't have extra.

That's right.

Director Lavallee.

Yeah, echoing the thanks in this presentation, it's very clear, easy to follow, has the data generally we're looking to see.

I also want to additionally call out thank you for looking at the June adjustment.

I'd love to see potential for something in September as well when kids show up to school.

to know ahead of time and kind of diffuse some of the impacts in October just so that everything doesn't go a month into school and then, you know, have carpets ripped out from under kids.

Just as a past history of what we've had occurring in the district.

And I really want to highlight, and it's a very, very important piece, is historically this district in October has had what has been referred to as the October Shuffle.

There's no question that we could try to start running numbers in September, and we should.

If the kids are showing up, then they're showing up, and we know they exist.

And one of the reasons why, and it's a little bit harder for principals and schools, but that's one of the reasons why we don't give extra money to schools early because it's much more detrimental to children to take away a teacher than to add a teacher.

And so that's why we're a little conservative around the initial allocation because if it goes up, great, we can add.

But if it goes down and now you have to take away a teacher that kids already have relationships with and already have started their routines, that's much more detrimental.

It is much more detrimental but there is some odd stuff there when even if you get a teacher added it does benefit the kids but you're still transitioning kids in classrooms to a new class a month into school which whether you're adding a teacher which is a great thing for the school and reduces the number of students in that class and that's fantastic and very very needed and if we could have gotten it right in the first place that's even better.

That's right, and I think that if we can add earlier, the better, 100%.

Yeah.

I do want to call out, based on Director Smith's comment around the .2 FTE, and not just for counselors as well, but I'd love to see a little bit about how we're making sure we're getting some of these staffing numbers not just right, but when we're looking at staff as numbers sometimes ends up being like 0.6 headcount of this.

And it means that the person either has to try to find a 0.4 headcount for their position somewhere, which might not be accessible in the part of the district they're in, or displace themself.

And then the school is looking for 6 of a counselor or 0.4 of a counselor, you know, whatever it is, which can be a very difficult position to fill because these are, at the end of the day, humans that don't want to spend every day in a different school driving across the city.

And thank you for doing that as you've driven to almost every school at this point in time in the morning.

But it turns out not everyone wants to do

No.

And I want to highlight that.

One of the concerns, of course, with just the funding model in general is when you have FTE by the point twos, you end up making sometimes decisions that are not great for the people that we want to support our kids.

So I'm glad that you highlighted that.

And certainly the hope is that we're able to make up the difference within the school so that the individual could be a full FTE there rather than split their time.

The next concern, and I really appreciate when you're looking at the elementary dollar enrollment allocation per AA FTE slide, I really appreciate you breaking down this data and discussing it.

I do want to call out, and similarly to before when there was discussion of interagency as well, that some of these have variable needs.

Yes, we absolutely need to make this so that it's not quite as skewed, but I also want to recognize that there are different needs in each of these different schools and some of them do cost more money to get kids to similar levels.

Not that the other kids don't deserve it either, they absolutely do and they should be getting more.

and these things should be better overall.

But I do want to call out that when we are evening this out to a certain extent that we don't lose perspective on that equity and paying attention to the impacts for students that need that.

Yeah, and I really want to highlight that.

And that's why we need to do it by child.

It's the need of the kid, not the need of the school or the adults in the school.

It's the need of the child.

And so you are right.

There are some programs like, let's say, firefighting program might cost real money, and then it wouldn't be fair.

But if there is a child that needs more services because they're ML or because they're special ed, absolutely.

But if you have a child and it's the same poverty level, it's the same classes, it's the same programs, and one child is having the district spend $20,000 and the other one is $10,000, that seems pretty unfair to the children.

So my request to the board and to the community is when we start to think about the actual formulas that should fund it, what are the things we want to take into consideration?

That's really important, but it can't be by It can't be by vibes.

That's certainly true.

But it can't just be by history.

Like, well, we've always spent that here.

That's what they get.

Well, why, right?

That's all.

Thank you.

Director Song.

not to pick on Gina, but I sent a lot of questions in advance because I knew she wasn't going to let me ask all my questions.

So thank you very much for answering this.

I hope we covered most of that.

We tried.

We tried.

We really covered it.

and I'm looking at this structural deficit slide and where you're talking about this current state funding model is not aligned with our structure.

The Finance and Audit Committee made a recommendation on what the cadence of budget work sessions will look like going forward.

Perhaps at the one where we're getting a legislative update, it would be helpful for us to know I'll pick an example, culinary services.

What does actually get funded by the state and what additional?

So we can have some, we can not only communicate to our legislators where we're not getting enough money, but it can also do the work of helping us understand the trade-offs.

So in our committee, we had this conversation of like say transportation, we're running at a $25 million deficit because we are funding transportation as we have always been spending.

Is that really where we want to spend the $25 million or do we think it would have greater impact on student outcomes elsewhere?

So I think getting to that level of understanding of our budget, the board is going to have a lot more confidence in approving a budget that really meets the needs of our students.

I have a question around the K3, four, five splits.

I think Ben and I have had this conversation before where we're, I think it's, we're trying to get the money from the state for the K3 ratio, but it seems to be coming at the expense of four or five because so many of our schools have four or five splits.

At what point do we feel like it's not worth chasing the K-3 because the impact of 4-5 is significant.

Yeah, no, I appreciate the question.

And just for those listening at home, there's this kind of bonus money that you get for having small class sizes K-3.

But that, of course, then means that you're not getting the bonus money for other stuff.

And the amount of money that we're actually getting might not even be worth it in terms of how we do that.

I think that we have to take a much deeper look into really figuring out how much money we're getting because of it and then how that's impacting us.

Now, look, the research is interesting around class size.

I mean, it tends to be that smaller class size is better, but there's actually ratios that whatever.

I mean, we can go deep into that.

But I think that and I'll defer to Curt in terms of the dollars.

I think we just have to look at schools and say, whoa, if there's a huge jump between third grade and now fourth grade, what are we doing?

And so are there ways that we could be thoughtful around their schedule, around the way that they're doing it?

The other thing, too, and I defer to Curt on this, that 17 to 1 ratio is district, not necessarily school, per se.

And so there's ways that we can think from from a larger standpoint.

So that is probably one of the most complicated but important pieces that might change the way we do are the structures of our schools.

But I mean, Kurt, you know this better than I do on this.

Yeah, it is a district number that we have run, some information to see where it crosses the line, where it's not.

saving money or costing money and there is a point where it does save the district money by increasing class sizes back to that structural problem.

Everything or most everything the district does cost more than the state provides funding for.

And so yeah, it's that there is a point where it would make financial sense to do something different than 17 to one.

Does that make academic sense is the real question, right?

We're not here to balance the budget.

We're here to make sure kids are getting educated.

That's right.

And we can take a hit in some places.

We just have to know we're taking a hit, right?

And that's the case.

You made a great point.

Is it worth the $25 million extra for transportation?

Or do we think that, bless you, do you think that it's better to spend it somewhere else that might actually lead towards more student gains?

I don't know, right?

But that's why we have to at least start with an apples to apples of like where we are and I don't think the district was doing that previously.

Wanna look to Vice President Briggs or Director Mizrahi?

My questions were answered basically more or less so I'm good, thank you.

Yeah, maybe this is just playing off Director Lavallee's question a little bit, but the thing I was looking at was the AFTE graph, which is really fascinating, and I think to some degree is counter to some of the thoughts that I might have going into if I were to draw this up with what I thought was the case.

One of the things that I'm noticing is that there are schools on here that are smaller but in the middle.

You gave a firefighting program as an example, but what are the actual things that you're seeing that are Because certainly you can see size is a big factor in where you are on this graph.

But what are the other factors?

Poverty, which again, we really do spend based on the equity or the idea of poverty.

So you can look and see here the over 50% poverty you have more than the under 10% poverty.

And that's a good thing, right?

We are putting our money there.

But the other place that we're seeing it is some of our schools get a ton of extra money from DEAL, FEP, you know, that kind of stuff.

And I think one of the issues, and you've all heard me talk about how we need to be the arbitrator of that money, is that there's these other dollars.

There's grants.

There's a school that gets a million dollars a year because of a grant.

Awesome.

but now that means that children at that school are getting an extra million dollars that other children who are down the street are not.

And so we need to take into account all of the money, the FEP money, the grant money, this and then that money.

And so that's the big difference.

There are schools on this list that get extra dollar figures and that's is impacting it greatly, especially if it's a smaller school.

And so again, and the city's been wonderful and they really understand this conversation, is if we got the money and then we distributed it equitably, we would actually be able to balance some of this stuff out.

But I mean, I defer to Kurt, as you've played with these numbers a lot more than me.

A million-dollar grant for a school whose budget is, let's say, $10 million, that's a tenth of their budget.

That's a big change.

And if their budget's $5 million, that's 20% of their budget.

So there's a lot of schools that are changing dramatically based on outside money.

And I will say, I know that the money from PTAs is a question that a lot of folks discuss.

The PTA money for the schools really does not impact the way that some of these large grants do.

But again, you can...

but is there is there anything that comes to mind about like some of the schools that are getting many more dollars i mean the levy schools there's that outstanding question about that was five six seven years ago and things have changed and is that still the right model and we're trying to approach that differently going forward that's a it's a significant dollar amount for many of these schools and how that plays out in the future i think is attempted to be more in line with what we're talking about right now at this table to and make sure that it's going to the right places at the right times and not just static for the period of time of the levy.

If things change, things change and we should be responsive to that.

That goes back to the thing I said about history.

Just because it's happened 10 years ago, is that necessarily the right thing today?

Kind of building off of that I guess is my question.

The difference for the middle school and our traditional high schools between sort of the low spend and the high spend is a lot less than our elementary schools.

Is that just because of grant like what happens

Yeah.

So if you look at the middle schools, it's because the smallest middle school isn't that small.

Is that, again, the way the state funds folks is this expectation of X amount of kids.

And so because the smallest high school, or sorry, the smallest middle school you have is 400 and, is that a six, I think, or an eight?

I don't know.

Is that you're not, you're, you're not being impacted, and then that school is at 46% poverty, so they get the poverty kicker, so they're at 92 and change.

That's the big difference, is that, and then if you look at high schools, again, nobody is below 799, so our smallest high school is 800 kids.

Yeah, you can run a high school at 800 kids.

There's not really a problem there.

And then, of course, with Rainier Beach, I think that's a 62, so they get the poverty kicker as well.

So that's why you've got that pretty tight.

And then middle school is the same way.

Now, alt ed is a whole other story, but that's the deal, right?

Director, Vice President Briggs, and then we'll go to Director Rankin.

Yeah, just a quick clarifying question.

So and also, yes, like I just want to echo everybody else's appreciation of the clarity of the way this information has been presented.

I really appreciate it.

But on the topic of the discrepancies between spending on different students and how we address that while also keeping in mind concerns around need-based allocations, are you suggesting that we move away from I just I haven't been able to tell if it seems like we keep pointing out that the waiting staffing standard is a problem and that it would make more sense to move to a per pupil funding model but is that what we're actually going to do well I mean we have to look at the impact and we also have to look at how to do it mathematically but this is a big district with some

some systems that are modern, and some systems I think are run with the hamster wheel and string, and so we just need to make sure that we're capable of doing it, but then the second thing, and this is where I think we care much more deeply, is we wanna make sure that the formula is right for children, right?

So I believe deeply in equity, I believe deeply in serving the children who have certain needs with the money that they need to service those needs, but it's a child rather than a school.

So one of the things that Kurt was talking about with the hard edges, if the model says at 20 teachers you get a principal or you get an AP and if you're now at 19, you now lose them, that seems like a little harsh.

Or you have two more kids, now you get an extra teacher.

That seems like that's a little imbalanced.

Or you lose two kids and you now lose a teacher.

If you think about it in a student formula, You get two kids, the school gets an extra, let's say, $10,000.

They don't lose a teacher, or they don't gain a teacher.

They get an extra $10,000.

And so we just have to really make sure that we're being thoughtful around the needs.

The ML kid, the special ed kid, the poverty.

There's all sorts of ways, and please don't think that that I'm making this up in the sense that most other large school districts do it, not most, many other school districts in the country do it this way, but most school districts in America that are large have at least some sort of student-based rather than school-based.

Our formula is very different than the way that almost any other district works outside of Washington.

Director Rankin.

It's also pretty different from other districts in Washington.

Also true.

Gina, you brought up the discrepancy in K-5 is larger between schools than middle school and high school, and why is that?

One thing I wonder is, I mean, I think there's a lot of reasons we need to, whatever formulas we end up with, elementary school is just run quite differently and has the everything about it is pretty, not everything, but a lot about it is pretty different and we will need to have different formulas, but at the elementary level, I'm guessing that a lot of the discrepancies in some of the schools are because PCP time or specials are treated in elementary school through various, I don't know if it's contract language, state definition, I don't know what it is, as extra.

and in a middle school, the expectation is that a student will be taking a certain distribution of classes and so there's a kind of as a person with a master of fine arts, a real dismissal of the arts and the people that teach them, honestly, in elementary school that things are very much centered around the general education classroom teacher.

And I'm not saying that this is what people want or anybody's pushing for this, but in the way schedules are talked about in elementary school, PCP, even just calling it PCP, it's centered on release time for the general education teacher.

It's not focused on, hey, this is a time where children are getting art or where children are getting this.

The contract language around it is it's planning time for the gen ed teacher.

And so I would guess that some of the discrepancy, the range discrepancy is because of art, music and other enrichment classes that are happening during the school day where if you have a really small school, you either don't get access to those things or you have PTA or grant or somebody else allocating money to fund those things because they're not, as intrinsic to the full day as they are in middle school where like you need a certain number of classes, a certain number of electives to kind of balance everybody's schedule and all classroom teachers are sort of more or less equally important on paper at the elementary school, it's the general education classroom teacher and everybody else is in our language, not how we feel about these people, but in our language, special or extra or release time kind of thing.

I don't know, that's a wonder that I have if that's true.

And then the second wonder would be how can we change that because we want all children to have access to those things and for it not to be seen as optional in our funding.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's no question that the way that elementary schools are built make it so that art, music, PE are seen as either extra or as in service to the kind of regular class, whereas in a high school, for instance, you're like, oh, there's a PE teacher, there's an art teacher, and they have the same kind of schedule as the history teacher or the social

And you have also, kids have required number of credits distributed across all of those things.

So it's kind of built into the ethos of the thing.

One other question I have about AAFTE, and you don't have to answer it, but I just have to say it, is this is, again, something special that we do because of our special education models that are, again, made up by us.

AAFTE includes awaiting based on assumptions of how much time students with disabilities are not going to be in the gen ed classroom.

And I would really like to see that change.

Yeah.

There's no question that special ed is an area that we need to address.

So yes.

Other questions from directors?

All right.

So we'll be back July 1st or 8th, depending on when that board meeting is.

Depending on what we vote on.

We'll have something like this for you to consider at your August 26th meeting for approval.

Thank you, Dr. Buttleman.

so let's take a quick five minute break we'll come back together at 6.02 or you Joe like some less structured 6.05 but that's Alright it's 6.05 so we will join back together.

We're not even going to let Superintendent finish his dinner.

So our next section is a community engagement work session and I will pass it over to Superintendent Schultner to begin the presentation.

Alright, wonderful.

Well, it's great to see everybody again.

This will be a little bit less complex, but just as important.

I want to thank the board and the community for really supporting something that I wanted to do from the moment I started, which was to get out into the community and really listen to what they had to say about our schools.

I can't be a mediocre, let alone a good superintendent, without knowing what the experiences of the community are.

And we were able to really go in and listen to literally over a thousand people as to what they thought around the community.

And I am really thankful for the two people, one to my left, one to my right, and all of the many, many people from the departments from tech, from comms, from all of the staff that came out to support.

So I think you know both the Chief of Staff, Bev Redman, and the Deputy Chief of Staff, Eric Gersey.

They were really the backbone of these community events, and I just want to thank both of them, and they will chime in as we go on through this thing.

So the agenda.

appreciation to the community.

We're going to talk about the objective and the format, what we learned, feedback from the meeting, and then, of course, next steps and board support.

Okay.

So some great pictures.

There's Eric.

That's really nice.

But These rooms were packed.

I mean, they really were.

It was really, really quite special to have so many community members come out.

Really, I want to just thank the community for being willing to share their voice, share their time, and really, really be part of what even through their survey data said was a really good use of time and hearing their voice.

I'll certainly turn it over to Bev and Eric for their kind of initial thoughts, but I just want to tell again, I was so overwhelmed by the willingness of the community to come out, to spend an evening with us, and really share unadulterated their voice and their time with us.

It was great, and we certainly look forward to doing it some more.

But Bev, Eric, your thoughts on the day?

Well, thank you, thank you.

The engagement tour, the conversations, very grateful for the community, very grateful to be able to offer space.

What I found most interesting is, yes, we had over a thousand people coming through, but remember, those a thousand people plus were very much so vested in public education.

they want to see SPS win or succeed and they were very present so I am incredibly grateful for the conversation the way it was structured from our conversations that we had with Ben on how to set up we wanted to make sure that the community could see their voice in the conversation and that we weren't necessarily forcing a direction on them So incredible, incredible efforts.

People were excited to volunteer.

I couldn't ask more of our teams.

They came in and said, hey, we want to be a part of this first effort from our superintendent and we want to see it succeed.

And the sincerity and the warmth in the room really came across on both sides.

I learned a long time ago you should never seek to follow Bev Redmond so I think we should keep the conversation going.

So one thing that was really clear that I wanted to make clear is that the purpose of these engagements is that we convene, but that we listen.

Bev and Eric were there every time we had these meetings.

I gave the same instructions and the same directions to everybody.

Listen, do not defend.

If a family member wanted to say, that I was the worst superintendent they ever met, you say, great, how do you spell that?

It's okay.

We wanted to hear the voice of the community and not to defend our actions.

And when the community heard that and felt that, we were able to elicit really, I think, honest and thoughtful feedback around what we need to do as a district.

And again, we had three questions.

What's going well?

what's not going well, and then tangible ideas for improvement.

These are, I feel, the right questions to ask in the initial engagement, so we can set the tone, get a sense, and people can answer these questions.

They don't have to go do research.

They know what's going well, what's not going well, and having tangible ideas for improvement.

So I will turn to Eric for this, because he had a lot to do with how and why.

Thank you, Superintendent Shouldner.

So the superintendent, before he even started, charged us with coming up with eight meetings, seven in person, in each of the board director districts across our great city.

And we tried to spread out the events within the districts and tried to kind of create and center on schools using a variety of criteria, making sure that they were accessible to the public, that there was at least some parking available or there was a significant population of walkers in the area.

We tried to make it sort of central within the district and we also tried to accommodate a lot of sort of other events that were going on across the district so for example at high schools around this time of year there's a lot of evening events concerts and so forth which is why you mostly see elementary and middle schools and we also tried to show a variety of our schools including schools that had been recently renovated thanks to the voters generosity so those were kind of the in-person events and our virtual event was hosted via Zoom which was the first time that we had used that platform from the district sponsorship lens and we had pretty great success as well in many aspects of the Zoom meeting.

And just to kind of reiterate, we tried to have food available at every event, light food available.

We had interpretation in all five languages, including American Sign Language, and we sort of had roundtable conversations with many facilitators to join the participants and really just want to thank our staff as well for being there, helping to facilitate and trying to create small group conversations so that everyone could be heard and we think that we were successful in achieving that as we'll see from some of our feedback.

And I was just going to say thank you to the board director for being at each of the seven meetings.

That was really powerful to see the superintendent and the director aligned up there and listening together.

Yeah we really appreciate that and you can see from February 26th to April 2nd we were able to host eight separate meetings and really talk to over a thousand if not thousands of people and so we're really thankful for that.

So what did we learn?

We probably learned what we knew already, but it's really important to have data.

And so what did we learn?

The participants overwhelmingly said that, you know, we have strong, caring educators and staff, that most of the schools, almost all the schools, felt positive, felt warm.

They were thankful for a lot of different enrichment programs and extracurricular opportunities.

There was a lot of strength around dual language.

and multilingual programs.

A lot of families spoke about that.

They liked the SEL components and student supports within our district.

They liked the school level communication and they certainly enjoyed the access to basic needs and an equity-oriented support.

A lot of people talked about there was food available or clothes available at a lot of our schools, and that there was academic opportunities weren't available.

The people who had the academic opportunities spoke very kindly of them.

And again, like we're always trying to do, if you want to click on this, we have the data behind this.

We did not make public the physical photographs of each of the hundreds of pieces of paper.

But we absolutely took all of the notes down.

If anybody wants to see the poster paper, we're happy to show it to you.

But I want to thank Eric and Bev and the team for transcribing everything that was written, writing down every single thing that was said and then finding kind of the theme.

So Eric, if you would just want to talk about how you did all of that, that'd be great.

Yeah, so just there was a lot of team support and kind of making sure that at the end we had all the poster papers, we took pictures of them, we transcribed them, and then what we did afterwards is we put together sort of a summary of each of the individual meetings both in-person and virtual, and those summaries are online under sort of an accordion on the website that just shows, hey, the South Shore meeting, here's what we learned, and then we rolled up all of that feedback into this summary document that's in front of you, and we tabulated the number of mentions of each of the themes.

So I'm looking at equity and resource disparities.

There were 24 group mentions of that, meaning that there were 24 posters that mentioned equity and resource disparities in some kind of way.

And we've got examples of what that means, sort of illustrative examples underneath.

So if 24 groups mentioned it, and on average we had about 10 people per group, that means that around 240 people we're talking about.

and resource and equity disparities.

So we tried to introduce some sort of a methodology in sharing back out what we heard, so it's not just what we wanted to hear, but what we actually heard.

Yeah, and again, we were trying to be really, really clear.

I heard over and over again from the community we want our actual voice to be heard.

And this is the actual voice.

We're not trying to sugarcoat anything.

We're not trying to hide anything.

We took all of the data, ran it through so we could find the themes so that we can share, so that they're palatable, so that we can actually digest them.

But again, all of the hard data we can certainly make available as well.

Is there anything either of you want to talk about, what we learned about what was going well?

what I feel about what was going well again not necessarily a surprise but that we should be very proud of what's happening in our individual schools and how they're performing and how they're moving around and take from that the best practices the things that we're seeing and how can we replicate so not just to say oh yeah checkbox but use it as inspiration for and a resource for how we can make things better across the district

Thank you, Bev.

All right, so what's not going well?

Also, none of this should be surprising to folks, but that there was definitely this feeling.

It wasn't just that, oh, we don't have enough money.

It was really around a feeling of instability, that the budget, staffing, enrollment, there was fluctuation, instability, not knowing how to make decisions.

And we heard that over and over again.

There was a sense of problems with communication, transparency and trust kind of across the district.

And it's not just communication per se around one thing.

It was communication around different things that were happening throughout the community.

I'm certainly going to defer to Bev to talk more about that.

And then also there were so many families who said, our kids want more, they want to advance, they want to do more rigorous things, and that there was even a sense that the district was actively working against that.

That's something that we heard over and over again, and certainly something we're going to have to change.

That some of the specialized services and supports were not as strong, so ML, special ed, et cetera, et cetera, and that there was a sense from many families that there was an overuse of technology, and overuse of screen time.

And then there were some individual concerns around safety and school climate.

And that there was also a sense of disparity around resources.

And then the one that Eric knows is a real bugaboo of mine is barriers for people to help us.

Here you have all these people who want to volunteer and want to engage.

And it is very, very difficult.

We heard that over and over again.

And of course, I'm not surprised because the people that are showing up at these meetings are the ones that are actively engaged.

And of course, they're the ones who are saying, look, we would love to be in our schools, but we're unable.

So that's what we knew were not going well.

But I want to defer to Bev to talk about some of the communication stuff she heard.

again when we're looking at that second bullet point communication transparency and trust I look at it like an equation communication plus transparency equals the trust and as Superintendent Chilgener was saying it is not that it was oh it's this particular office it's a collective it's how we're making our decisions when we start to communicate those things we're just not clear on where the direction of the district is going how you're going about making certain choices decisions.

We want more input into that.

We want to understand in very plain plain language and the desire to be in early on.

in a process versus at the middle or the tail end where you can kind of get lost in the sauce so to speak.

So I heard that over and over again and for many of the things that we tried as where as we could can we get some quick wins in such as the superintendent's newsletter comes online and doing that on a weekly basis.

making sure that we have some insight into district into decisions going ongoing even when you get into the technology and overuse we just came through our meeting where we talked about cell phones and how we were going to proceed with that so keeping families as close as we possibly could and being responsive to the information that they're giving us is the goal

Yeah, I mean, what was really nice when, you know, being a part of these conversations, you know, you'd hear like, oh, we really like the, you know, the superintendent's newsletter, that's helpful, but boy, we still have all these other communication issues, right?

And so, you know, there was definitely this acknowledgement of some kind of change, but we want to be really thoughtful that the things that were not going well is that communication, transparency, trust, and this instability.

I really want to highlight that.

The families were very thoughtful.

They knew we had a budget deficit.

They knew that things couldn't continue the way they are, but what they asked for is, can you just give us clarity?

Can you give us stability?

And I think that certainly the presentation that Curtin and I just gave, is hoping to start that conversation around like, here are the facts, here's where we are, here's how we're gonna try to make decisions, and we're gonna invite you in to be part of those decisions.

And then, What were areas of improvement?

Again, nothing should be shocking, but it's increased the budget transparency.

Nobody was like, well, Ben, just go find a billion dollars.

They understand that that's not necessarily there, but they're saying, what's the transparency?

Where's the equitable resource allocation?

And that's why, again, the conversation that Kurt and I just had was trying to answer that by saying, here's the transparency, here's the equitable allocation, what are our next steps?

They wanted to improve communication, engage families early, strengthen the academic rigor, academic rigor, academic rigor, differentiate based on skills.

We heard from parents over and over again, My child loves their school, they love their teacher, but they're not advancing at the level that they want to advance, that they're not allowed to move at the speed they want to go to, that they feel being held back.

And so that's something we have to deal.

And then again, there was a real push towards dual language programming and other special programming, but dual language got the most kind of like votes.

And again, they want us to reduce the technology and clarify expectations and simplify the volunteer stuff.

And again, if we are going to consolidate, to have clear transparency around facilities and consolidation planning.

Because again, many families were like, look, we get it.

If it's going to happen, but we gotta be clear about what's happening and it cannot be done kind of in a scattershot way.

So I know Eric or Bev, if there's anything you wanna add.

fake fingernails.

The piece about stability or instability that was on the other slide I want to translate it to here.

The thing that underscored for me is when we are not confident with our information or transparent with our information it causes parents to feel the same.

and especially when we're talking about enrollment and marketing our schools that our ability to transfer information completely thoroughly translates in their ability to be confident in us and calm and choose us every day.

So we have to keep that in mind with everything that we do.

Just want to elaborate that the superintendent's been sort of charging the team with beginning to make some progress and sort of get some quick wins in these areas.

Budget transparency the last presentation was a strong example of that.

The way we've moved the enrollment timeline up which should help to kind of stabilize the enrollment projections upon which we staff our schools and turn kind of ultimately stabilizing the staffing.

superintendent's newsletter and sort of some other communications tools and our engagement with media partners, our work around both a new curriculum as well as working to provide summer mathematics opportunities for students, the cell phone policy, and we're beginning to look at some recommendations around how we can appropriately simplify the volunteer process.

So we're trying to get some quick wins and make some progress in these areas coming out of next school year and going into next school year with some momentum.

Okay, so the other good news is that we always want to take surveys of our folks who participate in our activities to see if they liked it or not.

And so I'll defer to Eric because he did a lot of the kind of number crunching here, but what we got was an overwhelming kind of support on that, you know, it was well-organized, it was purposeful, and it was valuable.

That's great.

That's a huge win.

So over 90% agreed or strongly agreed that they started and ended on time.

82% strongly agreed about meeting, had clear objectives, and that over 75% found the meetings valuable.

And again, this is a five-point Likert scale, so these numbers are really quite good, meaning that you have a strongly don't like, don't like, kind of neutral, strongly like.

So we're only talking about the like and the strongly like, not even including the neutral.

So if you looked at it in reverse in terms of who found that it wasn't good, those numbers are actually really, really small.

So I'm really thoughtful and thankful for this.

And then the coolest one, or at least the one that I'm really happy about, is that the atmosphere was welcoming and participants felt engaged.

90% plus on agreed, strongly agreed.

So you're not even including neutral here, and that they felt that they had an opportunity to contribute.

If the whole purpose was to listen and hear the voice, well, we knocked it out of the park.

And so I'm really proud of that.

What's also good, and I'll take it as good, even though you could see it negative, is that the lowest ratings we got was that they felt that there wasn't enough time.

So that's pretty great when you're having meetings with over 1,000 people, and they're like, no, no, we want to spend more time doing this in an elementary school gymnasia cafetorium.

So that's good for us that people really wanted to do this and that there was some folks that sense that they didn't leave kind of invigorated, but we also talked to folks.

It's like, yeah, because they left saying, wow, we've got work to do, not like, oh, my God, everything's great.

So I think there's some real wins here.

But again, we're going to look at the data and we're going to rethink How do we do our meeting structure?

And we'll talk about this in a little bit.

But what we learned, of course, was people felt their voices were heard.

They felt engaged.

They felt that there was well organized.

But the question about clear topics or valuable were a little bit less.

And what we've heard from people is there's maybe some specific topics and things like that.

and we'll talk about that later.

But Eric, you really kind of dug into these numbers and also the board and the public would have some of the hardcore numbers here, right?

Yeah, just on page of the packet in front of you that looks like this, that doesn't have scribbles on it like mine does, that they're on page nine and 10. You can look through the numbers and at your discretion.

but what we did was we had iPads around the room.

Folks, after the meeting, we encouraged them to fill out the survey.

We also had paper copies and then I sent everyone an email in the morning, the following morning, encouraging them to fill out the survey with a follow-up a few days later.

So not everyone filled it out but what was, suggestive of some validity is that meeting over meeting, similar questions were producing similar results.

And then for the virtual meeting, again, similar themes as well, but it was just clear that we have to continue refining the virtual space because we have a little bit less control over it compared with the in-person environment.

Just wanted to highlight then sort of the qualitative feedback.

Something we heard a lot was what are you going to do with this information?

Where are you going to share it out?

What's next?

And we tried to address some of that by transparently posting everything online, trying to be detailed, trying to share out.

And at our next meeting, which we're going to get into, we'll do sort of what we might call feedback on feedback.

So this is the feedback and this is our thinking about the feedback that we received.

and then next steps in looking ahead.

So synthesized and shared out information available online.

Again, we're trying to make everything is open.

We're not trying to hide anything or sugarcoat it.

We want all of the great work to be out there in the public so people can take a look at it.

We're gonna use this feedback to guide both short-term and long-term actions in leading the district.

and of course we wanna host these meetings and we will make them longer.

We appreciate that and we also want them to be more focused because that was one of the feedbacks we had as well.

We appreciated that the first meetings had to be open-ended because we had to get people talking and we needed to see what was going on But what we really heard was, you know, what about specific topics and what about specific grade levels, right?

You know, people would say, well, you know, my kid goes to elementary.

It's a lot different than, you know, high school.

And so what we're looking forward to is creating a series of these meetings moving forward where we're going to have specific topics and also do it by grade level.

So next meeting, which is at Mercer Middle School on May 19th, that's going to be the final one for the year, because June is graduation and all the other stuff, that we're going to talk about safety, instruction, facilities, you know, those kinds of topics, and then we're going to have breakouts based on grade level or school level so that the families of elementary school kids can really come together and talk about these things.

And the last thing I'd say also, the feedback about the meetings themselves will be used to improve the format over and over and over again.

And so the Next steps again is that we're gonna create a year-long engagement strategy.

We're gonna have these monthly.

The idea is that we will have nine of them a year.

We will start in September, and the last one will be in May, and it will be again in each of the board districts and two online.

We'll do the first four on online, the next three in online.

That way we'll have one meeting a month, we will cycle through the city, and then we'll make sure to have two online meetings.

Now of course, Everybody is welcome to come to all of them.

And I will say, shout out to those that did.

We had a couple of people that come to like seven out of the eight ones, or six out of eight, which was awesome.

And so that's kind of the idea.

Now, in addition, we're also going to be having some, you know, we're going to promote some targeted engagement and recruit to meet with special populations.

But we also are doing a lot of other things.

I'm gonna kind of turn it over to Bev.

I want the community to really understand these are the meetings that we are hosting.

I think everybody knows that myself and others are going into the community at a ton of events when we're invited and other kinds of events that we are hosting as well.

So Bev, if you wanna talk about that.

Absolutely.

As mentioned, we just talked about us being in space SPS-created kind of spaces, but community organizations often invite us in, such as SCPTSA, CSEC, various orgs always say, hey, can we host you?

Can we bring you into our space?

So that extends our reach and allows us to get a little more granular and personal.

So we will be continuing to do more of those and attending those organized spaces.

I want to say that this has been an excellent bridge having been on the superintendent search engagement tour till now to say that this was a nice bridge and a nice handoff and a good way to open up SPS at this particular point in time from the beginning and not try to build it in as Ben was four months in that we started from the beginning and wanted to be very open and community has welcomed us not only for the meetings that we hold but again for things that they would like to see us show up to as well.

Yeah, and just as a kind of reiteration, so we are hosting these, you know, monthly district-wide or, you know, school board district-wide events, and then I also or we also will have, let's say, monthly meetings with the city-wide PTSA or, you know, monthly meetings with and so the whole idea for me as superintendent is we should bring in the community writ large and then we need to go to the groups that already exist and give them deference so that we can listen to them as well and so I think if we do these monthly meetings as well as go to the other monthly meetings we'll really get a good sense of what's going on well of course we have to learn we have to listen and then we have to act but I'm really proud of these first three months and six days in terms of really getting the voice of the community.

Eric, is there anything you want to add?

I know we're almost at time here.

and then the last thing that I wanna say is just thank you to the board.

The fact that you showed up when we were in the community means the world to me.

I think it really meant a lot to the community again.

So as we host these meetings throughout the next however many years you'll have me, is that the joint superintendent and board presence wherever possible to hear from the community together, because I think it's super helpful for you to hear what's going on as well, and thank you for being there with us, and that we're gonna work together to address what we learn about the meetings.

And please, we know that these will happen once a month, but we really appreciate the board bringing constituent services to me and to the district so that we can address them.

We're really thrilled that this was the initial engagement, well over 1,000 people, lots of packed houses.

I want to thank the staff for really, really going above and beyond, being a part of these conversations, and then, of course, thanking the community for showing up, letting us hear your unvarnished truth, and hopefully we're starting to already act on the things that you want us to act on.

So with that, thank you so much, and I want to turn it over to President Topp.

Great.

I appreciate the presentation.

So just so folks have an understanding of why now, not only are you wrapping up here with your last meeting on May 19th, we all had our engagement.

But at our retreat, we did say once the superintendent sort of did his initial seven district engagement sessions, he would come back to us with both his findings and then next steps for us as a board in engagement.

So with that, as we're discussing tonight, definitely questions for staff on what they heard, what they learned, but also on sort of the proposal that I'm putting out on the table, which is Ben has proposed sort of this monthly engagement cadence and having our board staff make sure that there are at least two directors up to three not a quorum at each of these engagement sessions throughout the year so that we are also hearing and learning because it is helpful as we prioritize our work.

I look at sort of the what we learned priorities and these are all things that I think that I'm definitely working in my role and I know many of you are in prioritizing the budget with both the presentation tonight and the work from the community, the sort of stabilizing staffing and sort of the enrollment changes that we made the sort of focus that we've had as a board on communication, the conversations we've had on strengthening our academic rigor and what that looks like, sort of the importance of our dual language and special programs, reducing the technology with our new cell phone policy, but also I know there's a lot of interest in screen time and what that looks like in the future.

The simplified volunteer and family engagement process, that one's new to me and interesting, and I want to dig into that more.

And then the last one seems obvious after the last year in the consolidation conversation.

But I think all of that, it's helpful for all of us to be and have ears in these meetings so we learn, so we can do our job.

So that is my proposal.

So as we sort of go around the table tonight, think about that, provide some feedback, and we can start initiating as early as this next meeting on the 19th if we we're comfortable with that process since the resources I think that we want to have in our engagement sessions are set.

I will also just say the feedback is super helpful on the responses.

I would have not thought that you got was the meeting valuable as high as 75 percent.

So I think that's really interesting.

I also appreciate that it's not going to be the same conversation every time.

You're going to take what you've learned here and continue the conversation and dive deeper.

So I appreciate that.

I think that's what I pretty much want to say.

So we will just, I don't know if you have any, yep, we'll go around the circle here.

And I'll start, I'll go the other way this time.

So Vice President Song, I mean, Director Song.

I saw Evan's sign is right there.

Where do I want to start?

Well, first of all, I just want to say thank you to you and your team for standing these up and I think it's pretty incredible when Eric was going through this slide in terms of some quick wins.

It's been actually a relatively short amount of time and you have really been responsive to community feedback, so thank you very much to your team.

As the chair of the finance and audit committee, having this information is really helpful.

So what is not going well?

Budget.

I think I would invite my committee members and staff, maybe we should add to our work plan to have a conversation about what does communication around our budget and financial situation look like together and how can we as a board partner with the staff and what are specific things that we can be doing and just add that to our work plan.

I have I don't think you'll have answers to these questions now but two wonderings I have are one if there were regional differences in some of the answers to these questions and that's just something that that we as directors for our district can be aware of that we need to engage more on.

That's one question.

And the second question is, what's not going on, the communication, transparency, and trust.

Where are families actually getting their information?

And in particular, I'm really interested in knowing where families are getting their information about our financial situation.

Yeah, I mean, I can answer the first question a little bit.

There were some regional variances, but what was interesting was just the overwhelming similarity around all three questions, what was working, what wasn't.

So there were some schools that some locations talked a little bit more about dual language than others.

Some spoke more about kind of advanced learning than others.

Some talked about safety and security more than others.

But in general, and we're happy to share.

I mean, Eric's created one for kind of each, and so we're happy to share the regional differences.

But in general, there was quite a lot of triangulation.

Valley yeah so my first one of my questions was going to be about the differences in each region and if there was anything that was particularly different or stood out as being different just so that we know if there's gaps somewhere and we know if there's strengths somewhere and and we might not see it in a forum like this but I know there are different both gaps and some of the different areas of the city so I would also like as we continue forward with your plan I'd love to know a little bit more about how we're planning which topics in which region just so that it's not you know so that it's the thing that's best applied and the thing that most needs to be discussed as well within the individual regions and not just haphazard of We pulled one card and we pulled a region and that's the random setup that we get.

And then I guess my only actual question for you guys is, was there anything that really surprised you?

that you heard, even if it was just kind of a one-off thing that just one or two people said.

Was there anything that just you weren't aware of or surprised you in listening?

Not that I wasn't aware of it.

I said it earlier.

The amount of people who really want to see SPS work for their students was super clear.

That they're not our enemies.

they're not against us, they're actually for us, but they are absolutely for their children.

So that was very, very clear.

Yeah, I don't think anything was surprising, but it was really validating to be a part of these meetings with families who just wanted to serve and to help and support, and I think What was great was to see how many staff members were at the tables engaging with families and then bridging those divides.

I think, and I've said this before, the superintendent specifically, but I think this building has been some sort of like Wizard of Oz place where everything is behind the veil.

Oh, you're the head of this department.

Great.

Oh, and you're asking me these questions?

So I think what was great was to see this desire to meet as humans and as people, to collectively move children towards success, but really those relationships between central office and the community, which might have just not been that strong, it was just really nice to see that over and over again.

Yeah, I would concur with everything everyone said and kind of the similarities you see across the different meetings in terms of the themes I think are pretty powerful and also just the ability of our team which was amazing to have folks not only talking with staff but talking to one another.

So the more we can have community members talking with one another is powerful to move things forward.

I had one more too that's carrying on from what Director Song said.

With communication, there's communication about what the district's doing and the budget and the committees and all of these different things.

And there's hopefully improvement there and will continue to improve there.

I know before the meeting I had gotten a call which Superintendent Scholdner I chatted with you about where a student had an incident at school and the parent had just not gotten notified and it's something that they should have gotten notified regarding and so just making sure that communication at all levels is increased to kind of the right measure which is a hard thing to measure because it's different for that line is different for everyone.

So trying to make sure we can kind of move that direction so that parents know what's going on about their kids that they need to know on a daily basis or a weekly basis so that they know what's going on with their school on a regular cadence and what their school offers.

I know so much of the times people coming in have no idea what after-school programs there are at the school or if there is something.

So really just getting an understanding not just of how the district is communicating to parents but also how how information is available and how schools and teachers are communicating with families as well.

Yeah, I want to be really clear.

What was just said is exactly what we heard writ large.

It's communication at every level.

It's the communication from the school, from the teacher, from the district, from the departments.

And so, you know, we have our work cut out for us, but it's really important to hear that because that, you know, when a parent doesn't know about something that happened to their child that day and they only hear about it when the child tells them, that means that there's a communication breakdown, right?

And so I really appreciate you highlighting that.

Thank you.

Just to take that in a slightly different direction, to answer your previous question, one thing that surprised me was the floodgates of folks really opened when we started pushing the communication out to principals and school leaders who are the trusted messengers, as was reaffirmed through our data, to then push the information to their families, and hearing from them, I mean, increase the numbers two, threefold.

In addition to your promotion, Director LaValle in your district, so.

Director Rankin?

Thank you.

Yeah, I'm like equal parts excited and grateful and also super, super frustrated just at the reality of the situation because I know that I have the honor, I don't know, I've been around the longest, so having the same conversation over and over and pretending that it's brand new is exceedingly frustrating.

So I want to give some of the benefit of some past work that it is, the board asked for an audit of the district's communications in 2022-23.

We got the results of that audit from the National Public Relations, I can't remember what the, NSPRA.

Yeah.

Seven high-level, very actionable findings and recommendations that came to the audit committee because the board at the time was also like, our communication, these are not new problems.

The results of that audit were what looked like pretty actionable, basic administrative things to address.

And instead we were stonewalled and there was a lot of hostility around even the expectation that there would be a response to the audit.

and so it's on our website.

I hope that you've been provided with.

Ben, if you haven't, it's on the website.

It's a completed audit.

Seven recommendations that are completely within the purview of the superintendent on improving communication and families participated in that.

Not to say that there are things that will be mysterious to you or that you couldn't have figured out, If we can not redo work, we have a history in SPS of identifying a problem, asking for help, being presented with some potential solutions from experts, and then totally ignoring it.

and doing the same thing over and over and over again.

That's the frustration that I have is just like, if something's wrong, I want to fix it.

And I kind of cannot get over such an engaged, intelligent, caring community as Seattle receiving expert recommendations and just wholesale rejecting them over and over and over when we could be doing better for our kids and honestly honoring the work of the people around us and honoring everybody's time much more and resources by not repeating this.

So there is that 2023 audit.

There's also the PSESD review of the process at Rainier View in 2024 outlined a number of broader issues on school-based communication, incident reporting, kind of clarity around what happens when things are, again, really actionable.

And I remember when we received this, those of us who have been around were like, yes, this feels really, really Even those of us who had nothing to do with the particular school, it just rang very true and there were a number of basic recommendations about addressing complaints and things that, again, we've gotten outside support recommendations and let's just follow those.

The idea of having the monthly, I'm also wondering how I'll pick the topics.

I'm wondering, because different things come up at different times.

In the past past, like pre-COVID, there would also be different engagements that were, you know, if there was a boundary change coming up.

it wouldn't necessarily have to be the superintendent, but the staff associated with that would go to the community impacted.

That's part of also the community engagement.

So I'm not necessarily assuming you're not gonna do that, but I'd be interested in kind of a overview of what we can expect as an approach?

Sure.

Yeah, I mean, simply, and I'll try to be more articulate about it as we move on to next year, but what we're trying to do is hear the community, they tell us the topics that they think are the most important, and then those would be the ones that we discussed.

So like a lot of things that we heard around, let's say, facilities or extra programming or safety and security, those again would be like the topics that we would do and to the point that was made earlier, if there were specific regions that had a specific topic, it would make sense then to have that be one of those as well.

And so right now we have 1,000 people, probably a lot of different data points.

There was a lot of triangulation.

There were certain topics that they wanted further conversation about I think they translate so well that it doesn't really matter where we are for those, but then there were some topics that were very specific to region, and that was what we would kind of add to that.

And again, levels are levels, right?

The elementary school folks wanted to talk about elementary, the high school wanted to, yeah.

and then I want to second or appreciate Director Song saying, you know, what's our role in this and how can we support?

So I encourage everyone to look back at the WASDA board standards and the fourth standard is community engagement for the board.

because the other thing I'm a little bit nervous about is that we are actually giving our obligation over to the superintendent of representing the vision and values of the entire community.

And so I'm wondering how we as a board wanna address, like being present at meetings with the superintendent is fantastic, we should do that.

And I would guess most of those issues are gonna be operational things.

It's good for us to hear, but our job is to represent really what does our community want for education, and we need to not let that go.

And then there was one other thing, but I forget what it was.

Oh, we can have a quorum if it's a public notice meeting that's open to the public.

Four directors can be there.

That was all.

So if there was a hot topic or something, if there was some hot topic and everybody really wanted to be there, as long as it's the public knows that the full board might be there, that's totally fine.

But I think this is a good start for the plan for next year.

Thank you.

Vice President Briggs.

Yeah, I just wanted to second the recommendation to look at the communications audit because a lot of this work was already done and there's a lot of great information in that audit that still hasn't as Liza said suggestions that still haven't been implemented and I think it's all still really relevant information even though it's a couple years old at this point but that's it for me great thank you director Mizrahi

My only thought feedback was that I think that the whole experience was really good.

The one that I went to was really good.

It'll be interesting to see as you transition to more driven meetings with like a topic.

I think one of the feedback that I heard in my community was that they enjoyed, that it was just a little bit of a, the district didn't come to us with an agenda, they were trying to convince us of something or even get us to decide on something.

They just wanted to hear from us.

So I think mixing that in will certainly be helpful as you go forward, too.

Yeah, no, I really appreciate that.

And the hope is that the topics that we'll be discussing would be so large that it would be topics that people would feel comfortable talking about, but I do agree that there needs to be a place for people to just share, you know, in a structured way, you know, because I do want people to feel comfortable having these meetings with us.

Just put airing of grievances on the agenda.

That's right.

Director Smith.

Not too much for me, I think, on the topic of the different topics in different regions.

I would just hope to see some repetition, since we've got some pretty clear topics, that it wouldn't be like, oh, well, we're doing instruction in North Seattle, and then that's it.

Like, we should keep going.

And probably even just over time, too.

Yeah.

Great.

Thank you.

Any other comments?

All right, I sort of got a warm feeling we'll have board staff work on coordinating us a little bit so we can make sure that there are at least two of us attending these meetings.

That concludes the engagement section and really our work session in general.

So we have our regular board meeting next Wednesday.

Our student presentation portion, we will have Gatewood School, a grant presentation from them, and then Chiefs South High School wrestling state champions here with us.

So very District 6 heavy day.

That was not my design, but I'm very excited for that since that is my district.

It is also Representative Yoon's last meeting.

so we'll have an opportunity for board directors to say a few things so please come come prepared for that but there being no further business on the agenda the meeting stands adjourned at 6 57 p.m.

thank you everyone