After months of speculation, it's official: Martin Luther King (MLK) Elementary School is targeted for closure after the 2005-06 school year.
MLK joined nine other Seattle public schools on a list of recommended closures as part of a cost-cutting and restructuring plan proposed by Superintendent Raj Manhas.
School principal Barry Dorsey, however, wants everyone to know that there's still time to save the school.
"We're trying to get the word out there," Dorsey said at recent community meeting. "This is not over."
Uncertain situation
Besides the fact that the current closure plan is only preliminary and subject to change, it still faces an uncertain school-board vote in July before becoming official.
MLK also has a specific hedge against closure that few people know about: a promise from the district related to the current effort to bring a Montessori program to the school.
"If your community is successful in recruiting an adequate number of students to participate in a Montessori program, we will reconsider the recommendation to close MLK," stated district chief academic officer Steve Wilson in a memo sent to Dorsey on April 21.
The memo was not all good news, however. It also indicated that even if Dorsey's group is successful in attracting enough students to the new program, the school could still close due to other considerations, and the student population moved to Madrona K-8 School, 1121 33rd Ave.
To at least keep the hope of the school's survival alive, Dorsey said that his group needs to continue moving forward in its effort to establish a Montessori program at the school.
"I do think that we have a chance," Dorsey said. "There is a lot of passion connected to Martin Luther King Elementary school - there just is. So many people have come through this program."
Grass-roots efforts
Dorsey's group has been relying on that passion since the first meeting last spring to find remedies for the school's shrinking enrollment. From those early meetings Montessori was chosen as the best option.
The school received conditional approval for the program - which would bring 150 new students into the school over the next three years - in March. If it can meet the benchmarks established in that conditional approval, the first of which is to have 25 students enrolled in the program by June 15 (extended from Sunday, May 1), full approval would be granted.
Dorsey and school supporters have been working hard to make that happen. The grass-roots effort has involved several community meetings, taking prospective parents on a tour of the Montessori program at Daniel Bagley Elementary School in North Seattle (which, incidentally, is also on the list of recommended closures), placing ads in local newspapers and sending mailings to the local community to recruit potential students.
This month a new mailing effort will target specific preschools and Montessori programs in the area. The school has received marketing and financial support in this campaign from Macy's, which also sponsors a tutoring program at the school.
This is an important month for the campaign, Dorsey said, and efforts are increasing accordingly. Soon, a banner heralding the program will fly on the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way East and East Madison Street, and a spaghetti dinner at the school on May 12 at 6 p.m. will give community members a chance to learn more about the proposed program.
The final event this month is an assembly at the school on May 27, featuring National Public Radio commentator Willie Weir, who will discuss the Safe Routes to School program, which promotes alternatives to busing at neighborhood schools.
The MLK group hopes to tie this concept in with its promotion of the Montessori program and its effort to save the school as a neighborhood asset.
"We've got to get the community behind this thing," Dorsey said. "The most powerful thing for us is people telling people."
Undoing the damage
But first, Dorsey said, they have to undo the damage done by the announcement of the superintendent's proposed school closure list.
"That just takes our recruiting and pretty much destroys it," Dorsey said. "We have to start all over again."
And perhaps this time with one less prized recruit.
Central Area resident Andre Helmstetter and his wife have enrolled their 5-year-old daughter in the MLK Montessori program for next fall, despite the fact that they are happy with the current private school she now attends as a preschooler.
Helmstetter said feels it is important to support a non-traditional public-school program. He credits his public-school teachers for who he has become and feels it is important to give back to public education.
However, he said it has been difficult to find a public-school program near his family's home that he and his wife both like. That is, until the Montessori program at MLK came along.
"I see it as an opportunity as a parent to come in and have an impact on how the school grows," Helm-stetter said.
He said they need to decide by the end of May, but the uncertainty of the situation and the possibility of a King closure make it likely that they will keep their daughter in the private school.
If they choose MLK and it closes or the Montessori program fails to materialize, even at Madrona, his options for his daughter would be limited, he said.
"If what they're trying to do is increase public-school enrollment in this area, that definitely was not the thing to do," Helmstetter said. "I think closing schools down that are doing interesting programs drives parents back to private schools."
Helmstetter said that if the MLK Montessori program is not implemented, he and his wife hope that by the time their 5-month-old daughter is of school age, Seattle Public Schools will be an option.
"It would be really nice to see the kind of school we would like," Helmstetter said.
District spokesman Peter Daniels said that staffs at the district enrollment centers have been instructed to continue to make the new Montessori option available to all prospective parents.
"We're keeping all options open," Daniels said. "We certainly don't want to discourage anyone."[[In-content Ad]]
