Facts Matter: SPS Enrollment Much Higher Now Than The 2000s
I want to debunk the idea that drastic enrollment declines are forcing closures. In reality, our headcount is higher than any point in 2000-2011 (earlier data not available), usually by around 2,000 to 4,000 students in a district that’s currently about 49,000 students. The idea that we have to “right-size” our schools now by closing 21 Elementary Schools due to enrollment decline ignores all of 2000–2011 since it brings us to, I think (it’s hard to dig through school moves/renames), 15-25 fewer schools than we had in 2000.
See graph below followed by analysis. Data available in this Google Sheet.
Headcount (P223 Total Count) since 2000
Below is a graph of the headcount since 2000. Pay attention to the data from 2000–2011, and the data from 2021–2024. The dashed orange line shows the current enrollment. The grey box with red text shows when we last attempted to “right-size” the district by closing schools.
Critical points
- Headcount (P223 Total Counts) actually grew by 15 students from Oct 2023 to Oct 2024.
- The pandemic-triggered decline seen in 2019–2020 may be flattening out.
- We have more students now than any year during 2000-2011, often by 2000 to 4000 more.
- The 2008 attempt to “right-size” the district closed 11 schools when the Headcount is 45,572. We are now being told to close 21 schools to “right-size” the district when headcount is 49,240 . In 2007–2011 they closed 11 schools and reopened 7. Now we want to close 21. That leaves us at 25 =(-11 + 7 - 21) fewer schools than 2000.
Saying enrollment is too low for a good experience with the current number of schools implies that students of SPS in 2000–2011 must have had an even worse time.
Reality: Seattle schools enrollment is still far higher than it has been for much of the last 2 decades and probably longer.
Caveat: The count “25 fewer schools than 2000” might be off by up to 13 based on the table of of schools on wikipedia. However, some of those dates don’t make sense (it says Viewlands merged into Broadview Thomson in 2007–2008, but then says Broadview-Thomson was established in 2008). in the worse case we end up with 12 fewer schools than 2000 which is still a lot.
Misleading info, Misprojection, and FUD
There’s a lot of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) regarding school closures.
This post started coming together after I heard Dr. Marni Campbell speak at the Well-Resourced Schools affinity group meetings for Chinese-language speakers on October 16, 2024. She began the session by asserting that everyone knows the enrollment decline is a real problem and that we need to “right-size” the district eventually.
This gained urgency when I saw a set of infographics, published by the Southeast Seattle Education Coalition (SESEC), in circulation. I noticed they were repeating the same misleading/false/incorrect narrative using the same misleading datapoints to do so.
The comparison points are cherry-picked to make current enrollment look exceptionally bad.
The graph earlier plots the last quarter century (2000–2024). Looking at it, it’s hard to conclude that the 2019–2024 enrollment decline is so shocking.
I don’t blame SESEC for making flawed talking points of people in official positions accessible (though they should retract/amend that infographic now as the error has been pointed out to them a few times).
I do however have a major problem with Dr Campbell’s repeating the enrollment decline argument on October 16, 2024. She is the head of the Well Resourced Schools effort and also a former principal of many years.
By spring, she should have known that the 2024 actual enrollment data was looking better than projection.
By September, she should have known to double check the P223 reports. All schools submit a record of their school’s enrollment in a P223 report every month. When the September reports show ~222 “Total FTE” (term explained in next section) above the budget projection instead of the projected 692 student decline, this difference should have been accounted for within the Well Resourced School (WRS) plan. This information was available to her before WRS was published.
By October, she definitely should have known. October is the most critical P223 count of the year, used to reallocate staff in schools (aka the October shuffle) and to directly calculate budget for the following year. In this year, the Oct 1st P223 showed 737 Total FTEs above the budget projection. This is only a 14 student decline from last year.
See the following graph to see how bad the mis-prediction was:
It’s deeply concerning if by October 16th, the person in charge of Well Resourced Schools either do not have the competence to read the data, or did not bother to look into the data, or even worse, looked at the data and still repeated falsehoods.
Doing this in an official forum meant to reach a group of Chinese language speakers that may not have heard the english-heavy information is another strike in the anti-Asian (and anti-English language learner) behavior of this Well Resourced School plan.
Seattle Public Schools staff, especially Dr. Marni Campbell as the head of this effort, needs to do better to avoid misleading communities.
As for the information coming out of advocacy organizations like SESEC and SCPTSA, I would encourage everyone to double check their numbers.
At this point we are all learning. We are all going to make mistakes. We all just need to make sure to seek out feedback from diverse perspectives, check citations, and ask for retractions if a mistake is found.
Conclusion: All arguments for closures are falling apart
Proponents of the Well Resources School closure plan tend to justify the need to close 17 to 21 now or over the next few years with arguments around
- equity
- drastically declining enrollment
- savings of 750k to 2.5M dollars per school closed
My recent posts and school board testimony already debunked the equity argument by showing that WRS is exceptionally redlining reinforcing, structurally racist, and has disparate impacts against many demographics — especially communities of color trying to establish themselves in Northwest Seattle. It’s really shocking to me that groups like Seattle Council PTSA are not coming out hard against it.
The alleged “equity” motivation for Well Resourced Schools is wrong. Well Resourced Schools is structurally racist and should be labeled as such.
This post debunks the idea that our enrollment is declining so fast that we must “right-size” the district and close schools in the next few years.
My next post will use the 2022–2023 SAFS F196 data that shows detailed line-items of actual spending per-school to check the savings estimates. Spoiler: I cannot get them to add up to anywhere near 1.5M/school though I’m still validating.
Sarah Clark was right: this entire Well Resourced Schools concept needs to be scrapped.
FAQ
How do the FTE mis-projections look when broken down per school?
It’s actually pretty interesting but the graph is huuuge. I’ve put it at the very bottom. Here is a link to the Google sheets that sourced the chart. An interesting thing to try is to take the delta in enrollment then project out how much more or less money a school may receive.
For schools with overly large class sizes where the district has refused to assign extra teachers (e.g. Cascadia, Graham Hill, etc) this might be useful info to pass to your teacher and principal union reps.
What is Total FTE? What is Headcount? What else?
Very good questions. Danny Westneat’s article (who managed to scoop me :P) notes this confusing mess of numbers too. Let’s go through this.
Enrollment numbers in SPS are reported using the P223 form — a monthly update sent to OSPI at the state level listing the current count of students per school.
The P223 has 3 counts with similar names that are confusing: Total Count, P223 Total Count, and P223 Total FTE
The SPS Budget book also introduces two more concepts: Average Annual FTE (AAFTE), and then an unnamed concept (described on page 59 of the 2024–2025 budget book) that is critically used to calculate budget allocations per school. I call this “Adjusted AAFTE” in this document.
This means there are 4 numbers that indicate “enrollment”. They are very related to one another, but you cannot compare them directly. For example, “P223 Total FTE” is often a few hundred lower than “P223 Total Count” which is often a few hundred lower than “Total Count”. However, the trends across each should be similar.
Can you define each student count term?
Total Count is every enrolled student, including preschoolers. This number does not seem to be commonly used. Danny’s article saying “By the first way, enrollment rose this year versus last by 206 students districtwide” is using this number.
P223 Total Count is every enrolled student excluding preschoolers. This is called “Headcount Enrollment” in the Budget Book and I call it “Headcount” above. It is not directly used for budgeting. In 2023–2024, this increased by 15 students.
P223 Total FTE is an adjustment on the P223 Total Count where a part-time student is counted as a fraction of an Full Time Enrollment (FTE). Usually this is only a few hundred less than the P223 Total Count. This number is used by the state for allocation money each month (apportionment).
AAFTE is the “Average Annual Full Time Equivalent” which is the average of all the P223 Total FTEs in a year. This is a Budget-Book-only concept and is the value used to make projections as well as calculate budgets. It’s unclear if this includes non-school programs such as BRIDGES Transition, etc.
Adjusted AAFTE is AAFTE above with special sauce AATFE factors that adjust it for “historic differences between AAFTE and headcount per grade at each school.” (2024–2025 budget book, page 59). It excludes the following programs “BRIDGES Transitions”, “Bridges Transition”, “Exp Ed Unit”, “Non-Public Agencies”, and “Special Ed Private Svcs” which are listed in the state P223. When looking at school level breakdowns, the Adjusted AAFTE should be compared with the “P223 Total FTE” minus the values for the schools above.
Data for the P223 Total FTE is only available as far back as 2018 (I didn’t include 2018–2019 in the charge above for easier comparison, but the trends look similar). Before that, only the P223 Total Count was readily available which is why the first part of this post uses P223 Total Count. The trends should be very similar though.
Why doesn’t the 2024–2025 Budget Book Allocations match exactly?
The Budget Allocation to schools are based on the Adjusted AAFTE which for 2024–2025 is 47,475 (2024–2025 budget book, page 59).
The October 2024 P223 Total FTE is 48,393.14 FTE but you have to subtract out 169.4 FTE for
- Bridges Transition (110)
- Exp Ed Unit (16)
- Non-Public Agencies (28.4)
- Special Ed Private Svcs (15)
leaving the total FTE across all schools in the budget book at 48223.74.
When reading any of the numbers, you have to be really careful as there is a lot of variation about which schools are including, if they have adjusted the number for FTE or other factors, etc.
What are the key Implications for Money Allocations due to the misprojection?
- SPS only lost 13.5 P223 Total FTE between Oct 2023 and Oct 2024.
- The 2024–2025 budget predicted an AAFTE of a vastly mispredicted decline. We have 749.74 FTE above the Adjusted AAFTE projection.
- The Well-Resourced School FAQ estimates $13,469 revenue/student, which is a questionably low-balled estimate.
- The 2024–2025 budget book page 64 shows $15,489 per elementary student. This itself is already a very conservative number.
- The 2024–2025 budget book page 21’s General Fund “Total Revenues” is $1,114,190,613. Dividing by the Adjusted AATFE of 47,475 gives $23,469 revenue/student.
- Using correct enrollment numbers means we should have somewhere around $10.1, $11.6, or $17.6 MILLION more in revenue above our budget prediction.
- DO NOT read this as reducing the budget deficit by $10.1M; much of that money will be spent on instruction.
- DO ask why we have larger class sizes but are not hiring more teachers.
If the projection error will give us $10–$17 million more in revenue, then it directly challenges the urgency for closing even 5 schools this year.
Remember, in Oct 2008, when we tried to right-size the district by closing 11 schools (7 of which had to nearly immediately be reopened) the Headcount was only 45,572 (vs 49,240 on Oct 2024). Furthermore, according to former school board director Michael DeBell, the savings from school closures were significantly lower than expected.
So the supposed 1.5M of savings per school is very questionable and I will dig into that in the next set of posts.
But what about underutilized buildings???
What about it?
We have new big buildings (with exceptionally good insulation and modern building standards) that are not full. If you leave those rooms empty, what’s the actual extra cost? Like most buildings it is probably mostly heating which is heavily mitigated by the modern building standards.
If you sum across the district, do you think we’re paying tens of millions more in heating for underutilized rooms?
It’s worth digging into, but on the surface, that argument that “we bneed to consolidate cause we have building with open spaces so that [what… saves XXX dollars? makes people feel safer? other?]” sounds like FUD.
What about the ~30 schools under 300 students?
Looking at October P223 Total Counts from 2019–2024, the number of schools with less than 300 students is trending up but seems to always be around 30ish. If you plot the schools with less than 290 students as well, it actually doesn’t look as scary yet.
The two questions to ask:
- How many elementary schools had less than 300 students during the 2000–2019 period with special attention to 2000–2011 when enrollment district-wide was vastly lower than now.
- Is there anything structurally set up with those schools that is suppressing enrollment? Are waitlists not moving? Are the boundaries wrong? etc.
If there were about as many small schools in 2000–2011, then the closure plan is not motivated by recent enrollment decreases or recent budget deficits. It’s actually a district school size design philosophy change and needs to be called out as such.
If there are structural issues that are setting up these schools to have low enrollment, then those should be looked at for fixing.
Schools are longterm infrastructure investments similar to creating a park or adding a transit station. Two of my childhood schools, Whittier and Ballard High School, lasted nearly 100 years before their rebuilds.
Schools are 50–100 year city design investments. Making changes for population trends that do not cover at least a quarter (25 years) of that period is not thinking through the problem hard enough. We should get more data.
What about the waitlist oddities?
There were some VERY noticeable oddities with waitlists this year where many schools — especially option schools — did not have students assigned to them even though they had lots of open spots and waitlists would have significantly increase the school’s enrollment. This was different from previous years.
There is speculation that some of this was an attempt to push more schools below the 300-student threshold. This is unconfirmed but my take is it doesn’t matter. Like I said in the last section, it turns out we have had a similar amount of less-than-300 student schools for a while. This is something to examine but there is no urgency and it is certainly not an strong indication of crisis.
Why isn’t the Board asking these questions?
The analysis here is not hard. Seeing the lack of decline required subtracting two 5-digit whole numbers (Common Core Math Requirement for 4th grade) that are core to the Budget making process.
How did the board not notice? No random parent should ever be the one to find something like this. This is their job as oversight which requires due diligence. Many folks blame just the Staff and Superintendent. I go higher.
I again point to the problem with the current board set up and governance structure where they do not have a finance committee and where their weird Student Outcomes Focused Governance mantra has directors telling other directors to not ask detailed questions.
Your governance structure should critically ensure one thing: that you understand the topic you are voting on enough to make a good vote. Everything else is secondary.
This is their job as oversight. Many folks are blaming the Staff and Superintendent. I go higher to the folks we elected.
And if you are silencing folks from speaking using procedure and positional authority, you will almost certainly remove the ability for disadvantaged groups to have their ideas voiced by the decision makers thereby reinforcing structural racism.
Heck, if someone was allowed to ask the “tactical question” about why the projection didn’t match the actuals, they could have saved Dr. Marni Campbell from continuing to repeat mislead statements to the Chinese speaking community.
The current setup with Student Outcomes Focused Governance seems to both create an environment for negligence and more structural racism.
Is 0.99999 repeating really the same number as 1?
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999... And it 9/9 bothers me too.
Data sources
Data for this analysis is taken from 3 sources:
- P223 Monthly Enrollment PDFs. (Data imported to this google sheet)
- 2021 District Facilities Master Plan Update (fig 9)
- 2024–2025 Budget Book
The P223 Monthly reports are a state-required submission of K-12 enrollment used to determine the amount of money (apportionment) Washington state gives the district. The district website only has data from 2019 forward. If you URL-hack it, you can get 2018 data.
The Facilities Master Plan Update in Figure 9, “SPS Annual Enrollment by Grade Level, 2000–2020”, incidentally contains the P223 Total Count Data from 2000–2020. It is still just P223 data. The data table was validated for the overlapping years and found consistent (minus one small error in 2021).
Admonishments & Rants
There is a major trend of bullying and silencing in the SPS Parenting community. Since my last post, lots of people have come talking to me and there’s a really strange trend of folks reporting statements like:
- “you need to take a wider view on equity” — as if anyone here in Seattle has a good view of the problems across the entire city.
- “you cannot talk to these people because [insert FUD]” — as if as grown adults will be somehow tainted by getting more views
- “you cannot fill out this survey because [insert FUD]” — as if as grown adults you cannot email the parent sending the survey and ask if it makes sense.
- “we cannot work/talk/engage/support [other school] because they are [privileged, racist, narrow-understanding]” — as if the person speaking somehow doesn’t have attributes of privilege, racism, or narrow understanding.
Seriously folks. If you hear people ever trying to control the meaning of “equity,” remember my last post.
NO ONE in any recognizable position has talked about the huge systemic, red-lining reinforcing, anti-Asian (and anti-Black + anti-Hispanic + anti-Native in some areas) disparate impact. Always listen but be very careful of ceding the definition of “equity” to someone who “knows better” because rather recently, everyone who keeps talking about that word allowed systematic targeting of Asians and other groups to go uncommented on.
Second, if anyone ever tells you to NOT TALK TO OTHER PARENTS or NOT BOOST EACH OTHER’S CAUSES or NOT SIGN EACH OTHER PETITIONS immediately ask hard questions about why, and then reach out directly to the group that you are being told to not help to understand them. Most of them want to talk. Then make your decision.
As to the folks who are pushing parents to not connect (since my medium post, I’ve had a distressingly large number of people come tell me they’ve been encouraged to stay silent by some folks in their school communities), please stop that. You are disabling the ability for the community to pool information in order to find equitable solutions. Don’t do that.
The rest of us should call out such behavior and get everyone to talk.
Acknowledgements
Though I’ve been dumping a lot of data, I’m actually not sourcing all these insights myself. However, a lot of folks who have been helping don’t like having their name published. So, if you see this, imagine a group of about 10–20 parents from different parts of the city, many who I’ve only really met in the last month, helping out. To all the SPS Data Nerds, you know who you are. Thank you!
Also special shout out to the folks on the Future of Seattle Public Schools facebook group where I tend to early-publish info and who have become a fast group of fact-checkers and insight providers. I hate that it’s locked in a FB group, but at least there is some place where people can pool information.
Appendix: Per-school Projection Mistake Chart
