001All right, this is President Top. I'm now calling the board special meeting to order at Thank you, folks. I know we're starting a little bit later than posted time. Um but we would we'll start with a land acknowledgement. We will like we would like to acknowledge that we are on ancestral lands and the traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish people. For the record, I will call the roll. Vice President Briggs. Here. Director LeValley. Here. Director Misrahi. Here. Director Smith. Here. Director Song. Here. Director Rankin. Here. And this is President Top. We also have representatives Masudi, Mangelson, and Yun with us today. Um we have two portions of our meeting this evening. Uh the first is uh a budget and at the conclusion of the first session, we'll move into goals and guardrails work.
002So, that uh tonight continues the board's conversation about our budget challenges and how we align our resources to support students and return the district to financial stability. Um I know that we are all very keenly aware we are facing a structural deficit and that puts us on the pathway to insolvency unless we change course and our responsibility as a board is to change that course for the students who depend on our schools every single day. So, with that, we have staff here to run us through a budget presentation. Um there'll be I think some natural breaks through the presentation where we can um have some discussion. Um and then we will conclude with a larger discussion as well. So with that I'll pass it over to staff to be to have the conversation or begin
003the presentation. Uh thank you so much uh President Top. Uh good afternoon to everyone. Um I want to thank everyone for being here today. As President Top said uh this district is facing some pretty significant financial hardships, but that doesn't mean that we make decisions uh just because of numbers. We have to always make sure that we're keeping our children and our staff and our families front and center. Uh that does mean sadly we are going to have to make some difficult decisions, but the hope is that we're always making those decisions with the best thought of both all 50,000 children and 9,000 staff and each and every individual child and each and every individual staff. So what I hope that you're going to see through my superintendency is this is going to be often.
004We're going to share conversation around budget often. This has to be a detailed but also engaging dialogue because the decisions that we make are going to impact folks. I think those of you who know me and now what uh month two day four uh I'm pretty transparent and pretty kind of honest about these kinds of things. These are going to be difficult, uh but I think there is a really good and thoughtful way forward. What I also want to preface something because as I think many of you know, I've spent a lot of time in the community over the last month is that I think there's some kind of misunderstanding around budgets. Mainly because they make no sense. So I really appreciate when folks are saying, "But Ben, like how come everything's changing? Why is
005it on one day it's one way and one day it's another?" A totally legitimate question. And so, what I would say to the board and to the community is one of the reasons for that is that we have to make assumptions about decisions without actually knowing the facts. So, imagine here you are sitting and knowing that a bunch of people in Olympia are going to make a decision that you don't know the answer to. So, you've got to assume that you think you know what they're going to do. So, you got to make a formula based on what you think they're going to do. And then, they might do something that you think about or they might do something completely different. It doesn't mean that the district lied to you, it just mean that they
006made an assumption that now turns out to not be true. I think the district has not done a great job in explaining all of that, and that's certainly my role as superintendent and our role as staff, but I just want to posit that a lot of times what you'll see is assumptions. One of the big assumptions, and I know we have certainly friends listening at home and folks in the audience, one of the big assumptions is going to be about how many students are going to be at your school next year. I don't know, but we will have pretty good assumptions of why and decisions that we make, but we do have to make sure that our systems allow for us to adjust and edit based on certain things. We have some schools more kids
007are coming than we thought. Some schools, less. But it doesn't mean that the assumptions we make today in March are false, it just means that they might not be accurate in a month, in 2 months, in 3 months. And so, I will try my absolute best to explain everything as you know, as clear as I can. Certainly, I'm here with two wonderful educators who care deeply about our students and our staff as well, and they're going to walk through this. And so, I wanted to just kind of frame this because what we're sharing to you today on the first week in March is not going to be accurate in 20 seconds from now because something might change where Olympia might change or the number of students might change or there might be some change where
008everybody says, "I want to move to Seattle." And we get 50,000 new kids. Who knows? So, we've got to make sure that we're as clear as we can today about the assumptions we make and then about the decisions we make. So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Bottelman to talk about at least the first page on what are some of the assumptions that we're making. Thank you. Um another assumption or another thing that's in flux is the reorganization discussions that transpired, I think, in this room on Friday. Had the I wasn't here for that, but another thing that we're sort of juggling in this process is that um we are starting this year with a school process. So, we've started working with school leaders on the last couple weeks with their
009gold book and their purple book to see what their allocations are based on our current assumptions. Um they'll come back in a couple weeks after they met with their communities to put together what their budget is for the school year that's coming up in the fall. But, as Superintendent Shelton indicated, things are going to change between now and then, but there's we'll be we'll have that starting point. So, tonight is mostly about the details of what we've given them in terms of the school staffing process. And then, it's a little bit lighter on details in terms of the Stanford Center process. And we're still working on that. There's some overlap and some things that um play together with the school process and the Stanford Center process, but we're working on that actively as we speak.
010We had I think we met 3 hours this morning on some of that. So, um Ben's point about this is in process. It is in process, but this is an update on the process. And then as we're going through it, I brought some a lot of pieces of paper. If there detailed questions that Marni and I and other staff are not able to answer in real time today and we'll get back to you on those. President Topp had sent 15 questions over the weekend. We do have answers to those in memo form. I thought I'd just add other questions so you'd get one memo from us with all the answers to all the questions and so we'll try and integrate some of the answers to President Topp's questions into this presentation as we go along,
011but want to be sure that I make sure that other questions will get answered and get it back to the entire board if we can't answer the very detailed question tonight. Oops. Uh-oh. So just uh the four things we're going to talk about is the legislature, the school process and what we've what we're doing there, um some proposed savings and efficiencies outside of the school process and then and just an update on the timeline. And I think Superintendent Schuldiner, correct me if I'm wrong, you want this to be conversational in sorts and staff from the back and come forward if we have questions that they're more positioned to answer them. >> I appreciate that I might have a different way of doing things, but I really believe that everybody should have time to feel comfortable
012with things like the budget and so certainly board, uh you know, feel free to to ask questions to to engage. You know, my hope is that over the however long I get to work here, um is that we are creating an environment where these are conversations so that everybody leaves understanding what we're doing and feeling I hopefully good, but at least uh understanding why we're making certainly certain decisions. So yes, and if staff comes up to have comments, that would be terrific. Great. So briefly, the legislature is currently meeting. They're finishing their work March 12th. Um in the last few weeks, there was an updated state revenue forecast, which I think the way we would explain that is there was additional revenue that was unanticipated when the first forecast was made, which made their problem
013a little bit less hard to solve. So, this isn't new money just for to give to K-12 education or to other agencies of state government, but it just made the cuts they're needing to take a little less drastic for the the next year's budget process. Um to Ben's point about the assumptions, so that last bullet point, we've been making assumptions about what the legislature was going to do, and if we look at the state or the house or the Senate version, we came within about $100,000 of where they're at today. So, our assumptions on what the state budget was going to do were pretty good and are baked into what we're planning around next year's um balanced budget plan. So, a few of the highlights there, um one of the things we hadn't anticipated was
014school districts like Seattle that don't have their own buses get some money from the state to account for bus depreciation from their vendors, and they were they're changing the bus depreciation schedule, which would be an impact of about a million dollars less for Seattle Public Schools. Other schools that have their own buses would buy buses less frequently cuz they'd have less revenue coming in through the STARS formula. So, that's one thing we hadn't anticipated. It's still active in Olympians' part of the legislative conversation. Another thing we had not anticipated is this reduction in the BEST program, which is the beginning beginning educator support team. So, Seattle Public Schools has $400,000 in this grant, and it's two FTE that do um support for first, second, third, and fourth-year educators consistent with the SEA agreement. And so,
015without that funding, the district would have to provide those supports in a different way. Um it's just a a line item in the budget that reduces that. And I think we've talked at this table a couple of times at least around the sales tax. So, there was new in last year's budget. School districts were charged along with other entities except for hospitals sales tax on temporary staffing services. The one that mainly impacts Seattle Public Schools and other K-12 services. So, for example, a psychiatrist that's not an employee of Seattle Public Schools that's doing work for our students. Now, we're being taxed sales tax on that. So, this is a number that we've built $2 million into our budget deficit for next year. Some of the the reason that number is not as big as you
016might think it would be is cuz some of that's offset by safety net funding. So, many of the kids who receive those supports that were now taxed on we get reimbursed by the state for some of that funding. So, the net impact of the state is bigger than that $2 million but we're estimating about $2 million if that sales tax exemption is not overturned in the coming legislative session or in the current legislative session. Do you want to take questions now or on the way? I mean, we're all family. >> we take questions if if we take questions along the way let's be mindful that we do want to we have to get out of here by 9:00 and then we want to be fair to all board directors as well. So, we can try
017this. We'll see how it goes. Director Rankin. Um yeah, uh So, wait, sorry. I want a clarification. You said that the what our assumptions were is only about a difference of about $100,000 depending on on what we actually think. Correct. Um or on what we think is going to actually happen. I That's what we predicted a few months ago. >> Okay. Because this is um I mean we a lot of the most kind of devastating cuts are programs that we don't have like transition to kindergarten and LEA are are sources that are going to really impact other districts besides us um in in ways that are Well, so the governor's initial budget kind of opened the door for a budget for a uh a budget balanced on the backs of children and disabled people in
018Washington state in ways that I find pretty horrifying and I just wanted to say that out loud. Um the education budget this is one of the worst but this is definitely the worst supplemental budget year I've seen in all of my 10 plus years. Like the fact that they're entertaining these significant cuts in a supplemental budget year when typically it's like a time to come back and kind of finish up some things and even like increase some funding um when projections are different than anticipated is is is honestly quite shocking. um And so although I understand that like TK and LEA don't that's not going to show up for us. I'm still surprised that we're this close and one area I'm wondering in particular about is Medicaid reimbursement. I know that there is movement to
019basically have this the Previously districts can apply for Medicaid reimbursement for students that qualify for certain services in their schools and the state is um going to stop funding some of those things and basically say well the districts can just pay for themselves. Well, I don't know where that money is supposed to come from so I'm wondering what that impact is to us. um And then the sales tax exemption am I understanding right that the the impact isn't as cuz I thought it was more like 7 million. The impact is not as much as we think because of safety net funding. Does that mean we're using safety net funding to pay the tax? This year we would be, yes. Okay. So, safety net funding is supposed to be for children with disabilities who go above
020the formula to meet what's in their IEP. And basically the legislature is we're having to pay this additional tax that shouldn't have been applied to us in the first place out of money that's intended to provide additional services and support for students with disabilities. We'd be sending the bill to OSPI for the kids that are eligible for safety net money, and it would include sales tax. Does it impact the level of safety net funding we can access? >> No. Okay. >> Not that I'm aware of. Okay. Yeah, and and just cuz thank you so much Director Ranken. What I hope we see from that fourth bullet point is that the other changes net less than 100,000 up or down. That's just that Curt and the team knew what to anticipate. It doesn't mean we only
021lost 100,000. It just means that we've caked in knowing what we were going to lose or make because again the team my pleasure because they are quite good at their job. The three things above that we highlight are the things that weren't caked in cuz these are new, right? So, now we have caked it in eventually, but you know, one thing that I really appreciate about what Curt is doing here is I love Seattle. I've been here for like a month and four days, and I love this place. And one of the things is that people really feel empowered to advocate. What one of the things that I don't think the district has done strong enough is to tell our wonderful folks where to advocate. The fact that we are paying $3 million in tax
022seems absurd for a government entity. That is something we could go to Olympia and advocate for and that would be $2 million in back for us. The idea that we have to lose a million bucks on bus appreciation is kind of ridiculous. But these are the kinds of things we want to highlight for folks cuz I don't want anybody to think, "Oh man, you know, we're losing all this money but we don't know why." Well, we want to be really clear. There's a sales tax issue and there's a bus depreciation issue. We're going to deal with it. We will we will absorb it, but there are things that we do and we want to be highlight this cuz this is new because and it's not that we didn't anticipate, we don't know what the folks
023in Olympia are going to do. Our hope, I think there's still time that maybe the sales tax thing is going to be fixed and if that's the case, that's $2 million more in the budget, which would be awesome. But we want to be really honest to the community and say as of today, this is where we are. Yeah, the sales tax issue is absolutely fixable. I think there's three different vehicles that it could be, but but we advocated pretty hard knowing that that was going to impact us and we're told, "No, it won't impact you." Last year. >> it and it it did, but they can fix it. And I've got the Medicaid question and I'll get back to you on that. I know that we've answered this question before, I just don't want to
024misspeak on it. I think the statewide figure is about 3.something million, which doesn't seem like very much, but a lot of it is probably ours because for some districts it actually costs so much for them to apply for the reimbursement that they don't even bother. So, but that's yeah, I'm wondering about that. Thanks. Take a walk. The next sort of part of the agenda is around the school budget development. So, as I said, school leaders have been coming down here the last week or week and a half um meeting in 2776 if anybody wants to join them, then join them on Monday morning bright and early to work through some of the the more complex um budget challenges that some principals are managing and other staff. I think most staff in this room are supporting
025that process in one way or another by going down and helping to support principles through some of these changes and figure out the best way forward for kids, as Ben said. So, that's ongoing. Principles then go back to their schools, work with their their building leadership teams. I'm looking at Marni, who's a former principal, to make sure that I've got the process right. And then they come up with sort of the recommendations around how to have their actual budget for next year. And as Ben said multiple times, and then things will change a little bit, so that'll be the point where they come forward to as their starting budget for the fall after they come back in a couple weeks and put it into the system. Um here's a a chart that um I think
026we'll spend some time on. The These are changes in the school type. And this is average annual FTE, which is the way the districts are funded. This is not head count. So, head count is the number of kids in a school. Average annual FTE is the way the state counts them for funding purposes. So, as an example, if you have a kid who's um half running start and half in the school, this counts them half that way and half with the running start way. So, it's a different number, so you'll see these differences in head count and AFT. To Ben's original point about trying to be more clear about that, Marni and I are joined at the hip on trying to provide better information on how cuz her team works in head count primarily because
027they're working on how many kids can go into this school, how many kids are in this classroom. My team works on how much money are we going to get to fund those kids in those classrooms. And so, um coming soon, there will be better information on how these two relate to each other and how they don't relate to each other. So, just a a caveat there. So, you'll see here the biggest change. Most of the school types remain relatively stable, a little growth in K-8, and then a significant decline in the non-traditional school enrollment is what's projected at this point in time for the 2026-2027 school year. I do want to highlight what Kurt said again. When you think of a school, you think of children. How many chairs? How many desks? Makes sense, right?
028All those lovely kids that need to to learn. But because funding doesn't work that way, sometimes these numbers feel wrong. You say, "Wait a second, but I have 200 kids in front of me. Why doesn't it seem like I have 200 kids for funding?" Well, it might be that you might have 200 kids, but 50 of them spend half their day somewhere else and we're not getting funded for them. Doesn't mean we don't love them. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't support them, but we have to be really clear about how funding works because it's the funding, it's the dollars we get, is the dollars we spend. As you've heard me say this over and over again, right now, the dollars we get is not what we spend. What we spend is a lot more
029than we get. And so we have to balance what we're getting and what we're spending. So this AAFTE, which is a long acronym, uh really is the funding mechanism. And that's why later on when we talk about things like the funding mechanism and the model for classes, it's not class size, it's the funding mechanism for the class. So this document is super important cuz this is the document we're going to use when we talk about the funding. The good news is -0.5% is not is not great, but it is not significant when you look at a large district like uh Seattle in terms of huge changes. I would love that. My hope and my promise to this district is I'm trying very hard for that to all be black and it all be positive and
030I think we have a good shot at doing that soon, but just know it's a negative point five 256 kids. And one other just distinction with this slide versus some of the other information that you probably see is this is from about this point in time last year to this point in time this year and so it's not how many kids were in there in October. This is budget to budget. So again back to Ben's opening statement around all of this is fluid on some level. Um I think Marni was going to talk a little about some of why the changes are showing up the way they are in K8 and non-traditional schools. Yeah, thanks for the question and and thank you all for being here and for your attention to this such important work.
031Um so if we look at actual kids, it's actually a reduction of about 12%. Um so the AEFTE number reflects the the and there's reasons that we've just talked about, but there is a reduction of about 12% in students. That's largely reflective of multilingual and international students are not coming here as much as they had due to the we would assume the political climate. So if you look at a school like Seattle World School, we are having fewer students arriving. Um we're also the trending in general is that we have larger exiting 12th grade classes and smaller entering kindergarten classes and also we have offered more access to choice. So some schools have lost some of their kids to other choice assignments. So those are the three factors that have influenced that. The number of
032kids, but it's um it's actually more like again 12% change in the number of students in non-traditional schools. Just to be clear, you are only talking about non-traditional schools. >> Correct. I want to make sure everybody did not hear that we are losing 12% of the entire district. >> Correct. Thank you. Thank you. >> Cuz that's how some of us might have heard it. Shifting to other places in many cases. Yes. It's a clar- quick clarifying question. >> I'm And just so we're clear, I'm going to now hold questions till the end of each agenda item. So, there's four agenda items, we'll let the staff get through their presentation and then we'll go to questions, but if there's a quick clarifying question. Well, yeah, base- Thank you. Based on that the 12% and you said
033um cuz 26.6% is pretty significant change for non-traditional. Um and then you said that's 12% of our It says 26 and you were just saying 12. Correct. So, you want to ask We we can tag team this. Part of the differences My numbers, and I'll call these my numbers cuz they're the funny numbers, are from last year's adopted. Marty's numbers are from October 1 of this year to the projected. And so, there was some probably some drop-off between February and October in those numbers to begin with. And then But also, I'm addressing head count, not AA FTE. So, the shift in AA FTE is different from the shift in head count. And do Do you both believe that the change is mostly due to international students, or is there uh something else going on in
034other non-traditional schools? So, again, if I look at these individual schools, Bridge Center School, Home School, uh Interagency Middle College, Nova World School. I can see larger exiting senior classes and smaller entering ninth grade classes, so that's part of it as well. And then also I can see more students have gotten a choice seat at at another school rather than going to what it be schools. Okay. Thanks. >> Yeah. Thanks. And did you want to talk about the choice, where we're at with the choice choice change? Sure. So we did see some significant So we completed open enrollment in the month of January, which means that we have really strong actual numbers for where our students are going. So as of as of March 2nd, we have 870 students on wait lists. That compares to
035about 2,000 at this time last year. That breaks down grade band about 340 347 in K5, 156 in 6-8, and 367 in 9-12. Of those, are remaining on wait lists because they applied to a high demand school. So that's across the district. Of those 870, 145 they're kind of temporarily on wait lists cuz they were late applications. So they're being considered right now. We're constantly on a daily basis looking at all those applications. We look at these numbers on a cadence of probably about three times a day to see what's shifting, make sure we're staying fresh, make sure we're keeping keeping as accurate as possible. And being reviewed for potential placement. Why wait lists? Because we we do have a slight decline in enrollment overall, but families are telling us where they want to go
036to school. So, we have schools that have more requests than have capacity or availability of seats. So, that's why we have wait lists even though we don't have completely full schools across the board and or we might have a decline overall in our overall enrollment. Um there are two kinds of things that this tells us that we need to work on. The first is if we can tell as we can by the patterns of where the schools are that have wait lists, in some cases it's a programmatic preference. STEM, dual language, in some cases K-8 opportunity. So, that tells us that we need to look at those opportunities that families tell us that they want. We need to make more of those available. In some cases it has to do um with the uh capacity
037of the building itself. Um and that tells us that we need to do more work on looking at um our boundaries. We need to be doing that and and Director Rainkin has talked about this a lot. We need to be doing this on a on a regular basis, looking at our enrollment, looking at our boundaries, making smart choices about where our students live, where they are, where they need to attend school. So, we kind of have two opportunities to really learn from this data. We have it early on, which is really great. We can get much more precise and much more refined in how we approach our schools. So, that's just kind of where we're at with wait lists, but the the positive news is that many, many more families have received the assignment to
038the school that they told us they preferred for their student. Yeah, I I really want I mean, we need to take this win. Last year, there were over 2,000 people on the wait list at this time, and now it's around 800 and change. That happened because we actually believe in choice. I know I've been here not that long, but I've been told by many, many parents that they feel like they asked to go to a school and then they stay on a waitlist forever and then they walk the halls of that school and they say, "Wait a second, there's 14 empty classrooms. How come I don't get to go to that school?" What we did this year was really make sure that if we could move you there, we did. And that's important because there
039is a side effect and we need to just be really clear about this. If we, as a district, as a board, as a superintendent, believe in choice, a parent says, "I want my child to go to this school." And we do it, that's awesome and we finally are listening to parents. Fin- Not finally, we are listening to them strongly, we are caring about them even more, but there is an impact, which is the school that they're leaving from. But if we believe in choice, this is what we do and we just then have to be honest that the places that had X amount of kids and now have less than X amount of kids, that's going to impact their budget. But the really good news that you are seeing is that at this time last
040year, we had over 2,000 kids on the waitlist and now we have over, you know, 800 and change. And as you heard, uh, Marnie say, some of those were late uh, to doing the process, which means actually we could probably sit more of them coming soon. So, that's a really good thing and I think that it's important that we see that cuz it means we're doing what we said we were going to do for the community, but we also have to be honest that there is then an impact, which is some schools are going to have less kids and thus their budget's going to be impacted. Thank you so much. And one more thing I I want to add, the vast majority of the students that are on wait lists do have an assignment in
041Seattle Public Schools. So that's not that they're either not going to be here or they're on a wait list. They actually do have an assignment. We can anticipate that then we've heard from families that have told us if I don't get it this choice, I've got another option in my back pocket. But most of I tried to pin my team down to a percentage, um but most of the again it's fluctuating numbers, but it's I would say over 90% of these families do have an assignment. Um and again we we we want Seattle Public Schools to be the place where you want to be, where you want to be with your student, and so we want to make that possible. So like I said, we also have some work to do then um right away
042in looking at both our boundaries, how are we using our buildings, how are how are we looking at where our students and families live and want to be, and also looking at our pro programmatic opportunities for our families. This is just a graph sort of trying to show that. Um so the outliers which schools are growing in large part because of the the mark choice process and which schools are uh getting smaller. Uh that students are not choosing going forward. And you the other takeaway for me from this is there's a lot of schools in the middle there where not a lot is changing in terms of enrollment through this choice process. So it's kind of the the schools at both ends of the spectrum, some that are losing fairly significant numbers and others who
043are gaining fairly significant numbers. Um there may be one school missing on here and a astute eagle-eyed community member pointed out to me that there may be one that missing. If there is, I'll update this slide later. Um but there may be only 105 there. Wasn't intended to be read literally, but um just sort of illustrative. But if there's a missing school, I'll add that. And I don't think it's an outlier. Um that's the natural break, President Top. Director Song. Director Um thank you for uh calling out with the outliers were um I am wondering how you came up with these projections for the schools. In particular, I think my question is around Nathan Hale and Garfield because those are pretty significant swings. Um why? Well, those many of those students received choice assignments to
044other high schools that they requested. So, um I have been getting emails from um staff members saying that the projections are inconsistent with what they see on their end. So, I just want to understand. So, when you're coming up with the enrollment projections, say like with Nathan Hale and Garfield, like how did you land at the number that you did? Yeah, so I know I know the emails at least in one school that you're talking about. One thing I will share um that's really a an important technical detail, but I think it's it bears stating here. Um if you look in PowerSchool, um you will see a higher number than the projection. PowerSchool, so when our superintendent talks about assumptions, PowerSchool is the assumption just based on sheer names of enrolled kids. As we know,
045not all students show up. So, PowerSchool is always going to be a higher number. And we find this often in August when our principals return to school and they look in PowerSchool and they kind of have a little moment cuz they're like, "Oh my gosh, I have so many students." And we always have to remind them, "Here's Here's how many students are actually going to show up." That is based on really the science of analysis of show rates, um analysis of really and they have a ace team of PhDs that do this work that really look at those trends and get pretty refined at how they look at those show rates. So, that's what this is based on. So, um the person I think one of the emails I saw referred to, "Hey, in PowerSchool
046it says this and the projection says this." That's because the projection is anticipating how many actual kids are going to be counted on that when they come to school. Yeah. So, uh You're using um unique show rates for individual schools. So, like looking historically at this school, what is the show rate? >> Mhm. Yeah. Um Okay. Yeah, each individual Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for pointing that out. We don't apply a single generic show rate. We actually look at at each school individually. We look at their pattern um and um you know, again, try to anticipate we could be very you know, we could be wrong. We make adjustments. That's why we do a June adjustment and then another fall adjustment. Um but yeah, we we calculate that for individual schools. So, I think one
047more kind of lingering thing that could change the numbers a little bit is HC. So, we have not closed that window yet, right? And so, what do we anticipate how HC assignments are going to impact some of these school projections? >> Yeah, we also calculated for that. So, again, we anticipate, you know, of the of the students offered an HC seat at a cohort school, we're pretty confident that we know about how many will take that seat. So, that's what we used to do those projections as well. We did that last year um also when we um maintained um HC at second grade. So, we used that for Thurgood Marshall, Decatur, and um and Cascadia. So, we've we've been able to refine that formula as well. So, that's how we did it. We we kind
048of knew where the students were who were identified. We knew exactly, you know, what schools they were coming from. We also know the rate at which they tend to select that. But again, that's something we're checking consistently to make sure that we're on on board with our projections. Yeah. Are we anticipating doing a June adjustment? I would say so, yes. I think that the June adjustment and I'm sorry if I've spoken heresy here, but it's it's a much healthier time to do it than October. Um and we hear this and and it's even probably feels too late to some you know, to many people for whom you know, they're working on budgets right now and you would love to know um right now and and I think during our earlier open enrollment, I have to
049give kudos to the team admissions and enrollment team. They really hustled to do to do that open enrollment during January, but we can really see the productive fruits of that particular labor, which is we have much better data now. So, you know, the difficult work of building those school budgets, um we hope will will be you know, much more um effective because we have better numbers. Um but June adjustment still means that we're able to do that work before we head out for the summer and are more prepared for the for the fall. Last question. So, I think I heard you say that the enrollment is is going slightly down. So, Mhm. are is the data from school choice showing that we didn't get as many school choice requests as we did previously? Like what
050did that tell us about what enrollment was going to go? >> That's a really great question. Um I will find out how many school choice applications we actually had. I think they were about the same, but I I I will get more specific information. Yeah. Director LaValley. Yeah, in the very beginning of this open enrollment update slide, you shared a bunch of numbers that I was not quick enough to write down. I would love if in the future those could be within this slide so that we could reference them um if at all possible. Yeah. Um cuz I'm just not quick enough to both listen and write that down all at the same time and contextualize it. So, um that that would be absolutely wonderful. >> I don't have to pass that. We do We
051all the specifics in this memo that we'll send back out to the board. Okay, it would be great to have it in the presentation if at all possible, especially if we're referring to it so that I think it was I'll give staff a pass cuz it was one of my late questions that or one of the questions I asked after the budget presentation that sounds like is addressed in the memo. So that might be part of the issue. Got it. Thank you. So within that as well I know there was in some of Director Song's questions as well, there was a report back from 2022, I believe, that we the schools used the school district used to run of kind of where students are zoned for and where they're attending. So you would be able
052to look up pretty easily and get the information of there's you know, K-8 choice school and here was the schools that they were zoned for and some of that information which we don't seem to be publishing since and I'm I believe it was about 2022. I'm kind of curious into why we aren't publishing that anymore or if that data is still being looked at by your department. As well as you know, you were saying that you have a bunch a wonderful team working showing some of this. It would be great to for us as the board as well as the public to be able to get more visibility into that process cuz right now we tend to have three bullet points on a thing and then a budget hitting with no understanding of where those
053numbers are coming from. And if if you do believe that they are very accurate, then I'd love to see a little bit more on that. >> Sounds good. Um, absolutely. Thank you for that. There's an executive summary enrollment report um, that is on the website. I'll send you the link that I believe has all of the information you're requesting, but we could also make that much more visible and make sure that we push that out to you. Um, so we are maintaining that. We used to publish an actual physical enrollment report. it. several shelves of them in my office and I look at them often cuz they're amazing historical documents, but I will make sure that I push that link out to you. And then also make sure that we find a way to get
054that work that the enrollment team is doing um more visible. I will say one one other thing that we're in the midst of an enrollment is we're actually um going to be replacing our student assignment system, which is an in-house uh system that we built um because we had some very specific unique needs and parameters around choice and things like that. Um that's actually aging out of its Windows platform, so we have to replace it. Um we are currently um building out the requirements for an RFP for a new system. My goal is for that new system to be one that is much more transparent, much more available and visible. And there are great products out there now that do what we've been, you know, trying to do, and I think we were probably ahead
055of the game in terms of how we were building something for ourselves. Um but um there's well-vetted now um uh platforms that can do this work and will make it much more visible to the public. Okay. I do have one more question. You were talking about waitlist being where were I I actually I'm not sure you were talking about it, but waitlist get dissolved Mhm. Um in the not too distant future. Can we get information about from who's left on those waitlists, if those schools are at capacity, or if they are at 80% capa- or what amount of capacity that they're at, so that we're aware that the waitlists are not holding kids back from options, holding families back from options that they want to participate in. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, a
056great a great suggestion. So, we'll make sure that, you know, maybe we have a chance to do an update um that's the end of May, so maybe early May we can take a look at where we're at with waitlists and and um and share that out with you. Okay. I'm I'm just I'm I am worried that waitlists are going to be dissolved and kids that could have gotten placements in schools that are desirable to those families are going to be you know, removed from that option. Absolutely. Thank you. Director Mizrahi. So, yeah, well, just two things. One, um uh Vivian's question about the number of those things. No. No. How about that? Okay, great. Uh I'm very curious uh about Vivian's question about uh the number of families that applied for choice, especially just given
057the earlier timeline. Like, anytime you change anything, it could have have implications. So, was it the same number? Was it more? Was it less? And, you know, what how we think that will impact the future. So, that would just be interesting to know. And then, uh similar to um we're just uh talking about this. I I'd love to dig in on the 8:30. First of all, it is amazing progress to go from 2,000 to 8:30. And I think that um it's it's wonderful that we are uh being more responsive to what uh people want and and the choices that they have. Uh And within the 8:30, I would be curious one, how many of those are on that wait list because of the 85% rule versus just schools that are just way over capacity. And
058then, also like what happens if there are as I'm sure there would be, you know, families who are now assigned to just to pick the biggest outlier, Cleveland, uh which I assume is at that number because it's over capacity and there are are people on the wait list probably making a guess, maybe there are, but uh if then there are families that say, "Ah, you know, never mind. We don't want to go to Cleveland." or or leave the district, then what is the process for getting folks who had applied for that? Especially if those wait lists get dissolved. Like, what is the next step for those families? Cuz obviously, those are somewhat the people that that we're hearing from and mostly, we're just pushing those folks to your office to find out where they are
059in the process. Because I'm not going to answer, you know, the individual questions about that, but it'd be great to know what the process is for them if spots open up. Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you, and I will. And I just texted Val to see if she can tell me how many choice applications we got. And I'm sorry that I don't have that number. So again, we're reviewing those wait lists daily. So prior to the time when they dissolve, those those people that are on wait lists get moved and get offered those seats. Um And then some So after the wait lists are dissolved, one of the advantages to that is that if you are new to Seattle, if you have moved here, it used to be that you just did not have
060a hope of getting into any of those schools. And so this means that if you do move to Seattle, you're not going to be put on, you know, 55th place on a wait list that where you're never going to move. But a family who still desires that assignment can then put in a an appeal, a transfer appeal. So that's the next step. We meet weekly in a transfer appeal board, so that's a very valid way for families to continue to request that assignment. Yeah. Director Rankin. Okay, so looking at what Well, first of all, I just want to say these are all questions that most of them I don't think are new, but what I just want to appreciate that we're making time and space to have these questions, and that past experience has been
061we ask them and then don't really see a reflection on how they might be different. And this is really important, and even though there's pain in budget season and people are confused when things change, I just want to appreciate us having this conversation, and and you both and Superintendent Juneau for acknowledging that we can't solve these long-standing problems without being able to talk about it, and it it may it may be confusing for folks who are used to budget dropping February, and then we don't talk about it again until June to have this and feel like things are changing a lot, which is uncomfortable and different, and it also is allowing us the opportunity to actually talk about what's going on in a in a way that we haven't done. So, thank you for this.
062Um the I'm similar to Director Song's question about the the outliers being Nathan Hale and Garfield. Garfield totally makes sense to me that a lot of students maybe opted towards Cleveland. Nathan Hale, I I don't understand. I don't understand that, and I would be really curious to know um is there really that much of a difference between the incoming freshman class and the exiting senior class? Um that's that's really notable, I guess. Um in those Well, so the outliers of the increase totally makes sense. They're all option schools, and we've decided to allow more kids to them. That's not mysterious at all. Um in the outliers of decreasing, again, Hale and Garfield is interesting, but I'm really, really concerned about Interagency, World School, and Cascade, and maybe some other programs that are not designated here
063as outliers. So, with Hale and Garfield, my my wonder is um about, you know, making sure that with the declining enrollment, yes, there's displacement, yes, there's change, but my main concern is about making sure that um we're sustaining access to required classes for students to be able to graduate, and that they have some electives. So, that's and I don't need you to answer that right now, but, you know, 139 is pretty significant um for Nathan Hale as one of our somewhat smaller high schools, and I know last year at least um there were some challenges with 10th grade history having enough capacity. And that's that's not a matter of student choice or preference. That's a matter of we've got to provide we've got to provide access to graduation requirements at all of our high schools.
064So, that would be a question maybe that's a master scheduling issue. I don't know, but that's just a a question about, you know, I'm not going to be one to say we had this many FTE last year, so we have to have this many this year, but my concern is about student access. Um, so how are we >> executive directors and they're meeting with Ben on Friday are collecting that data from the schools that may have trouble putting together the master schedules and they're going to work with the superintendent and Dr. Torres Morales and others to make sure that students do have those pathways. So, they're identifying those hotspots if there are some as you're describing. >> And and one thing I would say again, this is all kind of general rule of thumb, but
065when you are scheduling a high school the magic number usually is around 400. So, Director Rankin, your point is incredibly well taken, which is we always, no matter what school we have, must give the children what they need to graduate, to pass, to do whatever. Now, I also want to make sure there's robust everything else. That I can't necessarily always guarantee, but as long as a high school is at 400 or plus, the math works out usually pretty well. I don't know the number of Nathan Hale off the top of my head, but I think it's well well above that. But, I will say as as was said, I'm actually spending time helping each school do their own scheduling cuz I was a high school principal for 10 years, so I'm happy to do it.
066But, but I don't want anybody to be too nervous. Yes, that number 139 is large and we want to figure out why, but unless the number of a high school goes below 400, you should really be able to do the the kind of basic expectations. Okay. Um, so then connected to that, the other outliers being Interagency, World School, Cascade. Um, the page previous or maybe coming up says that there's no programmatic changes being made. My concern with these schools as outliers is that they are not your typical 400-student school with typical classrooms. These are unique programs and the loss of FTE for some of these schools could actually be a programmatic change. We could make these programs no longer viable through a budget exercise in a way that is really um deeply concerning to me.
067Um, it's a flaw in the WSS to begin with that we, you know, we always talk about we don't want to have one size fits all. We have a contract with a teacher agreement that doesn't doesn't have There's no MOU for Cascade. I don't know about Interagency if there's different requirements or protections in the bargain, but the bargain is generally for general education teachers and special education teachers at a comprehensive high school and it kind of covers everybody even if that's not really their job. Same with the WSS. The WSS says how many students you have, here's how many teachers you get, and that's it. And it doesn't take into account specific programmatic needs. And I am really concerned that some of these programs that are not just a personal preference, but literally a life-saving
068um service to some students or an or the way that they can continue to attend school are being impacted by a a budget process in a way that's not intentional. But it doesn't matter if we mean to do it or not. Like, so if we're going to say we're not making programmatic changes, Cascade Parent Partnership needs to be able to provide math and have a librarian in our agency needs to be able to have counseling support for students who um are have have any host of um things going on that they need additional support with that couldn't be met at their comprehensive school or perhaps were ejected from their comprehensive school. So, I want to be really clear about um and I we can't change everything overnight, but this is also things that we've been
069bringing up for a long time and haven't gotten any traction on. So, having this opportunity, we have to talk about it. Um I it's I don't think we should force any kid to be at a school where they don't feel safe or not comfortable. I am happy that we are moving things around to allow kids to go to other programs. I'm also concerned that when we say option schools, we're including these other schools that are really actually completely different programs and models that it's not based on would you like to be with a STEM focus or this focus, it's based on do you have the counseling service and credit recovery needs and all these things that is much more of a unique need um than a preference. And I'm concerned that we're treating them a
070little bit the same and going to make an inadvertent program changes and make some of these things non-viable. I from a personal standpoint, my younger son is at Cascade right now and had we not been able to do that halfway through 7th grade, he would have left SPS completely. It was not going to work. And um having Cascade has allowed him to continue to engage in education and and will allow him to successfully attend a high school. And so, I know that's just one story, but that's that's a pretty different thing from I like a STEM focus or I'm interested in expeditionary learning. Not to belittle those, that's that's great and we offer that, but when we're talking about the difference between access to education or no access to education, I'm worried that we're um
071glossing over that a little bit. And part of that is the WSS. It already doesn't take into account for that, and it should. Um the other thing that I'm I sent and and Superintendent, sorry if you didn't get a chance to read it yet or sorry if whatever, but I sent you an email about AAFTE, and that totally makes sense that if a student is part-time in running start, there's a different funding stream that pays for those students to be at running start. It's paid for by the state for them to attend a college class. Makes sense that we don't receive the funding for that student, and that we only receive the funding for when they're in class. For students with disabilities and students receiving multilingual services, they are always our students, and yet our
072secondary formula adjusts for contact time in a way that I find extremely troubling and possibly in violation of FAPE. So, if a student and it also predetermines how much a student will be in a gen ed classroom in a way that I don't think is appropriate. Um if a student is deemed to be resource level, we make assumptions in our funding and in our staffing that that student is going to be in a gen ed classroom 80% of the time and somewhere else 20% of the time. They're still in our building. They're not leaving the building. We still receive a gen ed per pupil allocation for that student. Where's that 20% going? And when you get into the other models, it becomes 40% where we're assuming you're not going to be in gen ed, you're
073going to be somewhere else with someone else. Where's that 40% that that student is generating as a gen ed student that is not going to provide FTE. I don't like I I'm And this is this is a question I've been asking for more than 4 years. So, you know, I will say that the special ed funding is bizarre, to say the very least, and I think that the models that we use for our own budgeting are problematic. I think I've been very transparent that I think we need to move away from the way we do formula. So, I think I would answer your question in two ways. One is I will happily go through individual ways of how individual s- students with different designations are funded to show where the money goes, but I think
074the better conversation is going to be about what new formulas are we going to come up with uh because it's not like the money isn't there. The money is definitely there. It's just that it's being spent in different ways. So, it is sometimes appropriate to say, "Based on a student's designation, there's a different funding formula." And the reason for that is because a child might be, let's say, a 10 to 2 to 1 or a 6 to 1 or an 8 to 1, and those are different than, let's say, a student that's in general ed that's in a class of 25. So, you know, one of the things that I think this district has been really thoughtful about is by saying, "Are you taking into account equity? Are you taking into account, you know, special
075you know, needs? Special needs not capital S, capital N, but just the special needs of children." Because we actually have formulas that are doing that, we are in fact increasing the funding when students have different designations. The thing that I find is that it's not very transparent. And I think that what we should do, and I look forward to this, is a what I would call an ISS, an informational study session, where we should actually go through the funding formula. That way the kind of misunderstanding, because we haven't shared it, so no shade on anybody else. I think when you look at a number, you're like, wait a second, only 40%, where's the rest? It's a great question. Well, it's not really 40%, it's probably 2.4%, you know, 240% because of the way that we're
076getting other funding and other things. So, I would, you know, I'll defer to certainly to Kurt if he wants to go into detail, but my response would be let us go through and really show where the money goes, and you have my word that we are going to be working on a completely different kind of formula moving forward, because one of the things that you'll hear from staff, and rightfully so, is wait a second, why is my number of teachers being impacted by one kid or two kids? That doesn't really make sense, and then there's this whole other thing about, you know, unless it's two FTE, i.e. teachers, differential, you don't get the way budgets should work is how many kids you got, what's the designation of the kid, what's the funding formula, and then
077do it by kid. So, if you have one less kid that isn't impacting a large number, it wouldn't impact probably $5,000 or $6,000. And not to make light of this, I will I do want to say because Kurt and Marnie and the whole team, these folks really do put kids first, and they really do put staff first. Uh uh somebody came to me, which I really appreciate, and said, you know, Ben, my allotment, it was 297. If we had just been at 300, we would have gotten more. I can't believe they put their thumb on the scale, just those three kids. And I said, we're not that good. Like, there's no way in the world that somebody looked at that and said, oh, I'm going to adjust this. But because we're we're not there, right?
078We're just using kind of formulas that are relatively antiquated, and we do need to change them, but we got to use them as they are today, cuz we haven't changed them. So, I don't know, Kurt, if you want to answer a little bit of it, but I want to share with the board later on that. I just want to answer a little bit about the non-traditional schools. There There is no model for those. It's different than the WSS spreadsheet. It's just sort of static numbers that persist on a spreadsheet over time, which I think Ben was surprised to learn earlier this week. Um so, I'm looking at last year's versus this year's, and the only change is really are increasing the the K the 9 through 12 ratio from 31 to at Center School in
079Nova to 32 to 1. So, this question about program, the staffing at the non-traditional schools is by and large remaining the same for next year. Yeah. I don't think that's true. I know Cascade cuz I've looked at the purple book. Cascade is 10.something right now today for the K8 in-person plus the virtual option, which that's a whole other thing. I don't even think that should be part of the same school, but uh they're projected for like six next year. They're They're not going to be able to do their program. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> But, it that makes a programmatic decision then. Well, I mean, I would love to get to the next slide. Uh so, I just because that's your point is about that next slide. So, I'm happy to answer it, but I want
080to make sure that any >> have two more folks who have questions real fast before we go to Director Smith, and then Director Lavallee, if you have a shorter question, or if you want then But, first real fast, what is LX? What elementary school is LX? We were just wondering that. It's the blue here. It's the outlier's blue. Oh. Our engaged community member gave me a key earlier today. So let me find that. Cascadia? It's on the We're hearing from a reporter Cascadia. Yeah, Cascadia. Got it. It's Cascadia. And And I also, if you're interested, we had 43 hundred choice applications during that short open enrollment window. That compares to 4,055 last year over the course of several months. So, it was a It was a 43 hundred. >> thought you said 430. >> No,
081no, no. 4,300. Yeah. More and more. Yeah, thanks. Okay. Uh Director Smith. So, my first question was just going to be to ask for the key So, that's taken care of. And then I just wanted to comment that I think this meeting is really focused on the budget, revenue, and getting that balanced, um which is there's definitely overlap as Director Ranken has been pointing out, but that is distinct from the allocation that I I look forward to you know, the ISS. Oh, so yeah, not not any discussion I can pass on. Director LaValley. Um yeah, so I I the My first thing is just thank you Director Ranken for mentioning the drops in some of these programs. I would like to call out as well that for interagency World School and Cascade K-12, they are
082a lot of word-of-mouth programs and not traditional in one building with a centralized location to the same extent as some of the other programs. Something like World School, people don't know about unless they're told about it. So, they don't know to apply necessarily. So, some of these schools don't have like interagency and world school students don't know about this same application window. So, it is an outlier within this, and you know, I I do have concern about having it grouped in the exact same thing. Um tying into Director Rankin's questions as well. My actual question is earlier Director or Dr. Campbell, you said that we wanted to make there was that 15% restriction to get to 85% of capacity so that we could make sure that people that were coming in and moving into the
083area um were able to get into some of those choice schools as well. Um within that, how how much of the time it does that get filled within the school year? You know, are we seeing schools where that 15% gets added within one school year? That's a great question. I would need to sort of look historically. I think just to be fair as well, um in working with our capital department, their preference is that we don't get to 100% capacity. Now, that should not drive choice. Sure, a bunch of our other schools are at 100% capacity as well. So, >> We do. um it is something that happens to our neighborhood schools as well. Um so, I I'd love to know kind of if we're restricting 15%, is that 15% often filled, or could we
084have a smaller percentage there? Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I think um I I will say I've I've I'm working with the team to say, "Let's look at some of these neighborhood schools where we do have larger waitlists, and we know that you know, we we students are tell like students this is what we did last year, where we seeing really large waitlists, and students and families are saying, "We really want to go to the school." We want to make that possible. So, I think we we do want to push on that. So, um I will keep track of that. We and and we will make sure that yes. But, Jen, what what would you prefer as a as a next step? No, I just love I'd love the information about how
085you got to that 15% from a data-driven standpoint to find out how much each year people come in and look to go to those schools in the in-between time. >> You got it. I will say that our waitlist situation last year and this year are vastly different as well how we've operated. >> Okay. Yep, but okay. I will get that. Superintendent Sheldoner, you want to continue? >> Well, no, I I want to make sure this is awesome, but we to to to the point that was made earlier, we do want to get to the actual budget stuff. Um so, the And and with that, I will just say there were a lot of questions and a lot of information that was from requests from staff. So, I think we'll just make sure that we have
086a feedback loop to the board with with answers to the questions that that have been asked as long with the the memo um being distributed. So, I do want to I'm going to start with this slide and then I'll turn it over to Kurt. So, I really appreciate Director Rankin's question because this is a conversation we do have to have, not today, not now, but what is our definition of a program change, right? Because from a superintendent standpoint, I could read that and say did we shut a school down or not? If the answer is no, then that's not the definition of a program change, and so thus, when Kurt writes this slide and says no program changes are being proposed at this time in 2026-2027, that is the one reading of the rule, right?
087The idea is if we're going to shut down a school, um let's say Franklin High School, which clearly we're not going to, so I'm using an example, uh is that if we were going to do that, then you by law, by board policy, we need to bring that to you. An interesting and more complicated question is, well, if there's 100 less kids at a school, and then we follow whatever formula we use, and that 100 kids less truly impacts the way that we are doing our education there, is that a program change? Good question. Our reading from a district standpoint would be no, because our reading of a program change, because of the scars and slings and arrows of last year, is hey, our definition of a program change is closing a school, closing a
088program, that's a change. But, I would urge the board to engage in conversation with me and others publicly and or certainly never break open meeting laws, we should come with a on a an equal understanding of program change, cuz all I want to do as your employee is follow the direction of the board. But, right now our definition is did we shut down a school or not? Did we shut down a program or not? A change that's our interpretation. If the board's interpretation is different, then we can do that, and I would certainly turn over to Kurt your kind of understanding and reading of that. It might be more robust than that, but at at its most basic of level, we need to bring to the board, are we shutting down a school? Are we
089shutting down a program? That's that's where this is. But, if you have a different understanding, please let us know. All right, I think this what slide is intended to to gain clarity on that question as you described. The last the two years I've been here, the educational program resolution has been sort of broadly describing programs or changes basically, and then last year the board changed what the superintendent had presented as the program resolution, educational program resolution. So, just an attempt for clarity on how the board wants to approach this question is why this is slide here today. So, one interpretation is programs are AP programs, IB programs, or to the strict definition of programs. Those are not being impacted with anything you're seeing yet today. Or you're seeing today, um potentially in the future there
090would be a need for its own reduction resolution if some of those were impacted. To Ben's point, different definition of program is up to the board, and then we'd want to be responsive to that. All right. Next slide. So, we've talked about the school allocation. I won't belabor this anymore. Just want to highlight the third with the dollar sign there. Um that as they're going through the purple pages and the books and all the things that they're working on, we're also integrating the city levy, the FEP levy funding into that process. So, it doesn't show up in the purple book. There's other things that don't show up in the purple book that do support schools. Um and there was questions around the FEP levy um for 26-27. So, schools are acting are working on integrating
091that funding into their school budget uh plans for next year currently. Um Do you want to speak to this one, superintendent? Sure. So, I love everybody that works in SPS. And so, I appreciate that sometimes when you make some changes to a model, the fear would be that this is going to cause folks to lose employment. Want to be clear about language that we're using here. Is that there are a couple of changes that we made to WSS. And when we ran all of the numbers, what we're trying to make sure of is these specific changes that is not there's a 300 less kids at your school. This is the change from 31 to 32. Some of these other changes that are slight is I don't want that to impact somebody actually being fired from
092SPS. And the reason why I'm saying this language about losing employment, that doesn't mean that you might not have to go from one school to another school because you got to go where the kids are. But we are really committed this year, I want to be very clear, this year is that some of the tweaks that we're making, which will end up allowing us to save quite a lot of money, is not going to impact the head count, the person losing employment with SPS. And I want to be clear, these changes we're going to go to that is different than if we are shutting something down or closing this or closing that, but we wanted to commit to really I I would say our union partners, but I mean more than that. The people that
093spend their time helping and loving and supporting and educating our children, we don't want to in this year have folks lose their employment because of changing from, let's say, 31 to 32. So we are working really hard to make sure that through attrition and displacement, we're able to make this happen. Now, this is over a lot of folks' objections, and I appreciate that. And yes, you have tasked me to saving a ton of money, but I want to make sure that we're saving a ton of money with humanity. And I I there is ways of doing that, that will still be painful, but possibly less painful. So, as we go through these processes, I will continuously talk about this because again, changes that we have to make, we have to make. That's different. If we
094shut down a department, we're shutting down a department. Those folks might possibly, you know, lose their employment. But because we're tweaking the class formula, I don't want anybody to lose employment because of that. And that's something that I care deeply about because again, if folks want to do this work, I really want to support them through it. So, this I can't go into detail because there is no details yet because we haven't actually done the changes, but please know that that is the direction I have given the district. Go to it. So, here's some detail on those changes that are being integrated into next year's model. And I'll go through them really quickly, each of them and give a little bit of the background on them, and I expect there'll be a few questions on
095this. So, the district traditionally has held back about 25 FTE in its budget to mitigate different things that come up during the change the changes that happen in enrollment and other school processes. This budget currently that we'd be presenting in next year, reduces that by 15. So, we would have to be tighter with our numbers going forward and in order to realize the savings. The district The next one, the district has traditionally allocated career technical education FTE differently than the typical basic education teacher. There are schools who this for whom the student teacher ratio was as low as 2 3 7 15. The highest was 24. This is moving that to 32 to 1 for the CTE teachers who are allocated through the WSS model. The district also has some other CTE teachers that are
096um allocated by the CTE team to meet certain needs at certain schools. Um Brian Day, who's the director of CTE, is working through all of those issues with the principals, um primarily the high school principals, and how this change will impact their programs, trying to make their programs tighter and more um in line with the graduation pathways. So, I think Brian could talk about that for hours and hours and hours, and he's working very directly with the principals on this. He's in the the arena rooms every day working through these questions with um the high school principals. The next one is a simpler, just a funding shift. So, the district has allocated um a 1.0 FTE to high schools and world school traditionally out of general funds. We're shifting half of that save half of
097that cost to the LA LAP program funding, um the state LAP program funding, and eliminating um some work that that emanated from the district office um on that funding. We don't have that figured out yet, but the the plan is to take some money out of the strategic plan budget and reallocate it to schools in this way. Um I should have started with that the WSS model is primarily just a reflection of the CBA. So, nine the WSS model pushes about $650 million out to schools. The things that are in the model, 90% of that is driven by CBA. So, the these changes that are being proposed are within the constraints of the current C CBA with SEA. So, um just wanted to highlight that, that these are all changes that are within the current
098confines of the collective bargaining agreement. Um or the state rules and laws is the next one. So, aligning the K-3 with state funding. So, the state gives districts additional funding to have small classes for K3 education. As long as you stay at or below 17 to one as they calculate it, Seattle Public Schools has been slightly below that the last few years, so we looked at that a little more tightly. And we looked at the non-high poverty schools first to make sure we weren't impacting the higher poverty schools and sort of tweaked the numbers a little bit so we can get to that 17 to one not be significantly below it for next year in terms of staffing. So, small tweak to the K3 funding model there. Um where instead of rounding up to the
099next point two, we're just rounding for ML and counselor FTE. Um you'll see the potential savings there um in terms of FTE savings. And then when there's two increases to class sizes, again within the constraints of the collective bargaining agreement, increasing the grades 4-5 staffing allocation model to 28 to one and the the 6 to 12 to 32 to one as well as the CTE to that 32 to one. Ben talked about the previous slide and so people not losing employment, um teachers impacted or staff impacted by the changes you're seeing on this slide. And so we working through so schools have a lot of autonomy in how they develop their budgets, so that process is happening right now and the HR team is working with them to see what the different um where people
100will be bumped out of their roles and things like that. So, what what will happen in the end here to make sure that um staff who are impacted by these aren't losing employment. We reserved about 35% of the potential savings at this point in time to mitigate those changes. So, there may be a key places where teacher A only has these credentials, can't there isn't a place for teacher A at a different school, teacher A stays at that school, teaches that same program because there isn't a place for him or her to go out. So, So, so let me try to frame this because again, budgets get very weird, especially with K-12. Kurt has an obligation to create a budget that doesn't show a deficit. He's by law, he's got to do that. So, we've
101got to make sure that it gets to zero. Now, a lot of times what happens is, let's say there's a vacancy. So, there's a a salary. Let's just call it $100,000. If there's no person there, clearly we're not spending $100,000. But, it shows like we're spending $100,000. And the problem is, if you show that you're spending $100,000, then the state says, "You're spending $100,000." And if you do that, that counts against your budget. And since we cannot be at anything less than zero, we have to make sure that if we are having vacancies, that we are really good about saying, "Well, actually, we don't need these vacancies. We'll close them down." This is how I'm trying to get us to a place where individual people, because of these changes, not other changes, wouldn't necessarily be
102losing their employment. But, because of the way school budgets work, if you show that you have something open, that is a that is a knock against your budget. So, what we're trying to do here is get our funding formula to a place that it makes it so that there's a lot less vacancies that are showing up, that there's a lot less things that we're not actually doing. And then, it's only a million dollars on this slide, but the thing that we really build will be working on moving forward, is there's also a really big difference between general fund and grant funds. Grant funds are dollar in, dollar out by definition. But the good news about grant funds is that if you put a salary on a grant fund, that doesn't count against your general fund.
103So that way, if you move, it's still the same person still getting the same dollars, and they're all green, right? But the difference is that if it comes out of a general fund budget, that counts against us getting to that zero. If it comes out of grants, doesn't count. So what Kurt and the team has really tried to do is are there people that can be paid out of grants legally that would then help us with this? Are there jobs that are vacant that nobody's been in for a while? Can we close those down and save those money? And then with this, again, this is not actual class size caps, this is allocation. And for like the CTE, for instance, there was I think it was 30 ish with central There were 30 CTE FTEs
104that were being held at the district office. So if we could just push those towards the schools, that's not us losing teachers in a classroom, it's just us changing the way that we're formulating it so that the money is now going into the schools. I will say though, when we did run some of the CTE numbers, we saw class sizes of What was the lowest one? 2.31. >> Yeah. So we had some small class sizes, let's just say that. And so what we want to make sure of is we can't run classes of two kids, we can't run classes of four kids, but we want to make sure that kids have a robust education. If we start to have classes of let's say 10 or 15, we're still going to do our thing, but that's
105where the funding formula changes, not the cap size. It's about how we use the money. So, I know this doesn't always make a lot of sense, but the number I do want to highlight is that 35% reserve. That's our promise, right? That's us saying, "Look, we could have said it's all gone and all of this is happening, but we do know that there are things like breakage. We do know there are things like, "Oh, we're $5 away from something. We'll figure it out." But, we are estimating that we might need about 35% of breakage, meaning like, "Yeah, they really should have had the teacher. They were off by three kids. We'll give them the teacher. We'll we'll eat it." And that's how we're getting to this number. And again, there's a lot more slides to
106go through, but this is probably the slide that impacts the most people and the one that you're probably most interested to. But, Kurt, Just want to clarify one thing. The 30 that's a whole or a a phase of shock over here. Um the 30 FTE who are CTE teachers were allocated to schools, but outside of the bottle. So, in part, the reason that the 32:1 doesn't actually match what's actually happening in classrooms on average is because there are a number of things like that. CTE, some music teachers, some others that are outside of this model that that are allocated as schools. Back to the question of why Cascadia is KZ, I don't know the answer to either of those questions why that is the case, but that is the current case. Um Superintendent Childrener is
107um adamant that we were going to change the model for next year. So, for the 27-28 school year. Yeah. And clean up some of that. Yeah. Perfect. Director, we'll just go kind of this way. Director Anken, Thank you. Um so, on yeah, on this page, like a the 101, again given that these adjustments are not going to result in anyone's loss of employment, is either attrition and then we won't fill it, or positions that have been vacant that we're just going to say we don't have anymore. Um or a switch of a of of the the way it's allocated. Okay. Or an employee moving from one school to another. Right. Here the librarian here bad example. Here teacher here, your school's gotten smaller, you don't need that many teachers, now you're teacher at this other
108school. But that still that still wouldn't that wouldn't result in the savings cuz we're still paying that person. Yeah. >> Exactly. Right. Um so uh and a lot of this is making sense and some of what I'm going to ask is because of past experience. And um the way we're talking about it is different and I really appreciate that and I can't wait to I want to skip ahead right now to next to next year when we can actually talk about making a model that actually works to serve to serve students. Um but uh the um I can't remember if it was last year or the year before one of the um savings uh you know, that year trying to close a certain amount of deficit was to increase the secondary allocation by one. The
109result of that was suddenly kids had less access to electives and we had, you know, classes of 40 kids and not enough desks. Help me understand how this doesn't make that worse. And I do understand too that there's some classes with two kids, but like if there's a CTE class with two kids and Ballard has an algebra class with 40 kids, that that that's not necessarily going to Yeah. No, it's true. So, just so you know, the what what I try to do with my my days. So I had asked to be sent every high schools master schedule. And cuz I'm a dork, that's kind of what I do. And so that's it's true. It is true. It is my job, right? And so what we're seeing is even now things like an algebra class
110having lots and lots of kids and then an elective with seven kids in it. This change from 31 to 32 has nothing to do with that. What we have to do is start to have real conversations with high schools and everybody saying you can't run a class with seven kids. I mean, I'm sorry. And like it sucks and I love those classes, but we've got to be really clear about what is important and what we need to do and how can we be solvent? Do I want to get rid of any electives? Of course not. But if students are voting with their feet and you only have five kids signed up for the class you probably shouldn't have that class. And when you start to impact those things, you're not going to have 40 kids
111in your algebra one class or your biology class. You're going to start to bring it down. But this tweak from 31 to 32, that's not impacting it at all. It's going to be having really thoughtful conversations with schools and principals about what kind of rules are they using to open up a class. Okay, that's really helpful because I would say like that's the same similar conversation that we had the last time with an increase. And I unders- I understand that we're not actually talking about the number of kids in a classroom with one teacher. We're talking about adults to students in a building. And and different staff counts for different things with that. And that totally makes sense to me. And we had that conversation. And then the next fall we had classes with 40
112kids. And so, my assumption is because the conversation didn't happen at that point around master schedules and balancing and maybe saying, you know, we do need five sections of 10th grade history. We don't need underwater basket weaving. >> Thank you for >> just even though five people really want it, that's just we're just not going to offer it this year and that's just >> That's right. And that's why the district has to be more thoughtful and more supportive, especially >> Sorry, that's a joke of my dad's, underwater basket weaving. It's uh is that that's why we have to be more supportive of our high school principals, our counselors to help figure out how can we say, here are some rules of the road that we work with. I was talking to somebody yesterday and they
113looked at the schedule and they were like, oh my god, we have to get rid of music. And I said, don't touch the music. Let's say there's another way. And then of course we found that there were some other classes that were electives, people wanted it, but only seven people wanted it. And so this is where we have to make some hard decisions that I spoke about at the beginning. These aren't going to be easy, they're not going to be great, but it's a lot better than getting rid of a music program. You don't have to do that. But I will say if there is some wonderful, historic, amazing program that your school has loved for a generation and you have five kids in it, you are going to have to start thinking about shutting
114it down. Okay. And then related but slightly different um the uh Jen and I were at your visit at to two elementary schools the other day and so and then actually Vivi and I were talking on the phone about the intent of the legislature with the um 17 to one and right now what we're seeing is pretty reasonable um well supported K through three and then you go into a fourth grade classroom and it is wall to wall kids and desks. And a lot of you know, probably probably varies by people's ability to classroom manage and how many students are in the class, but um a lot of sitting and waiting for kids in fourth and fifth grade. Um and and Viviane and I were talking about we don't think it was the legislature's intent
115with that reduction that you just push stuff down to the K3 and sacrifice the 4-5. It's supposed to be additional resources to decrease those class sizes. So, is there something similar going on that we can balance because that's that's a different factor of like how many classrooms we can have in a in a elementary. So, how do we I mean, literally there was almost no one classroom we were in there was almost no room to walk around the desks in a fourth grade classroom. >> Yeah, I mean, and thank you to all of the board directors who have been visiting schools with me cuz I think when you see it with your own eyes, it's really really helpful. Um what we are seeing or what I am seeing on school number 38 now or whatever
116it is, is that there are some schools where fourth and fifth grade are pretty heavy. It's mainly because they haven't brought it's breakage cuz there's a lot of other schools where in fact the fourth and fifth grade have 12 kids in it. And so, yes. And so, this is why also when we start to go through school choice and we start to balance numbers, you're going to start to see. So, for instance, because we don't departmentalize fourth and fifth grade, one of the schools that we went to had one fourth grade class and they had one fourth grade class of like 30 and change. But that's because you can't break the 30 into two classes of 14 or whatever or that would be 28, I know my math. Is and so, they're deciding to keep
117that one large class. However, that's about do they have enough kids in the fourth grade at all. So, that's it's it's I wouldn't say it's anomalous, but it is what you were seeing at some and then the exact reverse is happening at others. And that's a decision that the schools are making that we need to help support them with. And that's where things like >> do with boundary change and >> Who knows, right? It could be boundary changes, it could be choice, it could be just the way that that one year happened. Like it's just and that's why to to show so I was just at a school, I was at Sacajawea. Running for school, talking to the parents. One of the things that school does is they do splits. So, they do a third
118fourth split or second third split. Another school that we went to that had all those fourth graders, they didn't do a split. They could have, but that was a decision that they're making. So, I don't think that the legislation is the reason why four and five are totally bananas. I think a lot of it has to do with how we as a district have our kids. And that's where we need to help those schools balance them. Yeah. Director Song. Um thank you for asking that question, Liza. I um I do think that there are kind of I don't know they're like real rules, but directions given to principals when they're developing their budget that because we're trying to chase that K3 ratio that that does put principals in a position where they have to make
119their four make your decisions around four five. And I would just say like I think we've all observed it that it there's, you know, Joe and my kids' school, there's a situation where because they were told you have to have the K3 ratio, um we've got a very large fourth grade class and a very small uh very small other grade class. And it's complex because the language part. So, I think that, you know, these are kind of like general staff assignment rules, but I think we really need to work with principals on their dynamic situation. >> 100% absolutely. I my question is so why was it in the originally in this WSS we had a lower ratio for CTE for high school like what what was the genesis of that? Do we know? I don't
120think we I don't know. No. Okay. We will definitely look into it and I will rarely say this anymore but way before my time. But I think we should know because I want to know what the history is. I will share that as a high school principal that was explained at times because of specific equipment so that if you were going to have a CAD lab at that time that was kind of the big thing that could only have this many workstations or that's how many it was allocated but that that was sort of the received wisdom was that it was because of you know if you were working with tools or other kinds of things that it was prohibitive around the amount of equipment or the safety of the equipment. Please keep going superintendent
121next section. >> Yeah, go to it Kurt. So this is less solid at this point in terms of specifics but just uh if you looked at the previous slide the total savings if all that came together in that way is around 9.5 million and that's the basis for school school sports is about a billion dollars so 9 and a half million out of a billion central office we're targeting about three times as much as a percentage between 8 and 15 million out of 300 million. So we had talked about some of this already Ben talked about some of the vacancies that have persisted so eliminating some of those as part of the the balancing the budget process we met this morning about that think that'll be within that 4 to 5 million dollar range by
122the time all is said and done. And then we're continuing to look for additional budget reductions or changes at Central Office between 4 and 10 million. Again, we're starting with the school process. Um that's underway. And now we're attacking the central budget central office process. Um the restructuring reorganizing John Stanford Center is a part of that. So when we get some more clarity on how the district will be organized, an input into reductions and changes at the district office. Um some of the ideas that we've come forward with that we're starting to estimate the numbers around are the district initiate some professional development at schools. And then some of that is during the school day when we have to pay for substitute teachers for those teachers who are getting professional development. Is there a different
123way to do that so that now we're in so that we're not incurring substitute costs? Um could we do that in a different way with those teachers is one question that the professional development team is looking into. There's only about 600,000 of the 1.3 billion dollar budget that's on travel, but making sure that everything that's unnecessary is still funded, but things that are optional are not funded. Similarly with consulting contracts, there are a few things the district has done. Um ERS did all the the work on the diagnostic. That was funded by outside funding, but there are some other things like that that happen at Seattle Public Schools. So eliminating or eliminating those. Um self-help an example of that is we sell computers when they're at end of life. We get some money for that.
124We use that to do other things. Can we use some of that to help balance the budget next year and do those other things with addition different monies? Um inter-district reimbursement, kids who come to the Seattle Public Schools for different purposes. You can get reimbursement from the other school districts for some of the costs you've incurred, so being more efficient in our process around that. Um culinary services changes, just thinking about the way we serve kids and what we serve kids and is there a more efficient way to do that? Marni and her team have been leaning into that heavily to try and figure out there's a better way to do food food services. It's a significant operation and so trying to find some efficiencies there. Um the furlough days for the non-represented staff um
125would persist in this scenario. And then I alluded to earlier, there was a budget that was supporting of the old strategic plan and it was about $7 million, $3 million of it was title funding, $3 million of it was lap funding and about 1.5 was general fund. And so re- re- orienting re- orienting that whole budget in different ways and trying to save that general fund savings to be more um in line with the current direction of Seattle Public Schools. So, these are just sort of the ideas that are happening right now. Um we're actively working through the details of all of that and we'll bring that forward when the time is right. Um And just uh just bring you into our days, cabinet was in a room, I think three floors directly above this,
126and we went through line by line. Do you need it? Yes or no? Let's cut. And so, you know, we're at right now around 8 million to 15 million. We do think we're going to probably add to it, but I do want to highlight what Kurt said. When you look at a percentage of the money we're saving from central versus schools, it's almost a three-for-one ratio and I only say that because that's what's right. If we're going to cut, where do you cut first? You cut central. That's the deal and it probably should be around two and a half to three times as much as a hit for central than it is for schools. Schools should always come last. Doesn't mean that they never get hit, but the fact is that right now we're running
127at around a 2.5 to 3% 300% ratio in terms of the hit to central is three times what the hit is to schools, and that's the right thing. And so, you know, though it pains me to continue furlough days cuz that means I don't get paid my full salary, that is the price that we we have to pay. My hope is that in a couple of years when we get to zero, we get rid of those and I can get my full salary. But more importantly that everybody else gets to get their full salary. But I do want to highlight this because, you know, we actually are taking a hit for the team, and that's the right thing to do. I don't want anybody to pat us on the back and say thanks. I just
128want to highlight that if folks understand that we are actually taking a hit because it is the right thing to do, and I thank everybody who is taking the hit. And that ratio of three to one, two and a half to one is the right ratio, and I am very appreciative of central office understanding that, and I'm certainly appreciative of the cabinet for literally making cuts just today, and these cuts will continue, and we will be more detailed once we can flesh them out. But the reason why they're not as completely fleshed out is we want we need to make sure we understand exactly which roles, which optional contracts. It's a little bit different cuz there's no formula for this, right? The formula is do you need it? Formula for schools is how many students
129do you have, how many programs, things like that. So. And then the next thing just is on a separate slide cuz there wasn't room on the first slide, and it's a little bit different anyway. And so this is just negotiating different arrangements with our bus vendors to capture some volume pricing discounts. And then looking into more routing efficiencies for next year. Um about 3.5 million, I think Marnie is what we're estimating on that at this time. This is just sort of the summary slide of where we're at. Um you'll see we've sorted it as we have previously into one-time solutions, so you'd expect a bar coming forward at some point in the spring around um the capital interest, uh the rainy day fund. Um this third thing there is a different thing. Um so there's
130a federal program if you do geothermal, solar solar type things in buildings, you get what they call tax credit. We don't pay taxes, so it's not a tax credit, but we get a check for doing those things if we document it in a certain way, send in the paperwork. We're anticipating potentially $5 million next year that we could apply to the the budget one time for next year um from that program. Um we've talked about this before. The interfund loan was not utilized, so the assumption in the original $87 million was we'd have to pay that back. This year we won't because we didn't use it. So it's another way of looking at we're saving that money towards the balanced budget. And then we're trying to get more ahead of um I think uh Director
131Mizrahi and Superintendent Sheldon were asking at the last meeting, where do we think we're going to land at the end of the year? Today the answer is between 10 and 20 million dollars. Again, lots of variables in play. Um there's a couple big bargaining um sessions that will happen between now and the end of the year. And so just wanted to foreshadow that we're anticipating that we'll have some of the money we used to balance this year's budget available to balance next year's budget. Doesn't mean we won't spend our fund balance this year, so that's the next thing. We will continue to eat into the fund balance, but um going forward the the plan is not to do that anymore to rebuild that rainy day fund. And then the last part of this is just
132summarizing the ongoing changes that we have previewed here. And so here's the good news. The good news is we were about a hundred million in the hole. We now think through one month of really hard work and trying to put kids and staff first, but knowing that we don't want to be insolvent and be taken over by the state, we think we're we're pretty close. I had my hope had been to be about -50. I think we've actually done a little bit better than that. It looks like we might be around -20-ish, but things can break different ways. If we get the two million because of the taxes, great. If we have a couple of more enrolled kids, terrific. If a roof falls, that's a different story, right? And so, we've got to make sure
133that we are really transparent and honest about this stuff, but the good news is we if if all things are going right, we're going to probably dip, you know, anywhere between I don't know, I'd say 10 to 20, maybe 25 into the fund balance. It's not our hope, right? But the good news is the changes we've done in the last month are relatively sustainable for now. With the hope that if we redo some of the large ticket things moving forward, we can actually get to zero. I never want to promise that we would get to zero this year. That is just not true. I don't think we will, but the fact is is that through all of this changes, we are saving a really significant money. I'm I mean, I always joke the only time
134I'm ever conservative is when I do school budgets. My politics are a little bit different, but, you know, if we're conservative when we're looking at about a 63-65 million on about an 87 million-dollar, you know, problem, that's about 22 million. For us to only dip into the fund balance by 22 million would be a huge win. Again, we're still down a hundred million as of today, but we're hoping that if we can do these changes, we're only down about 22, 25, but again, that's not sustainable because if we continue to do that, we go bankrupt. So, we can't promise or continue to do other things, but I think I really want to commend Kurt, Marty, everybody on central office. This is and really thank you to the staffs and the kids and the community because
135these are cuts, right? I'm not trying to sugarcoat it, but I think we're in a pretty good shape. We will see. We will see, but relatively okay. But, don't take my word for it, Kurt. What he said. >> There you go. All right. So. And then just here's a preview, so we'll continue to update the board as we get more information, and then hopefully um have the fi- the formal public meeting on the proposed budget in July and then approval in August. Um that's a little different timeline than we did the last couple years. It was June, July, and we're hoping for July and August from the board this year to give us a little more time to give you a full information. All right. Questions as Director Song. Um I have a question about
136the inner fund loan. So, does this mean that we're just done with it? It's not reflected in the 27-28 projections? We had built into this year paying back 16 million, which we're not going to pay back, and that was part of the 87 million. Mhm. So, that will save that 16 of the 87 in the balancing of the budget. We won't project anything in paying back for the 26-27 year because we don't have anything to pay back. >> Mhm. Does this uh Yeah, so this this is going to sunset after the >> we'll give it back to the fund and it won't impact the budget. And um but the even though we didn't use it, are we paying? Do we have to make an assumption around interest? >> We earned interest on it when it
137sat in the general fund. We'll give that interest back to the capital fund. We're required to do that. >> Oh, okay. >> But it was interest we wouldn't have earned otherwise cuz it was would have been over there. So, the net of this is really zero. Okay. Um I guess I'm a little confused there's other things that in this presentation where like it felt like that's a capital thing. So, why is it like the bus depreciation? Like why is that >> of the STARS formula. Um Oh, okay. And I have not interrogated completely the STARS formula since this change, but it's part of the STARS formula. Okay, yeah. It says on the STARS formula PDF that you need an advanced degree to understand that. Yeah. And I have too, but I haven't taken the time
138to study it. Other questions from directors? Sorry. On the bus question, I mean, is it meaningful that they're not our buses, right? So, it's not our capital. It's it they belong to another organization, but it still hits us as part of the STARS formula. They write us a check. The state writes us a check for this. >> to us. >> And it'll be a smaller check if they change the depreciation schedule. Director Mizrahi. I'm trying to find in the previous meeting what is our current projected fund balance for the end of this year. Do you know? I mean, it's something. >> I hesitate to Okay, well, I mean I have a lot of numbers in my head right now. Maybe it's not a question, but a little bit of a question. So, we're so we
139Okay, so whatever the projected is for the end of this year. And then maybe another 2025 that comes out of >> Our trend has been it's been reduced by about 31 in the last 3 years. With these reductions, we're anticipating it reducing by less than 31. >> Right. I guess my question would be is that something You're You're saying that that's not sustainable. Ben, is that something that we can't do that for another year, right? So, we have to get to a point where we're we're sort of putting ourselves on a on a on a trajectory where that 27 28 budget really has to not be dipping into the fund balance. Right. Okay. That's right. I mean, you know, when I getting here a month and 4 days ago, I wanted to be really kind
140of as as transparent as possible. There was no way that we would have enough time to actually balance the budget in 1 year, but I think we've made really good progress that next year we really have to cuz we can't go and continue to dip, but the good news is we're making good progress. The bad news is we're still negative and we can't really be negative for 2 years in a row cuz we ain't got the money in the bank. Unless Microsoft wants to just give us a billions of dollars. I'm just saying. So. And there's a legislative session intervening in there, too. So, that Cut. Cut. Which could cut both ways. Right. Right. That scares me. Right. So, this is why yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of variables at play. So, we have wrapped
141up the budget portion. I think Dr. Botelmann, Dr. Campbell for the presentation. We will continue I think some of the conversation in our new finance and audit committee, which is very exciting. I think some of this also some of the enrollment stuff hits in the in the operations committee. But, we're going to transition gears. We'll take a Is 5-minute break good enough? So, we'll be back. Joe would like a little bit more. So, we'll take a 10-minute break. We'll be back at 6:55 where we can go through and have our conversation kind of continuing from our retreat about our goals and guardrails because today was supposed to be uh, progress monitoring session, but from our conversation at our retreat. Don't want to steal Superintendent Sheldon nurse thunder here, but >> Steal it away. uh, some
142of the changes that we we we we we discussed and we wanted to move forward with. So, we're just reviewing that, making sure, and getting an update there. So, with that, I will see folks back at 6:55. >> All right, we're going to shorten our break here. I'm going to find other board directors cuz we have to be out of here by 7:30 tonight. I'll start calling directors back. Director LaValley. >> Want to go find director Moon? Those just returning. We're going to start now instead of later because we had to be out of here by 7:30. 7:30? Yes. That's why we're starting we're not having the full 10 minutes. We're having it at 7:30. We got it. We're We're done for the evening. >> Sorry, I thought you said nine. I'll be quick. Okay.
143I will pass it straight over to you, Superintendent Schuldner. Well, thank you. Well, good evening everyone. I think this is on. I really want to thank everybody for a really wonderful and robust conversation about budget. As you saw, one of the things that Kurt said was that we will try to do these updates a lot more. Um, and similarly I really appreciate um, the conversation around goals and guardrails and really progress monitoring. One of the things that boards really uh, always do, which I love, is really try to keep a pulse on how the district's doing. But, we thought it was appropriate for us to have this conversation because we had a wonderful retreat uh, when I first got here, which I really appreciated, and it was certainly a public meeting, but, you know, it
144was in a library of a school, and we kind of had a great conversation, but I'm not sure that everybody got to see it or hear about it, and we also have been been really want to be open about what is happening around kind of goals and guardrails. So, I want to I want to start Let's see. Is this working? Oh. Okay. Let's see. All right, magic. Okay. So, here we go. The first thing I want to do, and I want to be really clear about this, is I want to thank the board, and I want to thank the community. You have done so much work around goals, around guardrails, around trying to make the public understand what we're doing as a school district. Even when I was in Lansing, even when I was in
145Hunter, when I was a professor, the work that was happening here was really special, and I think that we have been, we mean SPS, have been maligned a little bit around those conversations, and I do want to thank everybody because if you have community and board working together around what we want to hold ourselves accountable to, that's really, really helpful. But, I want to also say, I think there's always a chance to have a conversation around ways to make them better, uh, and to tweak them to live in the moment, right? The reason why the Constitution is such a great document is it has the ability to make amendments. It has the ability to make changes. But we still keep the under grow the under kind of growth the the the undergirding of the of
146the document because the document is so good. So, here we go. What do I am appreciative for? It was a commitment to student outcomes, leadership wanted to raise academic rigor, a clear focus on equity, and strong accountability for superintendent. I'm one of those crazy superintendents that actually likes strong accountability cuz that is your job is to hold me accountable to doing my job. So, really thank you so much uh for this. Now, background on goals and guardrails. And of course, the board knows this really well, but this is really for the community, too. Why should we have goals in the first place? If we don't know what we're reaching for, how do we know if we've reached them? But it's also about holding me and the district accountable to making sure we know what we
147are valuing. What do we want to do? Where are goals? And I want to thank the board, of course, for the goals that we currently have because I think they're really good and really thoughtful goals. But I think we need to have a conversation about tweaking them so that they're even more robust uh than they are today. And then the second, of course, is why have guardrails? Guardrails, the theory, and it's a very smart theory, is hey, what are what are our non-negotiables? What are the things that we really care about that that you as superintendent and you as the district do? And this comes out of some really thoughtful work that's been around for really generations about saying the board should tell the leader, these are the things you really can't do or these
148are the things we really care about you doing, um and we want to be really supportive of of being clear about that. Now, in the business world, a lot of that is hey, try not to break the law. Hey, you know, use the money thoughtfully. In the school world, it's really saying, you got to put kids first. You got to make sure that teachers are taken care of and schools are taken care of. So, again, that's the background on goals and guardrails. But, now that, you know, we're here and it's 2026, I think there's some conversation we should have about rethinking. And again, we've had some of these conversations uh before. So, here are our district goals, right? We all know them, we love them. These are our district goals. The or maybe we don't
149love them. It's okay. So, second grade literacy. Why? Well, cuz literacy is super important, right? And the idea was we want to get it early, so we want to make sure that we hold kids accountable and really the adults accountable to doing the work. Terrific. Sixth grade math. Why? Well, we care about math, too, but we're not necessarily going to only do kind of younger kids. We want to make sure that we understand about sixth grade math. And then the last one, life-ready, which I kind of refer to as grad plus. Well, great. We don't care just about kids graduating from high school, we certainly care about them doing well in the world and maybe getting college credits and things like that. Great. So, that's our current world. That's where we are now. And then
150on the right-hand side, certainly I don't have to read them, but we've got district guardrails that are really saying, you know, the superintendent will not allow this, the superintendent will not allow this, the super And these are all good and important things. But, as we move forward, I think there's some thoughtful tweaks and really just questions that I want to bring to the board because it's now a perfect opportunity to think really critically about what we believe, we collectively uh believe is right for this district. So, here's the here's the current performance of the state of SPS. Across schools, and now I've gone to at least a third of the schools, if not more, we have deeply committed educators. The teachers are working hard, the staff is working hard, the principals are working hard. Everybody
151is really doing a good job. We have robust staffing. We have a lot of adults. We have a lot of people, a lot of volunteers, parents, teachers, administrators, you name it. They're there. There's a strong appreciation for you know, having leadership. We have curriculum. Principals really want alignment and clarity. And there's also kind of a lot of interest around things like enrollment and attendance. And so, the question of course is is this translating into outcomes? So, I've gone to more than a third of the schools. I've seen this. And of course, what's the most important question? Well, is it working? Well, the good answer is yes. In the aggregate, and I want to be clear here, in the aggregate, SPS is among the highest performing school systems on the entire West Coast. And we should
152be really proud about that. I don't think we get enough credit. Not that we need the credit, but I don't think we get enough credit for being really one of the highest performing districts in the West Coast. And here's the data. Little small, I apologize, but just know that number two, that's us. So, when you look at all of these school districts, you know, Bellevue, Everett, Portland, Oregon, San Diego, Long Beach, San Francisco, San Jose, Renton, you know, Tacoma, Kent, Sacramento, Fresno, Highline, Federal Way, that's around here, right? Sorry, I'm new. Oakland, you know, you Those are cities. And guess what? We're number two. I mean, we're coming for you, Bellevue, but like we're number two. That's amazing. And we should be really proud. And that's ELA. And guess what? That's math. We are number
153two on the West Coast. when you look at any of the big school districts in California, in Oregon, in Washington, that's us. And we should be really, really proud of that. However, that is not true when you look at different groups of students. That is the graph that should scare us. You can drive a truck through that. The top lines and the bottom lines. And so, these are the significant gaps that exist in third-grade literacy, race, poverty, multilingual status. Top, bottom, drive a truck through. To put it in perspective, though we are higher than most, we drop down from second to fifth on looking at grade third-grade literacy for low-income students. And if you remember, it was before my time, but Dr. Hart from the Council of Great City Schools, and I think the ERS
154folks had said that if you look at poverty is a pretty good indicator of how you're serving populations that have not been have been not served well. And if you look at this, we are not number two. We're number five. And you know who we're below? LA, San Diego, Long Beach. So, when we look at us as a district, we have to care about this. We And I highlight this because when we talk about what are the goals we want as a district, we want to be really clear about where we already are rocking it out, and where we are not, and making sure that you, as a board, hold me accountable as a superintendent to make some changes for our kids. Again, you can drive a truck through this. This is now math. So,
155English, math, gap, gap. I like visuals. And we're again number five. 1 2 3 4 5. Yes. Okay. So, ELA, we're fifth when you look at uh low income, math, we are fifth. I'm only using low income cuz the data is pretty clean. I can get access to it. The truth is also when you look at race, when you look at ELL, when you look at other things, we are middle of the pack. I'll get I'm happy to share whatever data you want. I only have a half an hour, so I don't want to go too deep. Um but really, what is this saying to us? This is saying, as a district, we are doing really, really well in the aggregate. Top two, right? I mean, you know, you look at all the big districts
156in California, all the big districts in Washington and Oregon, we are number two. And I mean, I clearly need to go visit Bellevue, but like, we are really doing well, but we're not necessarily for the kids. Um So, if our true north, as you've heard me say a lot, is how can we be the best urban school district in America, what does that require? Rigor. We need to have higher expectations of kids. We need to close gaps, have equitable outcomes. But here's the other thing. If you look at the goals, we're getting there. They're only academic. You should ask more of me. The board, the community wants more than just literacy in second grade, math in sixth grade, graduation plus. Now, again, I started off my slide by saying it's amazing work this board did.
157I'm not knocking this at all. I am thankful that you did this because you needed to, because you needed to say to the community, you know what, we care about board as a board, we care about these things. But, I am saying it's time to ask for more. And when I say that, what have I heard from the community? I've heard attendance. I've heard don't go bankrupt. I've heard families need to trust us and care about us and want to be here. And I've heard safety. So, again, this is a presentation. I'm not saying anything that like we are going to make this change. I just think in a public setting, because it's important for all of us to have this dialogue, is if we are rethinking how we're moving forward, for us to truly
158be the best urban school district in America, it might behoove us to talk about things like attendance. It might behoove us to talk about budget solvency, safety, family trust. So, some other things about the grad plus metric that I want to highlight, and I this is a little bit new data, which is awesome, is that if you just look at four-year graduation, it's dropped, which is not okay, and we will change that. But, it's at about 86.14% and then if you look at the current way that we were looking at grad plus, it was only 84.83%. So, there's not even a 2% differential between just regular graduation and our kind of life ready indicator. If we believe that we care about rigor, about students rising to higher expectations, we got to ask for more. And
159so here, again, I don't want to confuse anybody, these are just thoughts. What might a real grad plus goal look like? Not taking an AP class, but passing the test. Not taking an IB test, but passing the test. Not just doing the kind of yeah, I took an advanced class, but it really was a remedial for college, but I was on a college camp It's awesome, but is that really grad plus? And so if you run these numbers, we're only at around 59%. So rather than saying we're at 84 or something percent, if we really want to have these kind of high bars, it'll drop us down to about 59%. Now, one of the things that I do also want to point out is that when you go back I won't go all the way
160is if you remember our goals, our second grade goals, there was and again, I want to thank the board. The reason why second grade goals made sense was because you wanted to get there early. Absolutely. You wanted to hold people accountable to making sure that we got to to to getting the goals early. The problem is that right now, for second grade, the only thing you can use is MAP. You can't MAP is not really a good way to talk about really kind of high standards, especially for Washington. And then for all of you wonderful HC or, you know, applying HC families, you saw that MAP scores change even after a kid took the test. Why? Because there's these national samples and there's these percentile shifts and things change. How weird is it to know
161that your kid on one test might be one percentile, but because of a reshuffling, it changes. That's bizarro. SBA doesn't work that way, right? And so, one of the things that I'm just highlighting for the conversation is maybe we want to think about using something like SBA as one of the goals. And for us to do that, we might want to think about going to a third grade rather than second grade. Same thing with guardrails. I love guardrails because it's helping you tell me what you want me to do. The problem is the history, and again, and I thank the board for doing this. The history of guardrails was the CEO shall not. The superintendent shall not, which makes perfect sense. The CEO shall not steal money. The CEO shall not break the law. This
162the makes makes great sense. But, the way that the current ones are written is it's hard to prove a negative. I appreciate why we did it and when why they exist, but I would offer that it's possible that we could think about saying instead of the superintendent shall not the district led by the superintendent shall work towards offering equitable, work towards promoting. What Why do I say that? Because I want to prove to you that we are doing that. The issue with the superintendent shall not, well, I'm not perfect. There're going to be times where maybe things happen, and it's also about an interpretation of well, did this thing not do it or did do it? So, again, I'm not saying we have to do this. I'm just throwing it out there because I think
163it's a little bit of a new world. And not to say like I'm great or I can just say that I know I am different as a superintendent. And I want to be held accountable to being able to prove to you what I can do and what we can do. And so, again, this is just my kind of sharing with you, sharing with the community where I'm coming from. And so, these are some questions for the conversation. And again, happy to remain the way it is, happy to use what we have already, but in some respects, I think it would be awesome, which is crazy for me to say, but like, hold me accountable to more. But, I do want to be thoughtful about the way that the goals are written currently, which I think
164don't take into consideration our actual situation today. So, things to think about. Second to third grade for literacy, rather than second using third because of the SBA stuff, is a 10-point gain really accurate when we're already number two in the whole West Coast, and for us to do 10 points would be way I mean, nobody we would be so far out of the world. Now, you want me to do it? I will do my best, but I think it misses where we're not the best already, which is on things like closing the gap and and equity and things like that. And I would hate to say, "Well, you know what? We're already number two, but we but the board says we have to do this 10 point, and then we do all this stuff, and
165it doesn't actually necessarily close the gap, which is where we're not, you know, top in the in the West Coast, and I would say actually in the country." And then, what would it look like to actually increase rigor for graduates, rather than just that kind of grad plus, could we make it even more rigorous what that looks like? And then, again, cuz I'm asking for more work, what could we think about with non-academic goals? Is there a way to say safety and security, absences, attendance, extracurricular participation, budgets? I'm not trying to put words in the mouth of the board. I'm just saying that these are some thoughts that are possible that happen in other districts as well. So, again, it's important because I want to be very thoughtful that on the calendar before I became
166the superintendent, today was supposed to be a progress monitoring conversation. I didn't feel comfortable having that progress monitoring conference conversation because I didn't feel comfortable with what we were supposed to be monitoring yet because we hadn't had this conversation. So, with that, I want to kind of turn it over to President Top and certainly look forward to the conversation. And I just want I'm going to preface the conversation with a with question right towards you cuz I think we sort of had this conversation already at our retreat. We had this presentation. We went through a lot of these questions and I think my understanding was that we we essentially directed you to come back in 1 to 2 months with new goals and guardrails. Is that a correct understanding? >> If as long as the
167board is good with that, I wanted to make sure because it was on the calendar, I didn't want to take it off to look like we were hiding anything. I figured what a great conversation to have, but it is definitely my understanding that we had this conversation. There were some thoughts about this. I'd love I'm happy to hear more and then my hope is in the next, you know, month or two to present a kind of a draft. I didn't want necessarily the public to go, "Well, where did this come from?" And so, Yes. Yeah. No, I appreciate that. >> that and I think that that's that that needed to happen today. I also want to acknowledge that we'll likely see uh the an update from you at another progress monitoring because we have a
168calendar of progress monitoring on our schedule. We will be out of here at 7:30. So, I'm going to open it up for discussion, but we're going to have 10 minutes of discussion and then we're going to uh to wrap it up. So, be mindful. Start with Director Misrahi. I didn't know how that got up. I think it was up from before, but I do have I'll just say uh You were the first one, so >> Yeah. Well, see that's what when you have it up before the presentation even starts. Um, no, I'll just say the same thing that I said at the retreat cuz not a lot of people were there. Uh, one is that, you know, I hope that as you're going through the process of um looking First of all, very supportive of
169what you're saying and I think it's it's great for you to come in and present new ideas for goals and I like the idea of it being beyond just the academic goals. Um, but really to go back and look at all that great engagement that we did and I and I I think all that data should still be there. Yep. I think, you know, we built those goals around what we heard through, I don't know, Liza, what, 30, 40 sessions or whatever that we did with folks. A lot of uh community feedback and really good engagement and I think that that information should still be there and I think it will be very uh instructive for you to um go back and look at that. Um, and then the second thing is is also just
170very supportive of the rewording of the of the um guardrails just in a way that is more like plain language for people to understand. >> Yeah. Uh, Director Song. Um I am very supportive of of us adjusting the kind of the gap closing target. So, even just looking at this table of data when we're looking at the sixth grade math performance, something that kind of popped out to me is that for um I think this is for FRL students, right? So, LA made a good gain from 20 to 29% but we went the opposite direction. >> But if I look at the data for all of our students, that is not at all what's you would see. So, I think we really do need to have some goals around um gap closing. Um, I have
171long felt kind of like to be I don't know, honest, it's kind of like meh about our um life readiness goal because it doesn't comport with what feedback I'm getting from parents, which is my child graduated top of her class, but when she showed up to college, she was not ready. And so, um that's a problem. And so, I am look forward to us developing a goal that um actually does make sure that our students are ready for college. And again, thanks for sharing this information cuz I was kind of alarmed to see how low the percentage of our students who are passing IB tests. That's um really concerning. Um especially when I think about uh which schools have IB programs. Um and then finally, I love the idea of the non-academic goals because I
172also think it's a great way for um stakeholders beyond our school district to get engaged and supportive of our goals. Um so, these are things like extracurricular participation. That's like a fantastic way for us to engage kind of our broader community in safety and security certainly. So, um thank you. Director Smith. Um I want to say I want all of these things. Um so, I think there's that leads to my only concern is kind of like how do we whittle down to picking a manageable number. Um and I think I think Joey, you were referring to all of the data and engagement that's available. So, Yeah, I mean I'm I've already looked at some of it. I'm going to immerse myself in the data and you know, again, this is why I love these conversations
173is all I'll present a a draft. We'll get some feedback, but I appreciate sometimes I like my staff knows sometimes I just forget to eat. So, like I know that sometimes I'm asking too much of myself, but I think that they all are great and we will start to rank them. Yeah. Director Lavallee. Do you sleep? Very little. Um what I was my only small ask and obviously, we all talked about this during uh previous our our board retreat as well. Um and this is where pretty much unanimously came out as very interested in redoing these cuz no none of us were completely in love with them. But I'd love to see students with IEPs shown on this data as well. Just as as element of you know, I I did have that ask in
174a previous progress monitoring session and it's now been added in the appendixes and it's been wonderful and disheartening to see how our rates are for those students. Absolutely. So thank you so much and please sleep sometime. Thank you. Director Rankin. Don't sleep. Get everything perfect. Um so I am very interested in revisiting the goals. I want to be totally frank that I don't think any of us were 100% satisfied. That was kind of what we could get. And and and and certainly is not the when we when we engage with community, the the kind of unifying message that came out of all these different places and was again reinforced during the search firm about what do you want in a superintendent? Very much aligned what the Seattle community envisions is a public school system where
175every student regardless of race, neighborhood, home language, ability, or income thrives in a high-quality public school. That that's what they want and they want students to graduate from that being ready to take on whatever it is they want to do next. That is certainly not reflected in a second grade reading score, a sixth grade math score, or our how many classes do you take? We had the same thing like well, if they don't pass it, how do we know that they're ready? And so you know, multiple things are true at the same time. Some of the stuff is hard to quantify. How do we when when we only have guaranteed access to students until they graduate, we we can't I mean, we could try, but we can't necessarily go out and ask 5 years post-graduation
176and get a you know, I mean, we yeah, we could try. It is probably possible in some ways, but did your education adequately prepare you? Yes or no. Are you doing what you wanted? And so, we struggled a lot in making these goals. Ideally, a school district should have one. To prepare students to have good lives. That's it. Um I I do kind of hesitate I like I actually I think the idea of being the best school district in the urban school district in the country is kind of exciting, but that's very subjective. And so, if we mean best meaning we're number one in all of these things, we could do that and still leave a whole lot of students behind. So, and if we mean best by we have all of these options for
177all of these kids who are going to be pretty successful anyway, that's also not really best. So, I think that's like a a a It's like a fun thing for for you to say and something that I think when you're out there, people want to get engaged on, but for for me as a board member and us as a board being responsible for representing what our community wants, I never heard anybody say what I want from Seattle Public Schools is for it to be the best urban school district in the country. I think a lot in a lot of ways Seattle doesn't even think of itself as an urban school district, which is the whole other thing. But, what they want is a a great place for kids to have their lives improved. And so,
178I am totally with you that our current goals like really don't they don't reflect that. Um I am really opposed though to operational goals. I think if we have those, they should exist beneath the outcome goal because we don't exist here like having a balanced budget is a necessary component to us improving outcomes for children. But we could have a balanced budget and super happy parents and we could have attendance improve and not change anything on that gap. And so for me, the the the top line outcome goal for us as a board needs to going to a budget goal or something else is actually for me a lowering of standards. Is saying like doesn't really matter that much if kids are successful or not or if the trajectory for these students change because look,
179our transportation is is really working out. That that to me is a lowering of of of standards and um and so and there are also so many different ways that we already see and evaluate We already expect you to pass a balanced budget. That's an annual requirement. So setting a goal to do that is we already do that and it's our job to make sure that the budget you present to us aligns with what we're trying to do for kids which is all we're trying to do is pass a balanced budget, we're done. But we're trying to do much more than that. So that's I mean that's I don't know if that's just a I'm not sure. But so so goals, yes. Um and I'm interested in talking about how we would measure that more
180and again, we struggled to get some kind of a meaningful way to indicate that. I think the successful completion is a good one. Um but the most important thing is that all children can be successful. That's really what people want is knowing that when you leave public schools, you're ready to have a a good life as an adult. Um The guardrail is uh that is I'm going to I want to get to end. So Just Closing it Yeah. So, the guardrail things I understand. So, going from constraints to commitments in a system where the state is already telling us here's all the things you need to do. Our representation of what is important to our community is in while you're doing all those things don't do these things. I'm I'm nervous about adding more like
181also do these things and also have these commitments and good intentions. We all have really good intentions. How do we how would we actually monitor whether or not those are intentions are being or having impact. So, that's my my question about the guardrails. And and I would also just offer that we already have 0010 and 0030 in our governing policies which are essentially a Hang on. Hang on. A vision statement and a value statement that we should think about looking back into those things that we already have about how they could do these things. All right. Vice President Briggs, you have 2 minutes. I'm going to talk quick. Um first of all, I I really just have to say that I think it's bonkers that um you can have a 65% proficiency rate and be
182the number one school. Like I just just needed to say that. Um Whatever. Uh that's not my main point. Uh I think what what I obviously I'm very supportive of you proceeding um as I said at the uh retreat. But what what I something that I learned um early on in my 10 years as a school board member was about a school district in Texas that um set one goal of having every single student um what what graduate with an with a associate's degree. Obviously, this was a a smaller district. Um but but that goal required them to reverse engineer all the way back to pre-K. And I just really latched onto that um because I think that the danger, and this is kind of getting a little bit into Liza's point about having operational
183goals, is that if we spread ourselves really thin, we have all these different goals, then when we're not going to actually accomplish them. Um so, I I really loved the idea of setting some like really high pie-in-the-sky goal, and I think you can make a pretty good argument that having all of our students graduate hypothetically with a an associate's degree is like a great start out of the gate from high school. Um and that can't happen if all these other things haven't been cascaded through the entire system. And I I that's kind of how I feel about the operational goals, too. It's sort of like these things will necessarily have to occur in order for us to reach these academic goals. Um and and so, I I just worry a little bit about um losing
184focus to yeah, to Liza's point. Um but but I I I fully support you coming back to us with a new vision. Director Smith. I'll try to be quick here. Um so, just on the topic of I'm I'm kind of are the operational goals the all of the non-academic ones? Because I do want to push back on that a little bit at least for um extracurricular participation. The post-grad success is really hard to measure, but I think um and and this is just an example, but I'm pretty sure there's research that shows participation in ex- extracurriculars, you know, leads to more success after graduation. So, that's an example of something that we could use as a proxy for that future success. And I think it also aligns with like we want our students to be
185enriched beyond just academic achievement. And I also want to say that the guardrails being framed as the baseline of like this is the starting point for everything and then the goals are like what we're striving for. I think that that's a good distinction that kind of loosens us up from the negative versus positive statements. I strongly agree with you Director Smith on on on both your points that you made. We are going to wrap up now since we have two minutes. So thank you Superintendent Schuldiner. Thank you for kind of continuing our conversation that we really started at the retreat on goals and guardrails. But we will our next board meeting is on March 11th. We will talk about superintendent evaluation. We'll talk about board self-evaluation and then in April we will start student presentations
186at our board meetings as well. So as there's no further business on the agenda the meeting stands adjourned at 7:28. Thank you everyone.