In the Seattle School District, one step forward, two pratfalls back

The Seattle School District has a less-than-stellar reputation, aspects of it unearned, but the reality is, it will never truly shine if it continues to falter on the little things.

Exhibit A is the student-enrollment process. It is a convoluted system designed for a straightforward task — assigning students to schools. Names, addresses and school choice are entered into a computer program. Out spits a Byzantine process parents citywide have learned to dread.

Now comes news that a much-anticipated revamping of this torturous system will be delayed because the district's antiquated software can't handle input coming from the 21st century.

Embarrassing, any way you look at it.

One of the nation's most affluent, high-tech cities with a school district using the equivalent of Betamax. A computer so obsolete that a model is on view as a museum piece at the University of Washington.

For those hoping changes in the student-assignment plan would give them a better chance at gaming the uneven system, this is depressing news.

I've been patiently waiting for the still relatively new School Board and superintendent to get the lay of the land. Better to have lasting policy than short-lived plans made in haste. Overhauling the assignment mechanism offered a chance to make a large-scale shift. Instead, it is one step forward, two pratfalls back.

In other daunting news, the district's head of technology has left, taking "80 percent of the institutional memory" with her, officials announced. Let me get this straight: City families are left with ancient computers operated by a staff possessing only 20 percent of the knowledge they need?

I'm a Luddite — I'm still marveling over high-definition television and my husband is eyeing blu-ray technology — but even I know enough to get nervous about all of this.

Rubbing salt in the wound is the discovery that district staffers, realizing six years ago that the software system was worthy of an appearance on "Antique Roadshow," began moving important tasks to other systems. Payroll was moved, but not the program used to assign students to schools.

Oh well, as long as the adults get paid.

And that begs the question: How can parents expect the district to prepare their Pookins for Carnegie-Mellon if they can't get him or her down the street to school? Many parents have accepted that the district cannot. And so they make fretful choices of private education or leaving for other districts that appear more consistent and on top of things.

This latest fiasco has an air of familiarity to it. Former superintendent Joseph Olchefske was riding high when he was brought down by two computers that didn't "talk" to each other and thus failed to inform staff that the district had overspent by $34 million.

Perhaps instead of another round of grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the district ought to receive a team of programmers from Microsoft. Lock the egos in a room with free sodas, foosball tables and promises of patent rights and you can just about guarantee success.

A sense of urgency rides on this. Tackling student enrollment and school assignment is critical. Demographers gave a presentation recently to the School Board and it proved what most of us already suspected: the size of Seattle families is flattening. Enrollment growth is occurring north of the Ship Canal. Attention and resources have to turn north, even as they remain necessary in the city's South End.

It isn't an either-or situation. School-improvement plans, equity goals and other efforts to make schools more desirable are correctly targeted at South End schools. Attention in that region has been spotty and uneven. But the opportunity to grow enrollment and recapture rising private- and parochial-school enrollment exists northward.

District demographers put the percentage of Seattle families sending their children to private schools at 19 percent. That is a low estimate. Either way, the national average is 11 percent and Seattle's is much higher. The math is telling.

Change came to the School Board, so it ought to permeate the warren of offices at district headquarters. The district cannot continue to be hobbled by avoidable mistakes like failing for years to address an aging computer system.

From Olchefske, to Raj Manhas, now to Maria Goodloe-Johnson, superintendents have come to this city pledging to change the culture. Three administrations later, the rhetoric of the district is still at odds with the reality.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com