Seattle schools with low enrollment may close

By Sanjay Bhatt
Seattle Times staff reporter

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Closing schools with low enrollment, and perhaps changing the way the district supports schools with the neediest students, could stabilize its finances, channel more money to classrooms and ensure a more equitable distribution of resources to disadvantaged students, backers of such a plan say.

To bring enrollment into line with building space, some officials say as many as 11 elementary schools may close. But that figure will remain tentative until the district solicits public feedback over the next few months and discusses what academic program it should offer.

The debate, sure to be fierce and emotional, will shape a five-year district plan that Superintendent Raj Manhas will recommend to the board in October.

The expense of operating schools with excess capacity "is killing us," Manhas said at a work session last month.

	School Board President Mary Bass

Seattle hasn't closed a school since the late 1980s. The district has closed 42 buildings and reopened 14 since 1970. Enrollment has fallen from 86,000 students in 117 schools in 1970 to 47,000 students in 100 schools today, officials say.

"Teaching every child to the level we expect them to learn and then closing the achievement gap, that is what should drive it," Manhas said at the work session. Later, he said, "we need more resources for those kids who need help, and that is the equity issue, and so where are those resources going to come from?"

Probably not from the state Legislature, he said. Seattle's enrollment will likely remain the same until at least 2025, even as its fixed operating costs — for staff members, buildings and buses — keep growing. And so Manhas is focusing on a way to lower the fixed costs, particularly on schools with "excess capacity" — more open seats than enrolled students — and the district's $26 million annual bill for student transportation.

In Issaquah and Renton, where elementary-school populations are growing, the districts have built schools with capacity for 500 to 550 students. Seattle's funding formula encourages elementary schools as small as 250 students.

And Seattle generally operates smaller high schools than other urban districts in the state, such as Tacoma and Spokane.

Closing one elementary school in Seattle would save about $388,000 per year, a middle school about $902,000 per year, and a high school about $1.2 million a year, district records show.

A student-funding committee made up of district executives, principals and teachers-union leaders has been discussing the possible changes since last October, when a $10 million budget deficit was forecast for the 2004-05 school year. Even with deep cuts in central budgets, the district recently said it still is facing a $2.39 million shortfall.

"Many members feel that the elephant in the room is small schools," according to minutes from the committee's October meeting. "We have allowed outside dollars to influence the creation of small schools, which are not sustainable without those dollars. Strings come with outside dollars. These strings are driving policy rather than the Board driving policy. We may be cutting important programs when we should really be looking at long-term school closures."

The outside dollars include grants like those from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which aren't permanent. Many schools next year must jettison staff members as grants diminish.

The student-funding committee recommended to Manhas in December that the district "resize to fit current enrollment," reinvest dollars now spent on overhead in academic programs and "examine costs associated with and alternatives to our current Choice plan," which pays for secondary students' transportation to the school of their choice.

Some changes already are under way. Next year's proposed budget, which continues to be fine-tuned, would relegate the Seahawks Academy, a Central Area middle school with 37 students — the smallest enrollment of any school in the district — to the status of a program, move it from a leased site into a school and eliminate the principal's job.

"Schools within schools can be successful," said Seahawks Academy Principal Terrance Mims. "It's going to be contingent on the leadership that makes it work."

A staff analysis last month showed that the district had between 2,571 and 6,469 excess seats in its elementary schools, with the greatest gap between enrollment and capacity in the North End and Central Area.

Middle schools are underenrolled across the district, except in the Southeast region. Several high schools also have extra seats. Cleveland, Chief Sealth and Rainier Beach fall into this category because of low demand from students. Rainier Beach has the largest gap — room for 1,212 students, yet only 601 students enrolled.

But other schools have set artificial lids on their capacity by requesting fewer students than their buildings can accommodate.

For example, Nathan Hale High School has space for 1,486 students and requested only 1,040 students in 2004-05. West Seattle High has room for 1,400 students, yet requested only 1,180. Ingraham has capacity for 1,373 students yet asked for 1,198. Roosevelt has space for 154 more students than it enrolls.

Deciding which schools can set a lid on enrollment and which can't is "a concern for the board, quite frankly," said School Board president Mary Bass. She noted that schools in well-off neighborhoods can supplement budgets with thousands of dollars in private donations, whereas schools in poorer areas can't.

Board member Dick Lilly is "absolutely" opposed to closing any schools. But "I suspect that's where the majority of the board members want to go," he said.

Lilly and board member Irene Stewart think the district's enrollment could grow to fill some of the roughly 6,000 excess seats districtwide. The excess space in elementary schools also could be used to provide quality child-care programs, Stewart said.

"We know that kindergarten readiness is a really big factor in the success of students," she said. "First and foremost, I want to increase market share and get all of our kids into public schools, where I think they belong."

Closing schools and consolidating students in larger schools would create "a false economy," Lilly said.

The district would be making it harder to deliver a good education, would be undermining community cohesion, and would lose the good will of taxpayers who approved two school levies in February by a wide margin, he said.

And that could jeopardize the city's Families and Education Levy, which pays for after-school programs and family-support services, and likely will be on the ballot in the fall.

Rather than close schools, Lilly said he would prefer that the district add sixth grade at the elementary level, which would fill some of the excess space and create more desirable class sizes in middle schools, he said.

Another alternative would be to assign students to their closest neighborhood school, thereby reducing busing, and then reinvest the savings into academic programs in underenrolled, low-performing schools, Lilly said.

"Reducing busing gores everyone's ox, while closing a few schools affects only some neighborhoods," Lilly said.

John Vacchiery, director of facilities, said administrations in the 1980s didn't build schools in the South End because it was assumed mandatory busing would continue indefinitely. Thousands of South End and Central Area students, most minorities, were bused to mostly white schools north of the Ship Canal. White students in the North End weren't bused south on the same scale because there wasn't room in schools.

Board member Darlene Flynn said the School Board must take this history into account as it crafts the district's long-term strategy.

"Because these are the kinds of things that come together in an institutional way and keep us from serving populations that have been left out for the last several decades, while we're spreading the money thinner and thinner and thinner," Flynn said.

Later, she said, "It is a national history. ... It is what Brown v. the Board of Education was attempting to fix, and we only found other ways as a society to get around it, unfortunately. So here we are again, really dealing with the same thing, quite ironically, 50 years later."

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com

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