The overcrowding issue at the Queen Anne/Magnolia cluster of schools, and the cluster to the northeast, has become priority one among Seattle Schools board members in the past few weeks.
Last Wednesday, the board met to discuss solutions to overcrowding at Catharine Blaine K-8, Lawton Elementary, Coe Elementary and John Hay Elementary. Lawton, for example, has added two additional kindergarten classes to fulfill the growing number of students. Yet it has maintained the number of first-grade classes. The school is using all of its classroom space now and cannot add more first grade classes. And there is no room on school property for portables - which is also the case at Coe and John Hay.
"The net result is that we're short classrooms for the cluster of Queen Anne and Magnolia," said school board member Michael DeBell who oversees the Queen Anne/Magnolia cluster. "The best estimate is we'll be short four to six classrooms total for next fall. Ideally if we could add one or two classrooms per school it would solve the problem."
DeBell pointed out four potential solutions that are being discussed among board members:
Add portables and interior walls to Blaine to add classroom capacity
Reconfigure Blaine from K-8 to K-5 and move Blaine sixth graders to McClure Middle School in Queen Anne
Reopen Magnolia School at a potential cost of $20 million
Relocate the Secondary Bilingual Orientation Program from Old John Hay and create a new K-5 school with a capacity of about 400
DeBell said most parents put their kids in Blaine because they like the K-8 structure. That certainly is the case with Amy Smith-Jammes, a Magnolia parent with a second-grader and a fourth-grader at Blaine and a third who will attend in the 2010-11 school year. Smith-Jammes told board members last week that she's not happy with the idea of converting Blaine into a K-5.
"One of the reasons why I chose Blaine was because it is a K-8," she said.
Smith-Jammes was disappointed about the whole issue, found it "shocking" that the district likely knew about the surge in students some time ago. "They have demographers whose job it is to keep track of these things," she added.
The McClure options are sticky, DeBell said, because in four years, when entry-level kids reach sixth grade, there won't be enough seats at McClure. "So we don't want to change Blaine one way and then have to change it back another way to meet demand."
Seattle Schools also doesn't have $20 million to bring Magnolia School up to 2008 building codes. Even if the money were to be raised through another capital levy, the building wouldn't come online in time to meet the current classroom needs.
Other options include relocating the Secondary Bilingual Orientation Program to South Seattle and adding BF Day Elementary School in Fremont to the Queen Anne/Magnolia cluster. That school has 100 empty seats and could be a quick fix. But DeBell said parents aren't really thrilled about any of the options because they tend to impact one school or another quite a bit.
Smith-Jammes though is OK with the BF Day option. She said Queen Anne kids attending Blaine would likely be bussed to BF Day because it made the most geographical sense. She would also be OK with adding portables and walls to Blaine but with conditions: "As long as there are additional resources: money, teachers, support staff and that it was part of a long term plan," she said.
She also proposed the idea of overloading kindergarten classes at Blaine as long as an instructional assistant was added per class. She said that way, building walls and adding portables wouldn't be necessary.
Parents of Blaine students will meet about the overcrowding issue at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 23, at the Catharine Blaine library.
Next Wednesday, Oct. 29, the Seattle Schools board will have a special public meeting to introduce and further discuss some of the solutions. Then, at the Nov. 12 meeting, the seven members of the board will vote on a proposal.[[In-content Ad]]
