Not sure why it should be so surprising that the school district serving the largest, most expensive city in the state would be building some of the state's largest, most expensive schools, especially at a time when it is in the midst of an over-enrollment crisis. Do the math.

But what really jumped out at me from the article was this little political tidbit:

The proposal comes as lawmakers are once again debating how to better fund the public-school system. Senate Majority Leader Rodney Tom has said school districts should focus less on construction and more on what takes place inside the buildings.

Um... actually, it is Rodney Tom who should be focused less on construction and more on what takes place inside the buildings, since it is funding the latter that is the state's paramount duty. As for local school construction levies, that's really none of his fucking business. I mean, it's not like we could use that money to pay for teachers or anything, because the state caps how much we can raise from our operations levy, and Seattle pretty much always maxes out that capacity. So what we spend on construction has nearly zero impact on the money available to run our schools.

I can only assume that Tom understands this, and so his conflation of capital levies with operations funding was an intentional effort to mislead.