Education Stabilization Fund Audit report
This is an excerpt of pages 212 to 217 of the State Auditor's Financial Statements and Federal Single Audit Report (1393 pages!). The key redux is in the "Description of Conditon" paragraph here:
The Office did not perform the calculations required to monitor the level of effort requirements
for the ESF program during fiscal year 2023. After the year was over, the Office determined that
the fiscal year 2023 expenditures did not meet the level of effort requirement.
When compared to overall state spending, the average amount of state spending on elementary and
secondary education for fiscal years 2017, 2018 and 2019 totaled 49.35 percent of the state’s
budget. The state was required to spend at least this percentage toward education in fiscal year
2023. However, the state only expended 42.99 percent of total state spending on education,
meaning the level of effort requirement was not met by about 6.36 percent, or $2,103,004,922.
The SPS portion of that 2B is large enough to cover a significant chunk of the budget shortfall.
Somewhere late on Sept 8, 2022, 2 days into the 2022 Teacher Strike, a user made a post on /r/Seattle politics claiming to have detatils notes from an hour long phone conversation Director Hampson allegedly made in response to being emailed.
It is noteworthy because one of the largest cited gaps was the changes to the bargaining agreement proposed by SPS to how Special Education staffing should be handled. Yet, until this point, there had been previously almost no information from SPS Administraton or SPS board explaining why they this was such a large sticking point.
It remained up for some time and gained a number of comments, but by midday Sept 9, 2022 it was taken down. This gives a large information advantage for people who happened to be online to read it.
This seems a little unfair so here is a copy of the reddit page from the morning of Sept 9th. It has been editted slightly to delete ads and some account info but the text and content is unchanged. Note the original reddit link still has the comment threads.