[ Full disclosure: I sent an earlier ragier draft of this letter to the Stranger Editorial staff on Monday. I also volunteered on the Clark campaign in the last stretch when I started noticing what was happening. The letter should stand on its own though. ]

Dear Stranger,

I’ve been reading The Stranger since my days eating lunch at North Seattle Community College during Running Start when I picked up a paper copy and thought, “Well, at least it’s not boring.” When I reached voting age, my older classmates told me to start every election with the “Election Control Board.” As a teenager fresh off an Orwell phase, I found that name darkly funny. But it’s a lot less funny when it starts looking like you’ve actually come to control elections.

That’s exactly what it looks like happened with The Stranger and the Seattle School Board. Since 2011, no candidate for school board has won without The Stranger’s endorsement. For fourteen years. No exceptions.

Going back further to 2005, only two candidates (three if you count the one where you pulled the endorsement before election day) managed to win without your endorsement.

Over 20 years your endorsements have placed 34 out of 36 school board directors. For better or worse, that means your endorsees have controlled the school board. If you covered the district regularly to inform your endorsements, or if the results were good, maybe that would be fine.

The results have not been good.

Instead, we’ve gotten a string of school board directors who:

• Neglected the basic fiscal and administrative health of the district to focus on niche debates about walk-to-math, the Highly Capable Cohort (HCC), option schools, and PTA funding such that those smaller topics have taken up all the oxygen in policy and advocacy work.
• Bullied out Black staff members, then sued the district instead of owning their mistakes.
• Let a $27M deficit in 2010–2011 balloon into an $90M deficit in 2025–2026 — while eliminating the board’s fiscal oversight committee.
• Adopted a framework called “Student Outcomes Focused Governance,” causing directors to spend their time discussing what they are allowed to to talk about instead of discussing the actual issues.
• Failed to notice or address the slow erosion of middle and high school electives like world languages and college-prep courses.
• Generated a policy and budgetary environment so dysfunctional that it led to a sudden, reckless plan to close 21 schools which, on inspection, saved little money.

Yet rarely, if ever, do these impacts of your endorsees’ decisions and votes get mentioned in your paper.

During the closure debate, I penned an op-ed in the Seattle Times calling on board members with more than one year tenure to resign for their part in this mess. But watching this election cycle — and the Stranger Election Control Board’s role in it — I realize I didn’t go far enough. Until The Stranger demonstrates a deeper understanding of the school district and consistently tracks the impact of its endorsements there, you should recuse yourselves from endorsing school board candidates entirely.

If I called for accountability from people on the school board for more than one year, then I can definitely call for it from the paper whose endorsees have made up 94% of our school board members for 20 years.

For a particularly painful example of a questionable endorsement, let’s take the recent race between Sarah Clark and Kathleen Smith. Clark’s record was clear: she shifted the citywide conversation on the “Well-Resourced Schools” disaster so that it could be stopped, instated an ad hoc budget committee, and was one of the three school board directors consistently integrating parent-found evidence of fiscal mismanagement into their work. Sure, the campaign had a number of missteps, but Clark has a verifiable track record, professional experience in education policy, an actual degree in education policy, and, not incidentally, would have been the only Black-identifying person left on the board if she had won.

Although Smith might prove to be a good school board director she is, by contrast, largely untested. Yet your endorsement of Smith was not grounded in her superior policy, knowledge, credentials, or experience but because, in your words, you “couldn’t get over [your] distrust” of Clark. The possibility that the influence of your endorsements might have tanked Clark’s campaign with such reasoning — despite her track record and campaign having garnered a lot more grassroots support — is frightening.

To put it bluntly: it’s possible a small group of mostly white editors put a highly qualified Black woman with a public record of pivotal contributions and achievement on equal footing with a white candidate with no such record, and the white candidate won because you didn’t trust the Black one.

If I saw this during a corporate hiring decision, it would be an obvious flag for unconscious bias sourcing from interpersonal racism.

The bitter irony is that a self-described progressive paper can enact a textbook case of bias without a shred of acknowledgement, self-reflection, or accountability — and that the rest of us voters, trusting you as a reliable guide, went along with it.

All this leaves you to wonder, what other misevaluations have we followed for the past two decades? If The Stranger has not dedicated resources to consistently following and reporting on Seattle’s public education, then where are the endorsements coming from? Aside from the bias in “not trusting” Sarah Clark due to her day job at the Chamber of Commerce when that job has no impact on her school director achievements (e.g., stopping closures, starting the ad hoc budget committee, etc), what other biases are there? Was this an isolated incident or is it systemic? How are they controlled for? These questions are urgent because it seems possible that The Stranger — despite being the small alt-paper — has an outsize impact on our city’s schools.

It’s true that your endorsement success rate may be just a correlation. It’s also true you’ve endorsed a fair share of good directors (e.g., Song, Mizrahi, and LaVallee in this election cycle). However, your endorsement process undeniably selected people who composed the board majority for nearly 20 years and as such, in aggregate, you are selecting people that have created the dysfunction we are living with.

The Stranger is an important institution in Seattle with an influential voice. Please consider consistently covering school district news and revamping your school board candidate evaluation process so that your future endorsements can help us build a more functional district. If you cannot find the resources to cover Seattle Public Schools with depth and consistency, respectfully, please consider recusing yourselves from making school board endorsements until you can.

Albert J. Wong

Longtime reader, SPS graduate, and current SPS Parent that looks a lot at district data, owner of sps-by-the-numbers.com

TL;DR In 2024, Seattle Public Schools projected an 80M budget deficit, but the actual shortfall was only 13M — a variance (budget — actuals) of 67M or roughly a 6x overestimate. Of that 67M, 53M comes from unnecessarily large budget allocations in just 8 OSPI “Activities” that for the past decade have been chronically over-allocated in the budget by more than 0.5M yearly.

This variance matters because the inflated “structural deficit” narrative drives drastic solutions — school closures, bell time changes, class size increases, and staff reductions.

Trimming these unused allocations would have zero impact on operations, yet could shrink the apparent deficit down to something closer to 27M, helping avoid panic-driven decisions and even the looming threat of Binding Conditions. They should be addressed immediately.

Key Points

• There are two distinct deficits: Budget Deficit and Actual Deficit.
  They require entirely different solutions — yet are often conflated in public discussions.
• Over the past decade, the Budget Deficit is, on average, 56M larger than the Actual Deficit — a weirdly consistent “cashflow variance.”
• In 2024, 79% of this variance (53M/67M) comes from repeated over-budgeting, i.e. earmarking more money than is ever actually spent, across just 8 OSPI Activities.
• This variance must be reduced first since it’s what triggers yearly alarms about insolvency.
• Correcting this could have reduced the 2024 Budget Deficit from 80M → 27M, without a single operational cut. That “savings” is 1.7x larger than what the district claimed closing 21 schools would yield.
• Keeping the inflated 80M deficit distorts policy discussions towards drastic measures — pushing closures and bell-time changes that each aim to “save” less than the phantom 53M.

IMPORTANT: ₿udget Dollars ≠ Actual Dollars

Before continuing, we need to introduce some new notation convention:

• ₿ will be used for budget dollars (e.g., ₿ 100M)
• $ will be used for actual dollars (e.g., $98M)

Most SPS financial discussions use ₿ amounts and $ amount interchangeably — including some of my own older analyses. That can lead to wildly incorrect conclusions.

For example, assume a budget item is allocated ₿ 100M but at the end of the the actual spend was only $98M. This creates an “underspend” of ₿ 100M — $98M = ₿ 2M. Many people will incorrectly assume this translates to $2M (notice symbol change) and falsely conclude that there is $2M left in the bank that could have been used. This is completely, utterly, wrong.

Without looking at how the actual revenues or expenditures tracked the budget, it is impossible to know how much is in the bank. For example, we had a thousand more students than expected which increased the revenue by millions. We should have way more than 2M money in the bank and wonder why we did not spend more on teachers. This example 2M — the variance — only tells you how accurate your budget line item was and not much more.

Note that in finance, variance is the technical term for budget — actual which is different from the meaning of the term in statistics. We will use the finance term going forward as it will make talking with the district finance staff easier.

Anyways, as a rule of thumb, whenever someone compares a budget figure to an actual figure without context, your immediate reaction should be:

And yes, the Bitcoin emoji for the budget is intentional. Because much like Bitcoin (or K-Pop Demon Hunters), SPS ₿udget dollars have only a loose relationship with reality.

Now back to the analysis.

Are You Saying We Could Cut 54M from the “Structural Deficit” Without Touching Classrooms?

Yes.

While it’s true that some of that deficit variance is a result of good, conservative, expense estimates, tens of millions are simply repeatedly unspent allocations.

This sounds unbelievable. Can you show your work?

Absolutely. Thank you for always asking!

Here’s how the analysis was done.

1. Every SPS expenditure since 2016 is tagged with OSPI “Program Activity Object” codes (“PAO codes” for short). For this analysis, we use the Activity code.
2. Using F195 (budget) and F196 (actuals) reports, we calculated:
   Variance = ₿udget — $Actuals for each Activity

Taking variance numbers from above, we then

1. Found the Median Variances for 2016–2024
2. Sorted Activities by largest Median Variance
3. Graphed the ₿udget and $Actuals for the Activities.
4. Flagged the Activities underspend their budgets by more than 500k.

That analysis revealed the top 8 activities with highest variance also tended to have large unused budget allocations that recurred year-after-year. Over 2016–2024, these sum of the underspend of these 8 activities has a median of ₿53M which is actually larger than the median variance of ₿51M for the same span of years.

In 2024, those same activities also sum to ₿53M and are responsible for 66% of the ₿80M deficit that fueled the school closure debate.

Full graphs with more comments are in the appendix. For now though, here is a summary table of the results:

Why Care About Unused Budget Capacity?

Three reasons…

#1 Distorted urgency and magnitude
The magnitude of an ₿80M “structural deficit” has been used to justify sweeping actions — mass school closures, bell-time shifts, librarian cuts. It also leads to us dismissing attention from smaller, easier, and possibly more creative solutions.

For example, with the unused capacity removed the remaining budget deficit is ₿27M. At that amount, modest ideas like eliminating the $6M/year on electricity by using Capital Fund Dollars (read: no impact on operating budget) for covering schools with solar panels (h/t Mary Ellen Russel) would suddenly eliminate 22% of the problem.If we think there’s a ₿80M deficit, solutions of that size would not even get airtime.

#2 Opaque finances and forecasting
During those years, were the Weighted Staffing Standards — the process which directly controls staffing allocations to schools — skimping on staff expecting red ink when we should have been expanding expecting green? What about now? Are we skimping more than we need to with things like the 2-FTE rule?

Worse, there are many years in 2016–2024 where underspend in these areas completely mask overspend in others. Having such a large repeated variance makes it impossible to know if the money is going where we budgeted it to go.

#3 Unneeded borrowing
In FY2024, the district took a ₿27M interfund loan to balance the budget. However, when looking at the actual spending in the district’s monthly fiscal reports, the general fund balance never dropped below $38M so we never actually used the money we borrowed.

Though the loan gave us a way to avoid Binding Conditions by “balancing the budget” and bought more time to handle the Actual deficit, it also let us continue without confronting these repeated structure budging oddities — all while making us pay interest.

All three consequences are bad. The consistently unused ₿udget capacity should go. Because it is consistently unused, removing it should be doable immediately.

“But What If We Go Over Budget?”

Good question.

If this happens, then the district would need to go through a process to request extra funds from OSPI.

Yes, it’s time-consuming to make this request so a little buffer is good practice. But padding that forces closures or multi-year disruptions vastly outweigh the potential time saved.

Ultimately, while removing this underspend will likely expose volatility in other activities that has been hidden for years, that is arguably a good thing as the volatility should be understood and planned for in policy.

Fortunately, the latent volatility is likely not that huge. SPS’s revenue and expenditure forecasts are actually quite accurate compared to its peers. The expenditures are just consistently biased upwards. See the next section.

How SPS compares to other districts

Across neighboring districts, SPS’s consistency of variance is among the best. This is true for both the budget estimates of revenues and expenditures. However, our systematic expenditures overestimation (5–6% every year) stands out.

Looking at the following box-plot of yearly Expenditure variance for neighboring districts you can see that the SPS box is shorter than most districts but the median is around 5%.

This consistency means the error likely isn’t caused by enrollment or funding swings, but by internal allocation patterns that have ossified over time.

It also means that we are less likely to fall into Binding Conditions the way that Bellevue did, where expenditures exceeded budget for 2 years until the General Fund balance went negative. Our spending is just more predictable.

On the Revenue side, SPS looks even better as its median is near 0 and the height of the box is also not very big.

Given how consistent SPS is, it seems likely that we can remove up to about 5%-6% of the general fund budget’s worth of chronic underspend.

What keeps getting budgeted for and never fulfilled?

Mostly Staffing.

Using the “Object code” from the PAO Codes, we can further divide each activity into Compensation vs Non-Compensation expenditures and see the variances in each.

Notice that most of the underspend is in compensation. Notice also that in the case of “Teaching / Prof Learn” and “Principal’s Office / Principal”, the ₿44.7M and ₿4M compensation underspend masks a non-compensation overspend of $7.4M and $3.4M respectively. This data is not available in the budget book but it is available in the raw F195 and f196 filings from the district.

We can also cross-verify this result by examining the variance in Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) staff counts in the F195 Fiscal Report and the S275 Personnel File final report. Here is a graph showing that every year (except during COVID), SPS budgets for 200–500 more FTEs than it actually hires.

While the S275 reporting has a lot of errors (topic for another post), it is what the district uses as “actuals” for FTE and should not be hundreds of FTE off of reality.

In 2024, that gap was ~460 FTEs (the s275 can miss some employees). So, assuming an average 150k total compensation for each FTE, a back-of-the envelope calculation makes that into a ₿ 69M expenditure variance — roughly equal the deficit variance we are seeing.

A Quick Mother’s Day Data Mystery

Fun aside: much of this clarity came together when Jane Demel filed a public records request for Student Outcomes Focused Governance (SOFG).

One of the contracts included a cost center number.

Tara Chace noticed it.

That clue pinballed through online groups and eventually reached our little Data Nerd chat on Mother’s day morning. This commenced a few hours of nerdy code-breaking over chat as we collectively reverse-engineered the cost center system confirming how OSPI F196 data ties back to internal allocations.

Specifically, we decode that a cost center ID like 10021097117340 can be broken into:

• 1002 = Building (District Office)
• 1 = Fund number (General Fund)
• 0 = Sub Fund number (State)
• 97 = Program Code (District Wide Support)
• 11 — Activity Code (Board of Directors)
• 7 = Object Code (Purchased Services)
• 340 = NCES Code (“Other Professional Services” NCES codes are like expense categories in Quicken)

We then could confirm our allocation numbers against a PRR that Beth Day had made for SOFG invoices.

From that, we knew that OSPI f196 Actuals line items could be reversed back into the district’s internal financial structure which gave us confidence in this analysis.

Totally a community effort that came out of PRRs and fast sharing information between different involved advocates. Talk to everyone people! We can get a lot of stuff done together!

Also… what a weird way to spend Mother’s Day.

So What About the Actual Deficit?

That’s the next post.

For now, here’s a teaser: look at a graph compensation only in the Teaching Activity over time — both as 2 graphs, one of the dollar amount and the other as % of expenditures.

So here’s the multi-million dollar question: is teaching spend going up up up until we’re golden? Or has the % of our resources that we allocate and spend on teaching been the subject of a takedown, takedown, takedown-down-down-down (omg make the KPop Demon Hunters stop).

… hmmm…

Conclusion

The ₿udget vs. $Actual gap distorts our understanding, misguides our policy choices, and inflates fear.

By trimming a few predictable, decade-long overallocations, we can clarify what’s real and start focusing on actual resource use — not accounting shadows. We also remove the main threat of the district entering Binding Conditions which is us predicting that we have far less money than we really do.

And next time you see a “$” in a report, ask yourself: Is that a ₿, a $?

Appendix

The evidence for the above is most easily interpretable in showing the underspend charts for each activity. This appendix will show all 8 charts with special detail spent on the Teaching Activity since that’s, by itself, makes up most of the underspend.

Teaching / Professional Learning

This is the most egregious and so we will delve a little more deeply.

SPS has underspent about ₿49M every year since 2016 — a strangely stable number. True variance would fluctuate with inflation or labor costs, but this pattern suggests a persistent, unnoticed ₿50M allocation rather than diffuse error across all the different teaching category.

If we break this down further using the program codes, we actually see traces of exactly. For example, let’s isolate Program 73, Instructional Programs — Other, compesnation spending

Here it shows that ₿25M if this variance usually comes from just this one program, activity, object combo. Given our cost-center decoding earlier, knowing it is compensation can let us construct a list of likely cost centers that we can give to the district to examine. Those would be

• District Office Certificated Salary = 1002-1-A-79–27–2–110
• District Office Classified Salary = 1002–1-A-79–27–3–110
• District Office Benefits Salary = 1002–1-A-79–27–4–B

A can be 0 or 1 for state or local funding source

B can be one of the 2xx NCES codes (eg 212-Group Insurance-Certificate, 213-Group Insurance-Classified, 282Health Benefits — Certificated, etc)

We can dig further, but this illustrates the point that the unused budget is clustered.

Supervision — Instruction

This is straightforward constant underspend that has somehow increased. A separate question that we will dig in later is why has Supervision — Instruction spending nearly tripled since 2014? Note that Supervision — Instruction does NOT include Principals. These are people above that level.

Information Systems

Information systems also has a median underspend of 1.3M but it moves more randomly.

However, if you split it out to look only at the compensation, suddenly it gets more steady:

The variance is very steady at around 1.5M each year until recently when it grows.

This likely means staffing is not getting filled, but purchases vary wildly.

Principal Office / Principal

Underspend here is consistently just about 1M under and has reduced recently. This seems almost good...

…but if you look at compensation only, suddenly it looks consistently over-allocated as well.

Variance is now consistently 1.9M off — nearly double the median for the full activity. The underspend has actually increased to 4M in 2024, as opposed to decreasing to 400k so our staffing budget accuracy has gotten worse.

The roll-up number of the activity is hiding resource allocation shifts.

Superintendent’s Office

Superintendent office is starting to get into very small numbers, the consistent underspend is still fairly visible.

The variance is less interesting here than the trend of actual spending shrinking over time. This is “good” in that it reflects the central office trying to trim cost down to even pre 2014 levels. It is bad though because these are likely the costs visible to the board directors (eg Hersey once said they are down to a skeleton staff) but other parts, such as Supervision — Instruction remain above 2020 levels. It makes you wonder if there’s a selection towards cutting visible staff (eg front desk, HR people that leave paperwork) are somehow being cut first giving the impression of scarping-by.

Operations of Buildings

Operations of Building has two odd spikes, but it seems that FY22–23 and FY23–24, the years that lead to the budget deficit panic, the allocation to this budget was inflated a by around 2M. 2025 seems to have adjusted back down.

Supervision — Transportation

Supervision Transportation is getting into some small numbers. However it is consistently underspending as well.

Operations — Food Service

Again back to very small numbers but excluding 2024, this is always underspent.

Every few years, Seattle elects new school board members and most people barely notice. But this time, the stakes are enormous.

This vote will decide whether Seattle Public Schools starts unwinding a half decade of exceedingly bad policy on finances, safety, and academic rigor, or cements the downward path. The people we choose on November 4th will inherit a malleable district bureaucracy that’s in crisis and will make choices that have decades long impacts.

TL;DR

Vote Sarah Clark (D2), Vivian Song (D5), and Joe Mizrahi (D4) to flip the Seattle School Board majority into one that actually fixes things instead of getting lost in endless “governance” talk.

In District 7, I’m voting Jen LaVallee, though Carol Rava is also a strong choice.

And most importantly: make sure people know to vote for Clark — that race is close, and it shouldn’t be.

Why “20-year impact” Isn’t Hyperbole

Closures alone have ripple effects that last generations. Beth Day’s “school desert” maps show how each closure leaves gaps in citywide coverage that have persisted for 50 years.

And no, enrollment hasn’t “declined.” Seattle is near a multi-decade peak. Closing schools doesn’t save much either — most costs are teachers, who follow students, not buildings.

Meanwhile, the district has quietly gutted middle-school language programs and increased high-school class sizes hurting college applications. Instead it shifted staff into “Instructional Professional Development” jobs like curriculum coaches. That’s a budgeting failure — made worse by board rules that discourage meaningful discussion.

(Note, while I do use the Stranger’s Election Control Board guide, their school-board endorsements for years have backed the presidents who built this mess. DO NOT BLINDLY FOLLOW THE STRANGER’S SCHOOLBOARD ENDORSEMENTS.)

Then there’s policy. The removal of walk-to-math and the fight against acceleration has already made elementary school choices affect high-school pathways — and ultimately college options.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.

The intent was “equity.” The impact has been a new form of tracking — less transparent and worse for everyone. Whether or not we roll those changes back is what’s on the ballot.

Rebuilding school programs will take years of policy work followed by years of restaffing. If this election cements the current leadership/policy mess, we won’t get another shot for 4 years with even more policy to undo.

Between timelines for the next election, further enshitification of bad policy direction, and possibility of attempting nonsensical closures again due to misunderstanding of finances, 20 years of impact is conservative.

So yes, this vote matters.

Sarah Clark (District 2)

Sarah Clark is by far the most qualified candidate in this race — and it’s maddening that it’s even close. She’s the only one who:

• Opposed closures early and publicly
• Created an ad-hoc Finance Committee to confront real budget dysfunction
• Worked with Superintendent Jones to prevent HCC from being sunsetted
• Is an SPS alum
• Can actually discuss current policy details
• Uses community analysis to inform her work
• Pushed the district to reconsider enrollment and waitlist policies
• Supported student voices during the high school lunch shuffle

Yet she’s running neck-and-neck with a candidate whose main pitch is “I’m a data scientist.”

Data expertise is great — but where’s the evidence of using it? In six months of campaigning, there’s been no analysis, no insight, no public data work.

When I looked into district finances during the closure debate, I found major flaws in two months — while sick, with no infrastructure. A candidate centering “data” should be able to do the same.

Instead, we get vague lines like “SPS must amend its Closure Policy.”

The real answer should sound like:

“A decade of state fiscal data shows school closures save only a few hundred thousand dollars at best, with negligible year-over-year changes. The question isn’t how to tweak the closure policy — but how the closure discussion gained traction at all.”

That’s a data-informed policy position.

Vote Clark. Tell everyone to vote Clark.
And if you can, sign up to text-bank for her (it’s super easy).
This race should not be close. Let’s make sure it isn’t.

Vivian Song (District 5)

Vivian Song has earned my trust over years of real work. Even out of office, she’s done the unglamorous tasks that make the system better — like spending hours helping calculate the actual fiscal impact of closing a school.

She brings:

• Deep financial and board experience
• A practical grasp of people-resource problems
• A long record of integrity and persistence

If you’ve found any of the SPS financial analyses I’ve shared useful, you’ve indirectly benefited from her insight — she’s been a steady sounding board.

Vote Song.

Joe Mizrahi (District 4)

Joe Mizrahi understands both data and budgets. From our discussions I can confirm he’s taken the time to learn the details, knows how the system works, and hasn’t been afraid to challenge the current board majority.

He also brings something the board desperately needs: union-leadership experience.
Not because “unions are intrinsically wonderful,” but because a board that negotiates with SEA should include someone who actually understands organized labor.

Boards are teams. They need complementary skill sets.
Mizrahi fills a gap the board has lacked for years.

Vote Mizrahi.

Jen LaVallee and Carol Rava (District 7)

I’m voting LaVallee.
I worked with her during the school-closure pushback, and she earned my respect. She’s empathetic, data-driven, and deeply connected to the new wave of parent advocates pushing for reform.

That said, Rava is also a strong candidate. She brings broad district knowledge and executive-leadership experience — both critical as SPS (hopefully) restructures under a new superintendent.

Both are thoughtful. Both are tough. Both will get things done.
I lean LaVallee, but either vote is solid.

Read their sites yourselves

• Jen LaVallee — https://www.votelavallee.com/
• Carol Rava — https://www.electcarolrava.com/

Final Thought

Seattle has spent a decade spinning in circles while students lose opportunities, families lose trust, and staff lose morale.

But crises also open doors. Bureaucracies rarely change — unless they’re forced to. Right now, SPS is in that rare, malleable moment.

This election is the turning point.

Treat your vote seriously. Read primary-source interviews and questionnaires, not just endorsement roll-ups.

Then help your neighbors understand why this election matters for the next 20 years.

Primary Source Candidate Questionnaires

• All Together for SPS Questionnaire
• Fund SPS Questionnaire (archive.org)
• Seattle Times Questionnaire

Cheet sheet

Having watched SPS politics for a few years, I suggest supporting:

Vivian Song
Sarah Clark
Joe Mizrahi

For the past while, the board behavior has been dominated by a 1-vote majority of over-self-confident silliness. Voting these three in would swing that and let actual stuff get done. I was going to try to explain the politics in detal, but someone else published a good write-up of the power structures so you should just read that.

Why care?

As I’ve alluded to a few times, the biggest problem for the past while is that the Seattle School Board has had a 1-vote majority voting block which has done all sorts of silly things (remove the finance committee, sunset HCC w/o a replacement plan, chase after ~4M total across the district in PTA funding while ignoring the 383M untracked in the Budget, writing utterly asinine OpEds about governance structure that display basically no learning after a decade of involvement about how to actually change bureaucracies, etc).

This election gives a very real chance to swing the power away from folks who have shown a stark inability to analyze both human systems and policies. As such, it’s kinda important.

Why Vivian Song?

Frankly, other than the initial HCC letter I wrote in 2022, nearly everything else I have done for SPS has been either a result of insight from her, or done with consultation from here.

Automated searchable transcripts for the SPS Board and Seattle City Council? Came out of discussion about how hard it was to keep track of exactly who said what in board meetings.

Calculating, in detail, the minimal savings from closing schools during the closure debacle in fall 2024? She gave me enough background for me to start churning numbers with the rest of the SPS data nerds. Then for the final draft, she spent hours over video chat with me double check the math and reconcilining it with understandings of the budget she had gained from being on the board.

Going way back to refuting the bullshit “can’t staff bus routes for higher-need schools” reason for the 3-tier Belltime Analysis? She answered a random query from me explaining how examine existing bus routes which then let me do the data analysis (incidentally that’s how I got to even discussing things with her).

In a very real sense, these this work product for SPS does not exist without her. This is why before this post, she is the only candidate that I said “yes” to when asked for an endorsement.

She expended this effort both while on and off the board which shows a lot of commitment.

We’re in a financial crisis and we need the energy and expertise she has.

Why Sarah Clark?

First off, she’s the board member who most consistently responds to all the info I’ve been sending. (Gina, Joe, and Sarah all respond. The other 4 have not though perhaps they’re still mad at me for pointing out that their track record means some of them should resign.)

Second, she is one of the first to call bull-shit on Well-Resourced School and publicly against Student Outcomes Focused Governance. That took bravery. You can see that from the fact that from the lack-of-prior-OpEds for years. You can see the way conformity is pushed in the comments from some “Rattle in Seattle” person that says “shut up and keep the dissent private”. No… we need people to like Sarah that are willing to dissent.

Now I know the Stranger endorsed Kathleen Smith. I also want to point out a specific irony though. A top-line rationale is that during a high-stake real-time interview, Sarah Clark didn’t talk about the Parent’s Bill of Rights being a disaster. Fine…black-eye there… but, on the flip side in the Fund SPS candidate interviews, which look to be written responses since they’re all formatted differently, Smith manages to both indicate that she didn’t know HCC Testing was made universal already, and pull up the flaky “transportation costs to [HCC/option schools].”

Smith is new to this so maybe she just made a mistake but it’s a big enough one that it kinda completely invalidates the Stranger’s mainline rationale.

Given the choice there, I would lean Sarah cause local known matters more, cause I’ve seen Sarah walk through spreadsheets with me too, and cause she has experience on a board now.

Why Joe Mizrahi?

Similar to Sarah, Joe actually responds to emails like “hey, the whole well-resourced school calculation the district gave is bullshit.” So that’s a big plus.

Similar to Sarah Clark, he fine actually publicly dissenting. Dissent — public dissent — should not stop people the board from working together. Keeping that quiet kills off transparency from the outside and just empowers whomever has the most social/political/institutional influence. We need folks that speak up respectfully. And if people cannot handle that kind of dissent constructively, then those people need to leave positions of authority. I like that Mizrahi already has a track record of pointing out BS.

He also bring the labor aspect in that is really kinda useful to have especially coming into a contract negotiation year.

Lastly, as stated before, direct experience this time matters. We have too many fires and we need to hire a new Superintendent and then help guide the new SI to restrucrturing staff as well as board relations regarding both governance and decades of bad budget communication habits

~fin~

Too many numbers? See the walkthrough below.

When we hear 100M Structural Deficit, we tend to think this

But SPS has had a 13M to 101M predicted deficit every year since 2009 without going bankrupt

Though the budget had a predicted deficit, in reality one of the following two happened.

Our deficit prediction is always tens of millions larger than reality

making the problem sound way worse than what really happens

Our predicted September Balance goes up and to the right

which must feel amazing yearly since, as the dotted line arrows show, SPS keeps predicting the budget balance is going to drop by TENS OF MILLIONS.

Our actual September Balances are even higher — by 20M on average

The section before with just grey is only the predicted Beginning Balance used during the budgeting process. The green section shows that the Actual Budget Balance — what is really in the account — on average has 20M more money that could have been allocated to students.

(exact numbers in data table)

Every year has 3 conflicting values for the September Balance

You have to look across two budget books to see all of them and even then it’s a confusing mess

One is is always wildly off due to the deficit misprediction and drives us to take loans, cut staff, and close schools

Quiz: So in 2024–25 did we have a 78M deficit? A 12M surplus? Other?

We can’t tell from this! And that is why the Board needs a finance committee that regularly reconciles actual spend with the budget. One that examines — in detail — the monthly reports on the actual revenue received and money spent and checks to see if they match the resource allocation goals the board signed off on in the budget. That’s real concrete progress monitoring. Not the governance crap the 1-vote board majority keeps talking about.

FAQ

Does the board know this?

They do now.

I emailed them on Wed Jun 4th last week before the last board meeting. That likely was not enough time for them to process the info but it was definitely in their hands now.

I also emailed them after this post was published with a link. Contents of both letters are available on https://sps-by-the-numbers.com

Has it always been this confusing?

No!

The district used to reconcile actual balance with budget predictions by issuing revised budget estimates (known as a “true-up”). See the following screenshot from the 2002–2003 budget book where the numbers match up in the way you expect.

The ending fund balance matches up with the beginning fund balance across the prior, current, and next year in the way you would expect. From 2004–2009, under Superintendent Raj Manhas all General Fund Balance information was removed from the budget book so it is hard to see what happened. When the data reappeared in 2009, we have the confusing pattern we see now with three conflicting numbers and a constant over-estimation of the deficit.

If there’s over $100M in the Fund Balance, does that mean there is $100M to spend on kids?

No!

Most of the money comes into the district in the summer time. From Sept to March, it runs a monthly deficit that is only balanced in June so a very large amount of this balance is needed to prevent the district from going into a negative fund balance and entering “Binding Conditions”. This will be discussed in the next article.

Is the $100M deficit “real”?

Yes and no.

No because the actual deficit is much smaller than the predicted $100M deficit, and until recently, SPS ran a surplus in most years. Yes because even if much of it is from mispredictions, it has consequences.

When SPS underestimates the beginning balance or revenue and overestimates the expenditures, it does create an “on-paper” budget deficit that, by law, puts the district at risk of binding conditions, even if the deficit turns into a surplus when actuals are reconciled.

Additionally, even though mispredicting budget dollars may not translate into real money moving around, it creates a true pressure — especially during the school staff allocation phase — to reduce spending.

What is this “Binding Conditions” thing?

The laws governing school budgets are in RCW 28A.505 and WAC 392–123. In this, they specify there are 2 conditions under which the district can be put into “Binding Conditions.”

1. The Budget’s Estimated Expenditures are >= the Estimated Resources (beginning balance + revenue — reserve)
2. The General Fund’s Balance runs negative during the year.

If either of these happen, the state will place extra yearly requirements on the district to return it to financial stability.

Binding conditions does NOT mean the state disempowers the board and appoints someone to cut costs (receivership). That only happens after Binding Conditions have failed to be met for 3 years.

Until then, it is closer to a very strict performance improvement plan. That structure could perhaps be something that the district needs as it would provide real concrete goals with legally defined guardrails as opposed to the vague nonsense the board majority keeps talking about.

Is there any law saying Actuals have to come closer to the Budgets projections?

The answer seems to be no.

Many of us combed through RCW 28A.505 and WAC 392–123 on school budgets and could not find anything.

That being said, having a long term mismatch where you end up with three different idea of a beginning balance just seems to obviously too nonsensical to want to put in law, yet here we are.

Why does the district underestimate the beginning balance?

I do not know.

On the surface, it seems like there is very little benefit as underestimating the beginning balance by an average of 20M yearly just means you also have to assign 20M less to expenditures which causes a lot of churn and stress. There seems to be very little benefit.

Looking at the historical budget book back to 2003 when the district was last facing insolvency, there has been a trend to build a buffer back into the General Fund. Perhaps this pattern has just continued unchallenged.

If there is ~$20M more on average in Fund Balance than the number used in budget planning, does that mean $20M could have been allocated to kids?

Probably?

It’s unclear to me what benefit there is to having a lower fund balance amount during budgeting. Beyond from making it hard to know how much money SPS plans to bank for next year, it adds pressure to cut services.

This leads to question from the previous post: when does the 31% in the district office get cut? If that chunk is allowed to grow and then cuts all happen in the other portions, then yes this extra $20M would have probably avoided some unnecessary student facing reductions.

Did we even need the 27M interfund loan?

We did because we mispredicted a deficit. If we did not take the loan so we could predict increased revenues, that would have put us in binding conditions.

As for if we needed it in actuals, look at this graph on page four of the March 2025 fiscal report

if spending tracks like prior years, the lowest poitn will be June (the 10th period). In March (the 7th period), our fund is maybe 25M lower that the prior year? As such, it is possible that by June, we will dig down far enough to use the loan, but it is hard to tell.

Why does the district overestimate expenditures?

Again, not sure.

It just seems to cause confusion and stress.

Perhaps some departments habitually over estimate their spending? We will look at per department/cost-center budgets and actuals in a few posts, but here’s a preview: SPS markedly and routinely overestimates its spending on teaching, so much so that it obscures the fact that it is routinely overspends on some other areas without affecting the overall deficit/surplus. That examination is actually where this post started and then we realized we needed to give higher level context before going into more detail.

Does the deficit error come from revenue or expenditure misprediction?

Until the last couple of years, mostly expenditure misprediction. Before Covid, SPS was able to very accurately predict revenue, almost always predicting its revenue for the upcoming school year with a 1% or lower error margin.

However, starting in 2022, SPS has underpredicted revenue by a lot (3–4% underprediction) more than in the past while continuing to modestly overpredict expenditure, which has strongly contributed to the deficit misprediction as well. Here are 2 charts showing both prediction errors over time.

Underpredicting revenue is likely a result, in part, of SPS underpredicting enrollment, but SPS doesn’t release information on how it predicts revenue so we can’t be sure.

Do surrounding districts mispredict their budgets this badly?

No.

Surrounding districts all make projection mistakes (it is impossible to perfectly predict revenue or spending) but the average error is 2.57% of their budgeted spending. Seattle is almost always the worst, consistently predicting a worse cashflow situation than actual, and averaging a 5.6% error margin. This is because SPS underpredicts revenue AND overpredicts spending. SPS’s errors compound together to predict a much larger deficit than actually exists. Other districts slightly overpredict revenue and slightly underpredict spending, and these smaller errors cancel out.

And before you ask us to show the work again, here is the math for the averages:

% Error calculated as

Budget Deficit = Estimated Expenditures — Estimated Revenues
Actual Deficit = Actual Expenditures — Actual Revenues
Total Error = Budget Deficit — Actual Deficit

Comparison districts are Bellevue, Issaquah, Kent, Northshore, Shoreline, and Tacoma. Data is taken from the OSPI F195 and F196 tables covering 2015–2025 for most districts. Seattle has extra data for 2013–2015 taken from the budget books which is included here.

Here are charts showing the prediction errors for revenues,expenditures, and cashflows of all districts

See this dashboard of additional charts visualizing these data in depth. There are some interesting insights.

• For example, note that from 2013–2020, SPS was quite accurate at predicting its incoming revenue, however in the aftermath of COVID (2022–23, 2023–24), SPS’s revenue prediction accuracy plummeted.
• In contrast, SPS generally overpredicts expenditures, similar to other districts. This may be because districts would prefer to avoid overspending unexpectedly so tend to overpredict their expenditures during the budget creation process, because districts may plan to hire X FTE but do not successfully hire all of those positions, or some other combination of explanations.
• Unlike other districts, however, SPS’s tendency to underpredict revenue and overpredict expenditures exacerbates its net cashflow error (net change in district balance) to create an average ~6% underprediction in cashflow (difference of $67M vs reality for 2023–2024), and SPS is the most inaccurately pessimistic among comparator districts.

Where did you get your data?

Three sources:

• Budget books since 2002. Here’s a collection of them taken from archive.org
  https://www.sps-by-the-numbers.com/archives/budget-books-since-2002
• Official State budget and actual financial reports in the F195 and F196 process
  https://ospi.k12.wa.us/safs-data-files
• SPS accounting departments monthly financial report PDFs to the board
  https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/finance/financial-reports/

Here is a spreadsheet with a bunch of the balances tabulated. For the programming inclined, here is a Google colab showing how to access aSQL database with the f195 and f196 data. It has *ALL* the data from the state, not just SPS.

I found an error. You’re an idiot and have lost credibility!

OOOOhhh! You found an error?! Please send it to me at sps [dot] by [dot] the [dot] numbers [at] gmail [dot] com.

Feel free to include insults as well if it makes you feel better. But definitely include the error. We all need to understand this well, so I will make a correction regardless of how nice you are/have-been to me.

Who worked on this?

As usual, it’s a crew of random parents who want to ensure facts are sorted out. This post in particular pulled in a wider set of skills and input than usual because, despite the comic style intro, trying to figure out how to explain why a budget has 3 different numbers per starting balance in a way that people wouldn’t misunderstand took WAY longer than expected. We’re probably looking at a combined 80+ hours of work over 3 weeks, largely around sorting out what in the world was going on and then mutually trying to figure out how to explain it so that everyone else understood. So special shout outs to

• The person who created bunches of plots with Claude and then by hand until we had ideas to run with.
• The person who checked the financial terms and explained the general conventions for things like “variance”
• The person who helped crystallize the visual language steps necessary to bridge from “basic home budget” understanding to the complex world where there are actuals, budgets, and deficit mispredictions for one value that happening over 3 different points in time.
• The person who kept going “this graph makes no sense” until we fixed them.
• The persons who helped connect the history of events to what happened.
• The many people who copy edited the over 50+ pages of drafts including multiple discarded sections.

Like sushi…the simpler it seems, the harder it is to pull off. Thank you all!

Where are the other posts in this series?

See the top level post titled The 31% No one Talkes about — it is updated with links to everything published and outlines on what’s coming next

You said this was hard to get out, do you have pictures of funny plots that didn’t make sense in the past?

…yeah…

[Lastest Post: Cracking the Budget #1: Chronic Underspend. Finds 50M in the budget deficit that can be just erased without any impact since it is routinely never used]

TL;DR: The real structural deficit in the SPS budget isn’t about underutilized buildings — it’s about the $383 million (30.6%) budgeted to “District Office” staffing that’s gone largely unexamined for a decade. This post introduces the issue and outlines where we’re heading.

What can we take away from this?

That advocates, staff, and the board have focused on juggling staffing and spending in School Allocations while forgetting to ask hard questions about growth in the District Office is a collective failure. We’ve been looking at the wrong things, and that’s a major reason why we can’t make progress on equity or outcomes.

This is the first in a series of posts. By the end, we’ll zoom in on this 31%, draw a circle around odd growth areas, and (yes) share a list of staff names, transition paths into the positions, and salaries with the staff and board. Early findings are already with the Board and SPS staff.

The SPS Finance and HR departments could and should do this analysis more precisely. But we can help them by taking the first pass — using publicly available OSPI S275, F196, and F196 data.

Caveats and Terminology

• We define “District Office” as staffing not allocated to a specific school.
  This matches the official state reporting term.
  Older terms like “Central Office” or “JSCEE staff” or “Central Administration” refer to much smaller subsets and are misleading. Let’s retire them.
• This post focuses primarily on the budget, but keep in mind: SPS often underspends.
  In 2023–24, for example, compensation was underspent by $63M — over 5% of the entire budget. We will crack open this difference and how it matters in follow up posts.

Key Points

• The structural deficit is not in buildings — it’s in unchecked “District Office” staffing growth.
  Even though the percentage of budgeted dollars allocated to District Office has stayed around 30% for the last decade and looks stable, the % of total staffing assigned to the District Office has consistently grown. This is obscured by consistent underspending of the compensation budget; the extent of that underspend has shifted over time.
• There are 2600 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) staff allocated to the District Office. It has grown from 27% to 36% of total staffing since 2013.
  This is worth $85M in budget dollars. Note though that if we examine the actual spend for filled positions reported to OSPI, this shows the shift may be closer to $40M which arises from a complicated mix of underspending and reporting differences. This will be explored in a later post.
• Compensation is 85% of the total budget.
  Any serious resource allocation discussion must focus on staffing, career paths, and talent development over a 5-year horizon. If it’s not in the Strategic Plan, the plan is not based in reality.
• We’ve spent a decade fighting the wrong battles — PTA staff funding, school closures, HCC, transportation — which mostly just move headcount around within school-allocated staffing or the even smaller non-compensation budget wedge.
• Leadership failed to highlight the staffing shift.
  The new governance structure (Student Outcomes Focused Governance) has further prevented board members from recognizing, let alone investigating, this shift. It is maintained by a 1-vote majority on the board.
  Correcting governance to require deep finance understanding from the board is the first structural problem to fix.
• The next Superintendent must restructure culture and staff.
  The unchecked $40M growth happened on someone’s watch.
  Getting a strong Superintendent is the second structural problem to fix.

What’s next?

Most of it is written now! But much of it moved to reddit and was pushed out in a less polished fashion. Here’s the links:

• SPS By The Numbers District Finance (and data) dashboard — A very flexible dashboard that joins 5+ or 10+ years of data in OSPI about finances, enrollment, and test scores for all districts in the state. It allows one to drill down into many details, create comparisons with other districts, and send stable links with the charts.
• Manufacturing a Deficit: Why we always have 100M+ in the bank but keep having to cut staff
• Cracking the Budget #1: Chronic Underspend — 50M of the Budget Deficit can be just elimited without any cuts anywhere as it has been present for 10+ years and never gets used.
• Reddit: Growth in the District Office/Central Office — Breaks down the staffing in the 30.6% bucket by grouping activites into Teaching, Student Support, Building Support, and Other FTE.
• Reddit: Lack of relation between Per-pupil Spending per school and demographics — Analysis of FY2024–25 actual spending data by school, splitting out Special Education/Title1/Bilingual Transition/Compesenatory/etc thats shows that current allocation of funds do not relate much to demogaphic groups we keep talking about supporting.
• Reddit: Maps of School Data + Analysis of where District Office Staff comes from — Maps of FY2024-25 data on attendance, teaching experience, Funding per student, and highly capable drive times. Also shows that one source of loss of experience in South seattle is that nearly half of all hires into District Office since 2014 drew from that area.
• Reddit: SPS Enrollement vs Seattle population aged 5–17 shows declining capture — year by year comparison of enrollment (headcount and AAFTE) versus the Census SAIPE estimates for kids aged 5–17 in the district showing how SPS enrollment is declining, not because Seattle has less kids, but because fewer kids are choosing SPS.
• Reddit: Enrollment over time by schools — Description of how to use finance dashboard to look at enrollment over time for each school.
• Reddit: Teacher vs Aides — Description of staffing composition changes over time that have lead to fewer elementary classroom teachers both because budget was diverted into District Office and also because the composition of staffing under that pressure changed.

This post will be updated with corrections and new links as they’re published. Think of it as the landing page for this series.
Comments? Feel free to use my public Facebook post for discussion.

How much does this matter?

A lot.

As an example, during the entire school closure fiasco, even the most unrealistically optimistic estimates predicted only $31M in budget savings a year. No one ever discussed District Office allocations such as the fact that in 2023–2024, we had 137 FTE of “Supervision — Instruction”. That’s nearly 1.3x more District Office instructional supervision than we have Principals.

This blindness has continued. See slide 33 from the January 22 2025 Budget Study Session:

The “Central Office & Central Administration” line item is the only one from District Office Staffing. Here’s a graph comparing the % of the budget shown in the Pie Chart earlier versus the % of the proposed reductions each category has to bear.

The 31% District Office Staffing wedge keeps getting left out of serious examination even in the most recent reduction proposals.

Why do you choose 2013, 2019 as comparisons?

Enrollment in 2013–2014 (48,529 AAFTE) is almost exactly the same enrollment as 2024–2025 (48,229 AAFTE). Between these years, enrollment peaked in 2019–2020 (52,656 AAFTE). This makes both points a good comparison.

So… how do we fix this?

Step 1: Educate the public.
Until there’s shared understanding of how things really work, meaningful reform is impossible.

Step 2: Rebuild governance.
The board needs to reconstitute a Financial Committee and take ownership of strategic staffing decisions.
Forget governance doctrine — this is about stewardship of public funds and any rule that prevents fixing problems needs to go.

Step 3: Hire a Superintendent from the outside who can restructure.
The internal skills gap is real. If someone could have fixed this from within, they would have.

New leadership must be given restructuring power and a mandate to fix the organization. This leadership likely must also come from the outside.

This will take at least a year before we can even make meaningful change. So yes, the Superintendent search — and next year’s board elections — matter. A lot.

Step 4: The restructured governance + a strong superintendent working with the public can plan next steps.
Real changes can now start.

31% is a large number, can you show your work?

Of course. It’d be ridiculous not to.

All figures are from the 2024–25 Budget Book:

• Total Compensation = Certificated + Classified Salaries + Benefits
• Non-Compensation Spend = Total Budget — Total Compensation
• School-allocated Compensation = School Allocations “Grand Total” (p.66)
• District Office Compensation = Total Compensation — School-allocated Compensation

2,600 FTE of staff is a large number, can you show your work?

Of course! If you just believed numbers without the math, I’d be worried.

From the 2024–25 Budget Book:

• Total Staffing (p.201) = 7270.4 FTE
• School-Allocated Staffing (p.75–185) = 4667 FTE
• Unaccounted FTE = 7270.4–4667 = 2603.4 FTE

For School-Allocated staffing, here is a spreadsheet that can be used to double check numbers. (It was generated using a Python script to parse the Budget book pdf).

$85M Budget dollars is a large number, can you show your work?

Of course! If you didn’t feel entitled to clear explana…..you get the drift.

From the 2013–2104 and 2024–2025 budget books:

From 2013–2014 to 2024–2025, we gained 613 FTE in School Allocated Staff but 1052.5 FTE in District Office FTE. Using that and the numbers from earlier, we get:

• Change in District Office % of Total Staff = 35.81% — 27.67% = 8.14%
• Total Compensation Spend in 2024–2025 = $660M+ $384M = $1044M
• Budget dollar growth = 8.14% * $1044M = $85M

This is true even though the total % of the Budget allocated to the District Office has stayed at 30%. This happens because we underspend on budget by as much as $60 million. Detangling the relation between the % Budget dollars allocated and the FTE shift will take at least a full other post.

However, we can already see that the staffing FTE numbers show a steady shift of staffing away from schools and into the District Office that is not visible when looking at budget dollars alone.

How did we miss this?

It’s a process issue: Budget Book formatting changed over the years to give better school-level data while reducing central office oversight to just $ Allocated and not FTE. In doing so, it obscured changes in the central staffing wedge. (Here are all the budget books since 2002. For a comparison, look at 2002–2003 and 2013–2014 and ask questions like “how many people are in HR?” In 2013–2014, SPS even published this information in spreadsheet format!)

When we talked about school closures, many repeated the idea of a “structural deficit.” But the real deficit isn’t buildings — it’s oversight of staffing allocation.

The main change occurred in 2015–2016 during the first full budget process after Larry Nyland became Superintendent. (Historical curiosity: Liza Rankin was around too!)

Larry Nyland is on the Council of Great City Schools and a proponent of Student Outcomes Focused Governance, a governance model that discourages the School Board — who are primarily responsible for district oversight — from asking detailed questions.

Increasing the obscurity of significant parts of the budget combined with hindering detailed oversight from the Board is a recipe for budget mismanagement and eventual insolvency.

Student Outcomes Focused Governance is still being used and is maintained by a 1-vote School Board majority. It is also continuing to be pushed by some parent advocacy groups.

Does this mean $383M and 2,600 staff are idle?

No. Untracked ≠ unused.

Some of this group includes:

• Custodians and Cafeteria workers (~500 FTE)
• Staff whose roles are partially or fully funded by restricted programs such as Title I, Learning Assistance, and Special Education.

Do NOT conclude that there’s $383M free money and that school funding from the state is adequate or allocated correctly. The figures in this document are budgeted numbers, not actual spending. A significant portion goes unused each year and gets reallocated elsewhere. In fact, in 2023–2024, SPS underspent on compensation by $63M and was used to cover overages elsewhere. It is possible to be underfunded and have this gap at the same time. This will be explored this later posts.

Having said that, since 2013, things have happened such as SPS adding 127 FTE into “Instructional Professional Development” and “Supervision — Instruction”.

In 2025, we have 107 FTE of Principals.

This means over the last decade we’ve added 1.2x more staff into those two buckets than we have Principals, yet there’s been no public conversation about the value of any of those roles versus assistant principals, staff librarians, art teachers, tutors — or lower class sizes.

What can we do right now?

Whenever we see staff reductions in school-allocated roles, we must ask:

“What’s the equivalent plan for District Office reductions?”

Start with positions not directly student-facing — program managers, professional development, curriculum coaches, etc.
Leave custodians, nurses, food service workers, and therapists for last.

Why are you doing this? Who’s paying you?

Hah! As if anyone could give me enough money to go dig through school data. This isn’t fun.

Speaking just for me personally, we just almost tried to close most of the schools of color in the area of the city that I was born and raised in and no one cried foul — not even orgs that wear anti-racism on their sleeves. It is the right time to step up.

Also, all of this is done using free-tier of cloud services. No money is spent cause the data just isn’t very large. :)

If you notice an error — especially a large one — send an email to sps [dot] by [dot] the [dot] numbers [at] gmail.com. I would love nothing more than to be completely incorrect because if this is even close to accurate, it would make me rather angry.

Acknowledgements

Again, thank you to the small army of data-driven folks who are talented in analysis, writing, editing, data visualization, and generally making things sane. I know many of you don’t want to be listed, but there’s no way any of this gets done without you all.

#SeattleSchools #SPS #EducationReform #SchoolBudgets #PublicEducation

Hopefully we’ve now put to bed the idea that making a large number of buildings vacant won’t significantly drive down an operating budget gap when 82.3% of the expenditures is allocated to staffing that mostly follows the student. (2024–2025 Budget Book, page 32, sum Certificated Salaries, Classified Salaries, Employee Benefits)

What we haven’t done though is look into where savings can be found. Since we are now embarking on approving the 2025–2026 budget, I wanted to throw out a list of leads for others to look at.

Hazard: These are not vetted to the same degree as previous write-ups. Take them as areas of concern to explore only. Without further digging, these are not yet evidence of problems.

I have been unable to (and will not be able to) spend the time to do a detailed analysis but but I created a discord server called Seattle Public Schools Discuss in hopes that enough people can join that you can crowd source analysis. Our entire city is full of people who do analysis (frequently fiscal analysis) based on extracting understanding out of incomplete data for a living. I bet if people started talking, we could help narrow things out. I can be around to provide data as necessary.

Also, please remember that much of this is discussing staffing, which means we are discussing people’s livelihoods. Use respect and kindness.

And with that, let’s go for it.

Key data sources

• Obfusected S275 Personnel files from 2013–2024. Has duty title, building assignments, hours, salary, etc. (BigQuery. Google sheets subset).
• F196 Child General Fund Expenditures from 2019–2024. Has actual expenditures with line items for every (activity, program, object, nces, funding) source group. See this video lecture on understanding and dissecting it. (BigQuery, Google Sheets subset)
• SPS By The Numbers Data Source aggregates and archives. This is all public data we know of, cleaned up a little. I will keep that page up to date with more info (eg demographics and enrollment).

Google Sheets often only has a portion of the bigquery data. For the s275, most of the columns are inface dropped because it’d be too big.

If you want all the data, you need to use BigQuery. That will include everything from all schools and districts in the state.

Reminder if you look at the Google Sheets versions, go to “File | Make a Copy” to play with the pivot tables.

Baselining against 2013 staffing

There was all this talk about ”right sizing” the district with the school closure thing 4 months ago with the myoptic focus on building capacity and oddly chosen comparison points of 2019 and “1960s”. I suggest instead starting from the baseline of 2013 when the district had 49,864 “P223 Total Count” (aka headcount) vs the current 49,240.

When most orgs talk about right-sizing, the first question is to look at staffing changes, so I tabulated the s275 count per duty-title from 2013 to now.

As you can wee, we have nearly 1000 more employees now than in 2013 (here’s the link again). Also notice that “Elementary Homeroom Teachers” went from 1777 to 1144.

Before jumping to conclusions, know that the S275 file is messy to read. If people quit, both the person and their replacement is listed in the file. Also, this is raw headcount, not FTE hours so if a bunch of a full time position is fragmented into a bunch of part-time jobs, the number will go up even if the total expenditure may not. Lastly, there seem to have been some re-categorizations such as the introduction of the Elementary Specialist Teacher in 2015. A lot more digging is needed.

That being said, here are the questions off the top of my head:

• Were we super understaffed in 2013 and the 1172 (20% growth) extra staff is just making up a historical deficit?
• Where exactly *did* those thousand people get allocated? People always harp on “bloated central admin”…did the # of supervisors/directors grow faster or slower than 20%?
• How complete is the S275 data (see later)
• In 2024, we have 2261 Elementary Homeroom + Secondary Teachers for 49240 students meaning we should have class sizes of around 21 students for K-12. Why do classes look so much bigger around me?
• in 2024, we have 1412 Aides (which are obvious allocated very specifically in lots of cases). Adding that in, we should see an average adult : student ratio of 1 : 13 but our staffing doesn’t look like that. Why not? Is it cause they’re all very very part time? (fyi, there is data for this is in S275, but I don’t have energy to analyze)
• In 2013, there were 4232 “teachers” (Aide, Elementary Homeroom, Secondary, Other, Specialist), in 2024 there are 4759. Is the duty title mixture correct? We have 600 more aides… should we have more gen ed instructors with smaller class sizes? Is that even sane? What is the right allocation strategy especially for an MTSS and UDL environment?
• What is the target headcount for each duty title for the next 5 years charted against whatever the planners think the enrollment is?

Those are the questions that immediately leap out to me. I think there are likely boat loads of others (including why staff that gets pushed out of various admin positions for abuse end up moved into other admin positions…but that’s a much bigger can of worms).

I will again take a swipe at Student Outcomes Focused Governance and the “Strategic plan” process that seems to have been adopted in the last decade. If those things do not get you to understand how your staff will be assigned in relation changes in the city then you are doing it wrong. Goals and aspirations are not strategy. And framework for how to shape your org (where apparently 82% of spend is controlled by staffing allocation) so you hit your goals is strategy.

Baselining F196 Expenses from 2019

The F196 data only has school level granularity starting from 2019 so we cannot baseline vs 2013 as easily. (Someone can/should probably PRR the aggregates). However, 2019 is still useful. 2019 was peak enrollment as well as pre-pandmic meaning before a bunch of local inflation. Expenses now should NOT be higher than 2019.

As an example, let’s look at Salary only (no benefits) from the F196 expenses from 2019 forward to 2024. We bucket by “Budget Category” followed by “Activity” to make the next section when we compare against the s275 easier.

Pivot table link here

I made it become “max red” if there is > 20% increase of > $2M increase. If both columns are red, that’s something to examine. Immediate thoughts

• Teaching increasing over time likely makes sense as teachers have been historicaly under funded and we’re just seeing the contract changes.
• A 26.85% 1.7M increase in the HR department is kinda odd.
• 13% increase in Supervision also seems odd if compared to 2019 we have fewer teachers?
• There’s huge increases in spend on Guidance and Counseling + Health and Related Services — on the order of $20M (10M + 9M). Perhaps it was hugely underfunded in 2019? But we have fewer students. Maybe we brought contracts in house?
• What’s going on with “Professional Learning” and “Instructional and Professional Development” salaried staff accounting for a continual increase of 5M in spend? Note this shouldn’t list contracts or “purchased services.”
• Same questions for Operations of Buildings… we didn’t get more buildings. Why the 4.7M growth for a 26% increase?
• IT support gained 2.5M but we didn’t have more students so where is the extra equipment and staff going?

Lots of questions…but how did we decline in enrollment from 53627 students to 49240 (8% decline) and increase spending in nearly ever single activity?

Again, folks who immediately jump to “EXAMPLE OF WASTE,” please calm down.

The first question should be, did we even understand this data right? Did things happens like bringing contract staff in house so money just moved from “Purchased Services” to salaries? Is the math just wrong somewhere? Etc

The second question must be “what do we think the allocation should be” and then from that you can decide if 2019 was just the district being super efficient or if something else is wrong.

If after that, you find something wrong…well then feel free to scream. But due diligence first. Otherwise you’ll end up repeating the bad analysis path that lead to folks attempting building closures for saving money.

Reconciling the s275 vs the F196

This part gets fun. The S275 lists the salaries (“asssal” for assignment salary which is total final salary scaled down the % FTE assigned to a building) for each duty. Each of these assignments is allocated a “program”, “activity”, and “building” which can be used to join them against the expenditures in the F196.

However, people may take unpaid leave, quit, have a raise midyear, switch roles etc. These are not always reflected in the s275. So if you sum up all the asssal for a year for each activity, it will not match the F196. Even so, I would have expected

• The two numbers should probably be within a few %
• sum(assal) should be greater or equal than the sum of the F916 salaries, otherwise we’re paying more in salary than was reported for all positions in the file.

This turns out to not be the case.

Here is a table of the S275 sum(assals) grouped by Budget Category and Activity interleaved with the F196 for 2023–2024.

It’s a little hard to read. The Line 2 is an unkonwn activity code that was added in 2024. I don’t know the spend. The #N/A in line 41 consist of salary in the S275 that did not fit into the standard activity bucekts. The right two columns show how much the F196 expenses exceed what you’d expect given the S275 data.

Note in particular that there are quite a few buckets where expenditures are reported as much her than what’s listed in the S275 file for salary. This is a pattern since 2019 at least. (big chart below)

Spreadsheet link here cause that chart is unreadable…. The blue is just meant for a visual divider.

I do not know why this is happening other than guessing that either “salary” doesn’t mean what we think it does or the s275 is consistently rather incomplete. If it is incomplete to this level, it makes me want to point OSPI or the State auditor at the reporting practices.

But even with this level of uncertainty, you can still extract some info out of things because we have the headcount per activity as follows

As an example, we can see that in 2024, there’s 60 Human Resources people working for 7086 staff (1 for every 118) and that they make an average of 109k salary (s275’s $6,595,943.00/60). Since the F196 shows we’re spending $1,787,967.29 MORE than the S275 in salary, we can wonder if we have 1,788K/109k = ~16.4 more people working in HR than is shown in the S275. If so, then we would have ~76 worker for a ratio of 1 HR staff per ~93 employees.

Is that sensible? I don’t know… but it does let the board and senior staff ask the strategic question of what ratio of staff to HR personelle should exist and then reexamine the historical budget numbers and consistent overspend that might need examining or reeling in.

Skimming the table, the largest categories that consistently spend more on salary than their s275 reportings are:

• Teaching (20M to 50M yearly)
• Information Systems (5M to 8M yearly)
• Instructional Professional Development (5M to 6M yearly)
• Professional Learning (3M to 5M yearly)
• Operations of Buildings (1M to 3M yearly)
• Health and Related Services (0.8M to 3M yearly)
• Extracurricular [Teaching] (1M to 2M yearly)
• Principal Office (1M to 2M yearly)
• Operations of Food Services (~1M yearly)
• Guidance and Counseling(0.5M to 1M yearly)

We should understand the divergence here, especially since it’s been happening consistently for 5 years and in the worse case, it sums to $81M of salary (so it’s a lot higher if you add benefit) that isn’t in the personnel file reported to the state.

Is it just a accounting anomaly between different systems? Are things just “coded” funny? But even if it is, this can be a problem.

Imagine asking “how much do we spend on professional development and learning in house”. If someone goes to the personnel database that generates the S275, they’d see

• 593 people doing Instructional Professional Development spending $16M on salary for an average of 27.8k per person.
• No spend in any activity that looks like professional development.

and maybe they decide that’s slightly pricey but fine and move on, not realizing that if they looked the F196, they’d see

• $23.2M of salary spend on Instructional Professional Development instead of the $16M (so 7.2M extra)
• $5.3M spend on “Professional Learning — State” salary — an activity that doesn’t exist at all in the S275.

This. means there’s 12.5M of spending more than expected (78% more than 16M) for the decision to skip over analysis of resource allocation because the numbers didn’t line up.

… this is hazardous.

Final thoughts

The other thing that should be reconciled in the staffing allocations in the S275, the promised headcount per school at the end of each budget book, and the amount of salary expenditure assigned to each school based on these numbers.

I think that will help detangle some of the $400M moshpit allocation. My bet is we will find a large set where resources are not trackable in a way that allows it to be optimized…and I bet that is the first thing that the board should demand get clarified.

I actually started getting all the budget book tables put into spreadsheets a few months ago, but ran out of energy. If anyone wants to pick it up, I’m about 80% of the way there.

After looking at all of this, one of my biggest concerns now is the board (and the public and possibly senior staff) do not have the right systems in place to understand resource allocations in the district. I wonder if we get obtuse answers _because_ no has this data easily accessible. If that’s true, we have a real problem. You cannot rebalance an organization’s budget if you do not know what the allocations actually do.

I do think we used to do a bit better. I’ve seen snapshots of presentations given to the board from a decade earlier where there was more data presented. The current board probably needs to return to that — if for no other reason than to force the senior staff to absorb all the summary information.

(tl;dr? see 1-page flyer of the graphs and key points)

Executive summary

Closing four schools will yield savings of $630k-$678k per year per school, substantially less than the SPS estimate of $1.5M possible savings per school. We base our numbers on official OSPI F196 and S275 data, which describe actual district expenditures and staffing compensation, in detail. For the next two years, we will likely incur from $282k-$322k per year of costs related to closing schools. This halves the savings and produces a deficit reduction of only $308k-$396k per year for the next two years.

The SPS savings estimate inflates transportation and custodian savings, resulting in a substantial overestimate of the expected savings per school closure. Contrary to the assumption that SPS is making, it is unclear if there are any transportation savings as closing a school puts more kids on buses and may decrease transportation funding in the “STARS” formula due to reduced destinations. Similarly, the district expects average savings of $365k/year per school from reduced custodial staffing requirements, when the average custodian makes $80k in total compensation. This overestimates that each of these small schools employs 4–5 full time custodians.

Previously, we showed that the 21-school closures Well-Resourced School plan had a disparate racial impact, particularly in the north end of Seattle. The current 4-school plan continues to have disparate intersectional impact to OSPI homeless, low-income, ELL, and disabled populations. We have shown that needing to “right-size” for enrollment is a continually repeated falsehood as we have 2000–4000 more students than any year in 2000–2011 (and possibly much earlier). Here, we show that the fiscal savings argument for closures is overstated.

Estimation Detail

This estimation was produced via in-depth review of Seattle Public Schools expenditures using the available public data.

We estimate the current plan to close 4 schools will reduce the budget deficit by a total of $1.2M/year to $1.6M/year — or 1.3% to 1.7% of the 94M SPS budget deficit. Looking at it another way, these closures only reduce the annual operating budget by 0.1%. At this amount, the savings from closing a school is nearly the same as the average total compensation for just 4 of the 89 “Directors or Supervisors” allocated to the Central Administration in the 2022–2023 OSPI S275 personnel book.

Ignoring the one-time closing costs, and looking at it from a per-building perspective, closures would net an average ongoing expenditure reduction in the range of $630k/year to $678k/year of savings per building (total $2.5M to $2.7M across 4 buildings).

This is in contrast to the $1.4M/year per building (total $5.7M/year across 4 buildings) of savings the district is claiming is possible in their Oct 24th Estimate (see later).

We estimate these savings ($490k per school — from 72% to 78% of all savings) will come from eliminating social workers, counselors, librarians, operational staff, and replacing a principal with an assistant principal.

The non-staff portion of the savings come from building fixes, ongoing maintenance, and minimal utility expenditures. It is important to note that a higher estimate is caused by deferred maintenance/replacement of the school building (these buildings have been repeatedly left off of BEX levy lists for years). One has to wonder how much of this non-staff portion of savings would go away if the next BEX levy was adjusted to replace these school buildings.

Additionally, closing schools incur large one-time costs in the short run and have a history of causing significant loss of enrollment in closed schools. Adjusting the numbers from 2003 dollars, for the next 2 years, we will incur additional expenditures of $282k-$322k/year per school. This makes the short-term deficit reduction only $308k-$396k/year per school (a total of $1.2M to $1.6M across 4 buildings) This is important if the short-term budget deficit reduction is the primary motivation for closing buildings now.

Additionally this estimate, as well as those produced by the district, are done expecting no enrollment loss so the real savings are likely lower than the estimates. Future closures targeting buildings in better condition should also expect even lower savings.

This analysis shows that there is no strong fiscal reason for closures.

Can you show your math?

Sure. It’d be irresponsible not to.

(Links: spreadsheet of summary, and a 1-page PDF of graphs)

We used the 2022–2023 OSPI “F196” data, as this is the most recent available public data on actual expenses. Each district in the state has to report their actual expenditures (as opposed to what is projected in the budget) every school year. These are termed the “actuals.” Using the F196 data to examine SPS makes the raw figures in this analysis very precise.

Expenditures in the district are either assigned to an individual school or to the “District Office”. Expenditures coded to the “District Office” summed to $407M — 36% of the $1,124M Total Expenditures. It includes everything from “Settlements and Judgements Against the School Dist(rict)” to all food for school cafeterias. Some of these expenditures are divided across schools as services and some are purely allocated to Central Administration activities. We nicknamed this bucket the “Moshpit”.

To calculate the per school savings from each closure, we added together savings from both the individual school budgets and savings from the Moshpit. The result is a picture line the next graph.

We will start our explanation with expenditures assigned to each individual school as that is a straightforward analysis.

Expenditures assigned to each individual school.

Here is a summary of total expenditures attributed to each of the 4 targeted schools (categories match p. 44 of the 2022–23 Budget Book).

The vast majority (≥ 99%) of expenditures are staffing related (e.g. salary and benefits, contracting education professionals, additional programs needed for students, etc.). There is a very small amount left that is non-staff spending.

The analysis below starts with the staff-related spending as that is the largest bucket, and then looks at the non-staff fixed costs.

Overall savings at each individual school

Overall, we estimate a total of $297k/year saved in each closed school’s budget from reductions in utilities and elimination of staffing roles (principals, librarians, music/art/PE teachers, and administration).

The savings calculation includes the additional General Education teachers that will be allocated to the new school, but excludes the cost savings of maintenance, building Operations staff, and nurses as those three items are accounted for in the Moshpit.

The next two sections outline the savings in utilities and staff.

Staff savings from the individual school expenditures

Average cost savings from staff reductions amounts to only $271k per school.

SPS’s proposal removes Principals, Librarians, Music/Art/PE Teachers, and Administrative Secretaries. They replace them with a smaller number of Assistant Principals and General Education instructors (Additional Analysis for Preliminary Recommendations of 2025–26 School Closures). Changes to Nursing staff are excluded in this section as they are accounted for in the Moshpit calculation later.

The following table shows the expenditure reductions of all staffing changes summed together across four schools multiplied by the average total compensation (salary, benefits, insurance) of the positions being removed. The average is taken over the actual positions in the 4 closed schools:

The following table shows the new expenditures in the merged schools and is calculated using the average total compensation for the position across the entire district. This yields a slightly higher cost for Basid Ed by a few thousand a year.

All compensation data is taken from the State’s S275 personnel report data files which gives a detailed breakdown of staff allocation to buildings, duty title, and compensation. Note that while the S275 data is publicly available and shows exact roles per school, we are choosing to present in aggregate as that is sufficient for the argument. Each of these line items represents a human in our community and though it is necessary to examine them, attempts should be made to protect as much privacy as possible. A link to an identity obfuscated SQL database of the S275 is provided at the end.

Note also that the S275 is not filed at the same time as the F196 and updates are not always captured equally in both versions. Also, the S275 does not capture well the changes caused by workers compensation, overtime, unexpected leaves, departures, or other such issues. This leads to some discrepancies in numbers between the total of the S275 line items and what you see in the F196 line items but the overall result still holds.

From the table, we can conclude about $271k savings per school.

Non-staff savings at each individual school

Closure of the 4 targeted schools only yields $26k/year of savings per building in terms of non-staffing based operating costs, exclusive of maintenance, operations costs, and the larger portion of utilities that are charged to the Moshpit.

To calculate, we start with the total non-staff expenditures in the individual school and exclude items that will continue irrespective of school closure. We find that the vast majority of the costs follow the student.

Here is the starting table showing all non-staff expenditures which we will then whittle down until just $26k/year:

In the first three categories (Teaching, Principal Office, Teaching Support) the non-staffing expenditures consist of:

• General Supplies
• Student Transportation Svcs
• Travel, Entrance Fees
• Some scattered small items

These can be dropped from the estimate of savings from a closure because the costs likely follow the student to the new school or are non-recurring expenditures.

The Uncategorized expenditures in Sacajawea and Stevens includes interest on short-term debt which also does not go away with closure and can be dropped from savings estimates.

The Central Administration expenditures are too small to matter so they are dropped.

The remaining category of Other Support Activities averages to $43k/year per build.

On average, Electricity and Utilities Service make up 83% of this cost, the rest being “General Supplies”. (Note that the Moshpit, confusingly, also has a large utility line item that we address later.)

Per school utilities can be reduced in a closed school building but not eliminated as a commercial HVAC system must keep running to prevent system failure. The building also needs power for minimal security systems and lights. It’s hard to know the exact savings from reducing utility usage at a closed school building. The district in its Oct 24th estimate assumed 40% of the cost remained even in a vacant building so we will also use this figure for the entire Other Support Activities bucket which yields a savings of $26k/year per building.

By that logic we will assume a $26k/year reduction of non-staffing expenditures.

Adding together the $271k/year of staff and the $26k/year of non-staff expenditure reductions gives us the average $297k/year per building for each individual school budget.

Expenditures in the District Office “Moshpit”

Closure of 4 schools yields an estimated range of $333k/year to $381k/year reduction per building. Expenditure reductions come from $140k/year in custodial services; $47k/year in food services; $21.8k/year in grounds maintenance; $11.8k/year in nursing staff; and $113k/year to $162k/year in building fixes, utilities, and general supplies reductions

In Seattle Public Schools, one-third ($407M out of $1,121M) of the district-wide budget has been assigned to the “District Office,” which in frequently cited reports such as OSPI Report Card, get evenly distributed out to all students leading to misleading figures. For example, in 2022–2023, the “District Office” bucket accounted for more than $8k of the $22k average expenditure per student. In other words, we have to dig deeper to understand the sources of a full one third of the average per-student expenditure.

This $407M District Office Moshpit includes everything from “Settlements and Judgements Against the School Dist” for lawsuits, all food for school cafeterias, Speech Pathologists, Bilingual Transition Teachers, School Nurses, and Custodial staff, for example.

This means, frequently, over one-third of the costs attributed to each school by the OSPI Report Card do not reflect actual usage by that school; a student that is fluent in English is not receiving Bilingual Transition Teachers yet the expenditure is still partially attributed to them in the OSPI Report Card.

Understanding the reductions means cutting apart the line items as best as possible and then further cross referencing staffing data to break apart the compensation expenditures.

As before, we split the analysis into staff-based reductions and non-staff based reductions. The non-staff savings will require some guess-work as we do not have per-school allocation of repair costs.

Note: while this large Moshpit of funds makes it difficult to understand where district expenditures are actually going (likely even for their own staff), it seems more to be a result of messy accounting rather than anything improper.

Moshpit Staff Expenditure Reductions

We estimate $220k saved per school per year due to staffing reductions allocated in this budget.

Reductions come from eliminating $140k/year of custodial staff (1.75 FTE) per school; $47k/year of Food service staff (0.54 FTE); $21.5k/year Grounds Maintenance (0.25 FTE); and $11.8k/year in Nursing (0.1 FTE).

From the S275, the average total compensation for Nurses, custodial staff, and ground maintenance staff (listed in S275 as “Service Worker” assigned to the “Operations of Buildings” or “Grounds Maintenance” activities) are:

• Custodian — $80k/year
• Food Service worker — $86k/year
• Ground Maintenance stuff — $87k/year
• Nurse: $118k/year

For context, in 2022–2023 the S275 lists a headcount of 352 district-wide custodial staff, 154 food service staff, 32 ground maintenance staff, and 78 Nurses. These are likely overcounts as the S275 will double-count a departure + rehire but the numbers should give a sense of scale. These numbers also are headcounts. Many workers — especially food service staff, do not work anywhere near 1 FTE.

For our estimate, we note that Sanislo had one full-time day and one full-time night custodian and assume other small schools have 2 custodians each. We also know from the 2007 closure experience we know that the district had to retain one custodian to fend off property damage such as copper theft at the newly vacant buildings. Thus, we can assume 8 custodial assignments removed, and one created. This yields a net reduction of 7 custodians over 4 school closures eliminating 1.75 custodians per school.

For food service, parents at each of the targeted schools cite only having one food service employee each day. From the S275 data, the Service Workers assigned to “Operations — Food Service” average 0.544 FTE per duty assignment (in fact there is only one in the entire district that has a full 1 FTE; everyone else is 0.73 or lower).

For grounds maintenance, since ~30 grounds maintenance staff cover all 108 school + supporting buildings, we can assume each school closure eliminates 0.25 staff grounds maintenance staff per school.

For nurses, per the Additional Analysis for Preliminary Recommendations of 2025–26 School Closures, only 0.4 Nurse positions will be eliminated from the Moshpit when closing 4 schools freeing 0.1 Nurse position savings per school.

Thus the net Moshpit staffing reduction is (1.75 * 80k + .544 * 86k + .25 * 87k + .1 * 118k)/year = 220k/year.

Note that Building and Property Security has 15 employees that probably represent the security guards assigned to each of the district’s 8 “comprehensive” high schools. These will not be affected by elementary closures.

There are also 14 Utilities employees. It’s unclear what this staff is for but the number of people is too small to scale by the number of schools closed. They are thus excluded from the savings calculation.

Transportation employees will not be reduced and in fact will likely increase as we are displacing a few hundred students from their walk zones and moving them to further schools. However, since the STARS formula reimburses General Education buses, it is quite possible this is deficit neutral.

Note that the transportation savings assumption here is critically different from the estimates that the district is using. See the later section on divergence from district estimate.

Moshpit Non-Staff Expenditure Savings

We estimate from $113k/year to $162k/year per school in savings from maintenance and additional utilities. Variations come from different models for how much more expensive these 4 buildings are than average to maintain yearly.

The reductions come from $49k/year to $97k/year of building fixes; $42k/year of Utilities; $12k/year in cleaning services; and $11k/year of General Supplies used in maintenance + operations.

For the numbers below, we start with SPS’s Oct 24th estimate that the average maintenance expenditure per school is $49k/year. We valid that against the average building fix expenditure across all schools. Then we make a guess on a reasonable upper-bound for the closed schools based on our knowledge that the schools have a lot of deferred maintenance.

From the F196 data, building fixes sum to $6.2M/year and consist of 1.3M/year Capital Outlay and 5.1M/year Purchased Services (mostly contractors for repair and renovation).

This is totalled across all 108 schools and an unknown number of support buildings or things like Memorial Stadium. Conservatively, we will ignore the unknown buildings and divide the costs by 108, which will even exclude the John Stanford Center incorporating its share of non-staff costs. This yields an average cost of $57k/year which is higher than the SPS Oct 24th estimate but in the right ballpark.

To create a conservative upper bound for maintenance, we double the SPS Oct 24th number and estimate that building fixes cost between $49k/year and $97k/year.

Note the excess repair costs we are attributing to targeted schools are not properties of the school communities themselves. They exist because the district has left these schools off BEX levies for decades. The excess repair costs can likely be eliminated if the upcoming BEX levy was appropriately targeted to replace the existing buildings. Capital improvements via the levy do NOT affect the operating budget and deficit.

While we can consider the excess repair costs from deferred maintenance as part of the savings, it is disingenuous and short-sighted planning to believe that closure of school is the most fiscally responsible way to achieve elimination of maintenance. In reality, closure over replacement ensures we have the unnecessary continued upkeep utilities, and property insurance on a building that isn’t used at all. We will trade filling excess capacity that costs very little because it is in a modern energy efficient building for ensuring that an older vacant one will have continued costs that are just completely wasted.

Furthermore, the idea that physical plant’s expiration is driving school closure should be scoped to only saving between $49k/year and $97k/year, less than 0.1% of the Budget Deficit. These numbers make physical plant maintenance concerns an exceedingly weak fiscal argument.

Next, we examine Utilities. There is $7.4M charged to the district office for Utility Service, Natural Gas, Electricity, Communications; and $1.3M in cleaning services.

It is unclear why Utilities are split between the individual school budgets and the Moshpit. It is also unclear why there are $1.3M in cleaning services beyond what would have been handled by the $20M spent on regular 111 Maintenance Crafts and Trades Workers, 352 Operations of Building Service, and 32 Grounds Maintenance Service Workers.

But averaging both those numbers over 108 schools and using the SPS Oct 24 assumption that 40% for utilities themselves expenditure is on-going after closure we get $41k/year utility spend and $12k/year (not scaled down to 40%) of cleaning fees. This should be a large over-estimate since this includes non-school buildings as well as high schools + middle schools all of which have huge way more square footage than the targeted smaller schools. This leaves us with ~62k/year of Utilities and Cleaning services removed per closed school.

There are also $1.9M of general supplies across the Maintenance, Utilities, Operating of Buildings, and Grounds Maintenance activities. Spreading that across 108 buildings (again an overestimate due to the smaller size of the schools) yields ~11k/year per school of shared General Supplies.

Summing the above together gives a range of $113k/year to $162k/year per building.

One-time closing costs over 2 years

From the 2007 closure experience, we know that closing schools has higher than expected one-time costs. Here is the relevant snippet of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article from November 20, 2007 titled “After 5 schools closed, 157 students left Seattle district: Only half merged into designated nearby schools”

In 2007 dollars, the cost a year and a half into the process was $927k with an expected growth to the range of $1.4M to $1.6M. Using the seattle.gov historical CPI data for “CPU-U all urban consumers, not seasonally adjusted” in the “Seattle MSA” area, we see the 2007 index was 215.656 and 2023 is 340.845 giving an adjustment factor of 1.58. Thus, we can adjust the one-time costs to $2.3M to $2.6M over 2 years, or $1.13M to $1.29M in a given year.

This number is pure overhead and will be straight up added to the budget deficit over the next two years.

Divergence from Oct 24th District Estimates on savings

SPS sent the following summary of their estimations just as this was getting ready to be published.

We incorporated some changes (eg. the 40% on-going utility) from this document into the analysis above, but there are a few notable large divergences.

First, the SPS Oct 24 estimate expects an average of $310k worth of transportation savings which seems hard to imagine as we will be expanding the number of students outside the walkzone. Furthermore, the transportation reimbursement formula gives extra money to the district for each additional destination. Playing with the Stars Funding Simulator XLS’s for the Seattle Public Schools district, removing four destinations in the simulation, increasing the number of general education students bussed by 300, and increasing the district-wide average distance bussed by 0.5 miles yielded $667k less funding per year for transit. However if the buses are fuller, it might allow SPS to be more efficient to offset more bus routes. Our guess at this time as that it is more likely that transportation changes will be deficit neutral at best. More investigation is required.

Second, the Custodial staff savings average $364k per school. The S275 data gives a total compensation for Operations Service Worker at $80k in 2022–2023 and the F196 data shows that the vast majority of custodial service spend goes to staffing. That would imply that closing each school would somehow free up 4–5 custodians full times worth of compensation meaning a closure of 4 small schools would allow 16–25 custodial headcount out of the 350 in the district to be freed. This does not make sense.

Third, the Teaching Support savings seem to be a back-of-the-envelope calculation assuming a removal of all social workers, Music/Art/PE teachers, Librarians. This is in direct contradiction to the more granular staffing headcount changes shown in their Additional Analysis for Preliminary Recommendations of 2025–26 School Closures tables. Our estimate uses the headcount changes and compensation numbers for the specific positions to produce a much tighter estimate that is about $40k/year less savings than the district’s number.

Lastly, SPS’s proposed Principal Office savings seem to also assume full staff removal without considering additional staff that might need to be added to the merged school. Using the same method as we did for Teaching Support, we come up with a tighter estimate for savings that produces $183k/year less savings than the district amount.

There are some smaller divergences in Grounds Maintenance costs and Utilities Cost which amount to a few thousand a year average which we leave in.

Looking at these divergences, we believe that though our estimate uses 2022–2023 data, it is based on a more granular analysis and is more accurate.

Conclusion

Summing it all up we estimate an ongoing savings of up to $630k/year to $678k/year per school assuming no major changes in enrollment get spurred by closures, and the upcoming BEX levy isn’t used to more permanently remove some of the ongoing maintenance costs in the buildings being targeted for closures. This doesn’t even reach the lower bound of the original $750k to $2.5M per building savings range that is specified in the Well-Resourced Schools FAQ.

Adding in the one-time costs of closing, the first 4 schools closed will only produce, at best, a total of $1.2M/year to $1.6M/year reduction of the district budget deficit for each of the next two years.

Furthermore, it is important to know that 72% to 78% of the savings come from staffing reductions and not building maintenance and utilities. The savings from closures are not large and they are mostly achieved by reducing the amount of staff allocated to students.

School placement should be part of long-term city planning. It has century-long impacts, similar to an urban village or transit center. Removing schools in Seattle has historically created school deserts that never get patched up and likely reinforce socioeconomic segregation as we can see the closures disparately impact vulnerable demographics. We should be discussing closures and the shift to 400+ student elementaries in the context of larger city planning, not making rapid, reactionary, and arbitrary decisions. It should include an understanding of major geographic separations like freeways, arterials, hills, and rivers, plans for creating walkable cities, and upzoning neighborhoods. Making changes in reaction to a near-term change in population is a tactical choice motivated by reasons unknown to us, not a strategic one. Especially if the savings per closure is as small as $655/year — the cost of ~4 Central Administration “Directors or Supervisors” of which we have 89 of in Central Administration with an average total compensation of $188k, or about 0.82 FTE per school and $155k/year/building of expenditure.

Where is your data from?

This analysis looks at the detailed financial data available in the OSPI F196 Child General Fund Expenditures raw data table which, since 2019, records accounting line items at a per-school level for expenditures.

Employee spending in those line items was further examined by joining it with the S275 Personnel files that report each employee’s salary, benefits, duty title, building assignments, and percentage of salary assigned to each building. A raw version of this data with obfuscated names and no demographics is available on SPS By The Numbers Bigquery as well as one joined with activity codes and building assignments. A portion of the joined obfuscated table with the District Office and the 4 targeted schools is also available in Google Sheets.

Enrollment data was taken from the OSPI Per Pupil Expenditure_AllYears dataset (PPE) which underlies the OSPI Report Card portal. The PPE data was also used to double check the numbers resulting from the F196 analysis.

Lastly, the District’s 2022–2023 Budget Book’s categorizes and summaries were used to categorize expenditures and sanity check calculations.

All data is from the 2022–2023 school year. 2024 is usually not available until December.

For transit, there is this bus funding explainer from Mary Ellen Russell.

Anyone who wants a walkthrough of the data, feel free to email sps.by.the.numbers [at] gmail.com. If you find an error, definitely reach out. We want this accurate.

Acknowledgements

This was a very difficult analysis to write up as there were so many moving parts. I want to give a special call out to Jessica Chong, and Rachel Kubiak for helping copy edit, brainstorm, and refine wording over multiple full-rewrites. Also sending thanks to Mary Ellen Russell for consulting on transit funding complexities.

Lastly, another shout out to the whole entire crew of SPS “Data Nerds” that have helped source info, clarify understandings, fact-check, math-check, sanity-check, history-check, citation-check, and in general do ridiculous amounts of work to make this as accurate as possible. All y’all rock.

And special high-five to the cadre of SPS alums who’ve reconnected in this weird fashion.

Go team!

Okay. I’m done. (though I probably forgot someone…this was a huge community effort)

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

1. Headcount (P223 Total Counts) actually grew by 15 students from Oct 2023 to Oct 2024.
2. The pandemic-triggered decline seen in 2019–2020 may be flattening out.
3. We have more students now than any year during 2000-2011, often by 2000 to 4000 more.
4. 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

1. equity
2. drastically declining enrollment
3. 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). In Secondary School this is even more complicated as students receiving Special Education or Transitional Bi-lingual services are counted as a fraction of a FTE. Frequently it is 0.8 FTE but “Special Ed Resources” students are counted as 0.2 FTE, Transitional Bi-lingual are 0.4 FTE, etc. Usually, in aggregate, 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?

1. SPS only lost 13.5 P223 Total FTE between Oct 2023 and Oct 2024.
2. The 2024–2025 budget predicted an AAFTE of a vastly mispredicted decline. We have 749.74 FTE above the Adjusted AAFTE projection.
3. The Well-Resourced School FAQ estimates $13,469 revenue/student, which is a questionably low-balled estimate.
4. The 2024–2025 budget book page 64 shows $15,489 per elementary student. This itself is already a very conservative number.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. DO NOT read this as reducing the budget deficit by $10.1M; much of that money will be spent on instruction.
8. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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

The “Well Resourced Schools” plan has a disproportionate impact on school communities that have a higher percentage of people of color. The impact is clearly visible if you make a graph ordering schools in each region by % of [demographic] (example: NW region % Asian) and look at which ones are being closed or having their program reconfigured for them. In particular, though, in every closure region except SE, the schools with the highest percentage of Asians are consistently being closed/reorganized.

When I first graphed this (see below) and saw it, I felt so sick to my stomach I had to close my laptop. The demographic impact looks so blatantly racist I could not believe it.

However, in the following days and weeks, what felt even harder was the silence about this topic. For all the statements of anti-racism and equity that the loudest advocates use to push their ideas and beat down dissenters, not a single one has noticed or spoken about this.

No one from the School Board. Not President Rankin or Director Briggs who recently ran campaigns highlighting their keen attention to equity. Not the Seattle Council PTSA whose current and former executive board members frequently bandy about the phrase “equity-lens” while also reacting immediately to micro-aggressions on FB forums with fast, strong, condemnation. Not even the district staff itself — though that surprises me less as they’re attempting to sell a plan. No detectable discussion anywhere.

No one noticed. Which implies a lack of representation in leadership because, wow, anyone well connected to the impacted groups would have felt the targeting.

The roots of this resounding silence is major racism here. And it seems to be perpetuated by a number of folks who — I believe authentically — identify as anti-racist.

It is entirely possible to be anti-racist and racist.

Anyone who doesn’t understand this, didn’t understand the meaning of “we are all part of a racist system.” Anyone who reacts with “how dare you criticize [blah]. They’ve had a history of [blah]” didn’t understand the previous statement either and is exhibiting a form of Advocate Fragility (I can’t call it White Fragility cause not everyone is white. Turns out White Fragility isn’t just for white people anymore).

What graphs would lead me write something this provocative? See my walk through below or play with the interactive graphs yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Disproportionate impacts on Asian communities

The following are graphs of all of Seattle’s elementary and K-8 schools, grouped by closure region and sorted by % of students identifying Asian. Data is from the OSPI 2023–2024 Enrollment Report Card.

When reading the graphs, remember that each school a community and that a closure or massive program reconfiguration entails the dissolution of a community.

Though this section is focused on the “Asian” population, what we are graphing here more generally is how many communities of color are being dismantled.

The Shocking Observation: In every closure region except SE Seattle, the schools with the highest percentage of Asians are consistently more targeted for closure or reconfiguration. Red bars are schools being closed or reconfigured.

This is the visualization that made me crawl into bed for a day. The divide we’re seeing is actually a north Seattle vs south Seattle demographic divide.

Here are the graphs with NW + NE and then SW+SE. Central is already shown above.

You can infer that the top 5 highest % Asian school communities in North Seattle are likely freaking out about being dismantled while in South Seattle, the impact is more diffuse.

How have we gone so long without our leaders (who so regularly wear equity on their sleeves) reacting and reaching out to these communities to offer support? How much Asian representation can there be if they are blind to this? The answer: very little.

Vivian Song, the only Asian on the school board, was bullied out–there’s a story if you dig for it. There are no Asians on the Board or among SPS senior staff.

Worse, there is a “black-white” understanding of racial dynamics in Seattle (see The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans from 1999 by Professor Clare Jean Kim). This leads to non-conformant views by Asians being othered as ‘privileged, white-adjacent,’ and therefore dismissible. It goes beyond Seattle Public Schools. You may have noticed it recently in stereotype-reinforcing arguments used in various forums and in media like the Stranger when criticizing or attacking Asian political candidates.

Yes, there is some truth to many Asians being white-adjacent. Being an Asian, native Seattleite, and a techie, that partially applies to me. This doesn’t stop people from telling my family, “Asians don’t belong in Ballard” when we walk around. It doesn’t lessen the sting of being one to two degrees away from a constant stream of people assaulted for being Asian in America.

Ignoring, othering, or devaluing Asian experiences because they’re too white-adjacent to be truly anti-racist isn’t anti-racist. It’s simply racist. And classically so, in its easy-to-understand discrimination based on race. It’s triangulation, using othering to say Asians are not authentically part of a culture or movement.

It becomes structural racism when people with influence do this othering and follow through with biased policies and proposals. And we are supposed to be fighting structural racism.

What about other demographics?

Maybe you don’t think the school experience for Asian children in Seattle is a priority. Given the silence on this, the current Seattle School Board clearly doesn’t. Asians are not the only ones being dismissed, silenced, and hurt.

In the plans for North Seattle, we can also see a trend of targeting for higher percent Black/Africa-American, Hispanic/Latino of any race, or Mixed Race schools. ( Unfortunately, graphs for American Indian/Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander are excluded from analysis as the numbers are so small that they would be misleading).

Note also that “Two or more races” is a tricky category. I cannot find the citation, but as I recall someone got a public-record-request from the district showing that many of those students in this part of Seattle are actually part Asian which makes the Asian targeting look even worse.

For completeness, here is the graph of closures ranked by %White. You can see the distribution of school closures is more even.

Again I keep asking, how was this missed?

Only 5 of the 30 schools in North Seattle have over 15% Black/African-American population. We are closing the largest of those and moving the next one down. How has no one called out this impact on 2 distinct Black communities?

The targeting in North Seattle continues if we lower the threshold to over 10% Black/African-Americans. 11 of 30 schools in North Seattle fit that description. Of those, 6 are slated for closures or moves. That’s over half the schools with any significant concentration of Black / African-American students. Why?

The traditional PTA advocacy roll-up structure, whose members regularly pound on people online for using the wrong words, is not getting up in arms for an actual structurally racist policy. Why?

“All Together for Seattle Schools” had to form in order to give a voice to some of these folks? Why?

After staring at these graphs and watching discussions for the past 2 weeks, I think understanding may start from examining the long running argument about option schools.

Stereotypes about Neighborhood School vs Option School

Let’s hit the hot button topic about option schools. There is a common stereotype that option schools are privileged and more white than the integrated neighborhood schools around them.

Given that 22% of our schools are option schools, you are going to find examples where this is true. And maybe if you are traumatized by experiencing some of those dynamics, you will overgeneralize to thinking it must be true across the whole city.

The problem is Seattle has a history of redlining.

This means that the idea of an “integrated neighborhood school” is laughable for various portions of the city where entire neighborhoods are basically white. This causes the socio-economic relationship of option schools to neighborhood schools in these regions to be REVERSED from the stereotype above.

This is the situation in NW Seattle. If you plot the schools by % white, only 7/16 schools are < 50% white. 5 of those are option schools.

So if you make any policy that does anything negative to ALL option schools in the city, the experience for NW Seattle — a sizable chunk of the city — is that you will have targeted the LEAST WHITE schools and you will look like you are enacting a racist policy.

Even Salmon Bay isn’t really an exception. Every school it is nearby is basically just as white. In that area, Licton Springs at 44.5% white is significantly more integrated than its peers schools which range from 69% to 73% white.

This is the interaction of redlining and policy that many people seem to forget.

An equity-furthering policy based on experiences in one area, when applied uniformly over a redlined city, will almost certainly be equity-reducing in another.

Let me say it again: Because of redlining, any enactment of city-wide policy based on an understanding of race/economic dynamics in one section will almost certainly have the opposite effect in another.

Our city is complex, and things are entangled.

How did we miss this horrid racial targeting?

I came up with these stats 2 weeks ago.

It was nearly the first thing I looked at and it took me 15 minutes for the first cut at the graphs. I knew to look because the school list felt like it hit the most integrated schools I knew.

After graphing it the first time, I spent a week attempting to validate them because I was so shaken by how blatant it looked. And it’s not just race. If you play with the interactive graphs, you’ll see disturbing clustering across many OSPI categories that I have not managed to discuss.

If it took me 15 mins 2 weeks ago, why did no one on the Board or in the major advocacy orgs (with the exception of a parent in All Together for Seattle Schools coming to similar conclusions a few days ago) scream?

I have worked in government before and believe deeply that anyone who stays in civil service or runs for office truly wants to do good. It’s just too abusive of an environment to be in otherwise. So how could so many people who talk equity, social justice, or African American Male achievement in nearly every sentence miss something so big? Why are they silent?

I wonder if it’s because they live in similar parts of Seattle and things look okay for them.

Geographic Concentration of Power and Influence

Measuring such concentration is hard, but let’s try.

I am going to point at SCPTSA because they are the most influential advocacy group (both Chandra Hampson and Liza Rankin who’ve held president and vice president roles on the board over the past decade came from them) and because there is an easy visual to show, but they are not the only ones here to worry about. Every organization has a natural tendency to cluster.

During the end of last school year there was a big ugly kerfuffle about the SCPTSA election. Folks can dig into the sordid details of that ugliness if they want, but post election, Tara Chace put together a map showing the home-school representation of the two competing executive board slates which really stuck out to me. Here is the picture included with permission.

With the exception of a small overlap in SE Seattle, notice these groups are nearly clustered and that the blue and red groups live in different parts of the city? In particular, notice that the strong East-West split of north seattle adovcates — a pattern I didn’t even realize until writing this post.

It’s not hard to see how these sets of people could have totally different understandings of what the biggest problems are and what the solutions should be.

Our advocacy community is split in half and that split hurts our ability to find solutions that work for the whole city.

As is, you can see a huge cluster of influence in NE Seattle. Note also that current President Liza Rankin, former President + Vice President Chandra Hampson, and newly elected Evan Briggs all cluster around NE Seattle.

Given this concentration, let’s look at racial demographics for closures look for NE Seattle (again American Indian / Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander graphs are elided since the numbers are too small).

If you ideologically believe HCC and Options schools are inequitable** and should be destroyed then overall the graphs don’t look too bad! Especially since “Sandpoint” is a “just” a location move.

(**Note that ignoring that HCC/Option school in NE Seattle also means you ignore the impact on the 3 schools with highest % Asian. Here is the uncomfortable truth: you cannot be against Option schools and HCC w/o also supporting the dismantling these Asian communities.)

Since the center of influence in advocacy is STRONGLY clustered in NE Seattle, it suddenly becomes quite easy to see why response is tepid. Things don’t look so bad (except for the % Asians numbers) so then you probably wonder if everyone else is freaking out because they’re just too delicate or worried about losing their privilege.

This unconscious bias likely gets reinforced too because the folks in the affected communities that are most effective at speaking out likely won’t be the immigrants, the English language learners, the families with refugee histories whose families are afraid of public challenges to authority. No, it will be someone that fulfills some privilege stereotype.

In this bubble, it’s actually possible for every advocate to truly be trying to do their best to help equity but to have created an echo chamber where it is possible to accidentally devote a huge amount of energy to focused on controlling the 0.5% of the district budget that is PTSA funding instead of heeding the calls from option schools in March that knew they were being targeted for closures since their waitlists were not moving leading to a situation where the largest % Asian and % Black schools in North Seattle are targeted to have their community dispersed.

The racism that will occur here is not from advocates trying to preserve privilege. It will be from from advocates picking the wrong priorities because there isn’t enough representation in the advocacy community collaboratively find the right ones.

Side comment about Asian concentration in Option Schools and HCC

When you look at the graphs, it’s impossible not to notice that there is a correlation of higher % Asians and options schools + HCC.

Nearly everyone just leaps to the racist stereotype about Asians being good at tests and trying to hoard privilege.

I have an alternative possibility. If you live in this part of Seattle, where nearly every single school around you is 70% white, what would your world look like? Maybe a bunch of your friends say “apply to this option school” or “go for HCC” or “get into the DL/I program” because its “so much better.”

Why do they think it’s better? Maybe it’s because it’s finally a community where you and your kids actually see people like yourselves at school events. Maybe you can walk in the hallways and have a chance of hearing people speak your languages around you. And maybe that is an unconscious incentive to try to cluster here.

Maybe it’s actually a little of each. Or maybe one drew you and the other convinced you that you should never leave.

So when we as a city decide these programs are privileged (maybe they are) and mark them for destruction, what would have been the alternative reality for those families as they are dispersed and scattered back into the 70% white schools. What’s the impact on self identity?

I’ve got a trend going here of making seemingly contradictory statements but here’s the crux: you can be equitable and non-equitable at the same time.

The problem I have, and where I see racism, isn’t with having to make hard choices. It’s with choices being made without these complexities even being aired or discussed. And it’s also with choices being made TO a community rather than WITH a community, because some set of people in power apply a stereotype and create the policy equivalent of saying “all look same.”

The word inclusion is used a lot, but it’s often meant as a measure of how many best practices one puts in. I look at it differently now. Inclusion isn’t about best practices. It is about how many people who have changes made to them cannot find access to power so they may be heard.

By that definition, I think we do not have a very inclusive community.

Where to go from here

I don’t know how to get out of this mess but there are a few things that are very clear to me now:

• The topics here are complex and most actions have multiple possibly contradictory impacts.
• It is possible to be anti-racist and racist at the same time.
• Representation of impacted communities is hugely lacking on the school board and among the leaders of the advocacy community.
• The word “equity” can be used to legitimately defend the oppressed while ALSO bullying others into following policy that is based on a narrow (and sometimes upside down) understanding of the city.
• Fighting for equity and bullying are two different things. Bullying needs to be stopped and the word equity needs to cause introspection, not silence.
• If you are Asian and you feel othered in your interaction with Seattle Public Schools and the advocacy community, that’s because you are being othered and targeted. Time to stand up, organize, and assert the right to take up space, and find a way to evolved the advocacy so that we and everyone else are included.

— References

• Graphs: https://www.sps-by-the-numbers.com/analyses/2024-school-closure-demographics
• OSPI data set: https://data.wa.gov/education/Report-Card-Enrollment-2023-24-School-Year/q4ba-s3jc/about_data
• Option schools knowing their waitlist were held up: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQrjsk1LAHLaLf8kQtoVoVh9NBmL5dycckZ-QHJq7cmtGcRTCNJo786j9f8qi6hlAeWLZcBdWYnDRAn/pubhtml#
• The Racial Triangulation of Asian America (Claire Jean Kim, 1999): https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/6859319.pdf
• Also a shout out the group of about ~10 parents who have helped me cross-check, proof read, and generally support this. Most don’t want to be named because of the aforementioned bullying that co-opts and misuses the word “equity.” That bullying needs to stop now.