This is an open letter to the SPS Leadership, Board, City council, and many newspapers citing the blatant anti-asian bias that has gone unnoticed and unboosted by the school district and a the advocacy community for multiple weeks no.
If you can miss this, you likely need to re-check you connection to the city. If you can be aware of this and NOT boost it, you need to stop using the word equity -- you no longer deserve to use the word equity as your prioritization is backwards.
Here are graphs showing the demographic impact of the 2024 Well-Resourced Schools closure plans.
When evaluating, make sure to look at each closure region individually, or in sensible clusters like NW+NE. You will see some very disturbing trends of various demographics ( in particular Asians) being targeted.
There is a long walk through part of the interpretation of the data in this medium post.
2024 SPS Classroom Size Survey Results
Click here for survey Results in spreadsheet
I lightly scrubbed anecdotes of obviously personally identifying info and normalized school names.
Ran out of time for doing any analysis, but to read this data, you should look for trends within a grade since multiple people might report on the same grade with different numbers.
Things that leapt out:
* Cascadia is very overenrolled (duh)
* District did backfill staff in June to fix at least one school, but did not sufficiently add staff in others.
* Option schools knew of their enrollment issues EARLY in the year
* Option schools are systemically under-enrolled this year even though most years they are full.
* That indicates to me that only a few specific schools are unexpected enrollment this issues.
Education Stabilization Fund Audit report (pdf excerpt)
Edward Lin found pages 212 to 217 of the State Auditor's Financial Statements and Federal Single Audit Report that notes the state improperly lowered funding to K-12 education by nearly 2-billion dollars in 2023. The SPS portion of this is probably enough to close most of the budget gap. Key redux is in the "Description of Condition" paragraph which is copied below:
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.
This would likely avoiding the need to consider consolidations and other drastic service changes! And it also means there *WAS* an extremely large lowering of allocation to schools in the last few years.
Recent updates:
New SPS Elementary + K-8 Closure tool by Andy Cooper!
He did the Start Times Explortation tool that showed the possible economic impact on families. This one lets you evaluate a school on many dimensions (including historical redlining data) and then find other schools that are similar. Very cool!
