Community protests proposed school closures

At last week’s school board meeting for Seattle Public Schools, directors and district staff got an earful from a crowd of community members who showed up in support of our public schools and to express their concerns over the proposed school closures. The school board was considering the two proposed plans that close 21 or 17 elementary schools but only close about one third of the current budget deficit.

At the urging of online chat groups and the districtwide advocacy group All Together Seattle Schools, approximately 350 people showed up to make themselves heard. This powerful group included students and family members, education advocates, district employees, and local politicians. They gathered ahead of Wednesday afternoon’s regularly scheduled board meeting and protested for the better part of an hour.

When the meeting was coming to order, protesters filed into the John Stanford Center for Educational Excellence.

In addition to being the heart of their neighborhood ecosystems, some of the schools on the closure list house some of the most diverse, unique, and sought-after programs in the district. The first plan closes all of the elementary option schools in the district and the second plan closes most of the option schools, but leaves one K-8 school in each of the city’s five zones. Both plans close the Dual Language Immersion programs where students spend half of their day learning in another language, the highly capable cohorts where students learn advanced material in a group of their peers, the Deaf and Hard of Hearing program where the entire school is learning sign language to communicate with their classmates, and locations that house the special education programs for the most medically fragile students in the district.

SPS claims that these students will be dispersed to their nearest neighborhood schools and offered services there. Many families would prefer that their children remain at the schools where they have developed relationships and made educational progress. Based on past broken promises, other families are convinced that SPS will not be able to deliver these services at each of the neighborhood schools. Note- there were no interpreters available at this meeting that discussed the fate of dual language learning and the deaf and hard of hearing program.

In a statement on their website, All Together Seattle Schools said, “School closures have been proven to harm student learning and devastate communities. Seattle doesn’t want a bunch of cookie cutter schools that treat kids like widgets.” 

More information on school advocacy efforts at www.alltogetherforseattleschools.org