"The main reason we acted today is that the teachers who were cut today serve mostly students of color and lower income students," Powers said. "Those kids lost those programs."

Wrong. Not one student lost any program. Notice how they pointed out the gym teacher is female. She must be White or they would have pointed out her being a POC AND Female.

Both of my kids were arguing today over whether or not one of the teachers is a crappy teacher or not. Kinda funny to read their text messages in the family feed about it.

I know my kids didn't want to be part of it. They wanted to go to their classes, then go home today. Hopefully teachers will stop dragging students into political, identity politic fights they don't want to be part of.

Yeah that's what parents are for. Apparently.

Just out of curiosity, how many administrators is the district letting go in this effort to get under budget?

@2 Yeah. Sure would be a shame if people fought for a better education for everyone. They did in my generation and didn’t mind inconveniencing themselves to do so. It must be terribly annoying to you and/or inconvenient to have people expressing this issue. Just because you want to be a selfish asshole you could at least keep it to yourself. Poor people are getting the short end of the stick in education now and somebody needs to yell about it. The cost of education beyond high school is through the roof. The kids need all the help they can get. Because of the movement of the sixties many poor people were able to get degrees. We had to fight for it. As a single parent I was able to get one too and it made it more possible for me and others to survive better economically then. Its a lot harder now because that movement has long dispersed. Shame on you.

They aren't firing teachers @4, but rather reallocating them from underenrolled classes to overenrolled classes at differents schools. Well 11 of the 33. The others are being taken out of underenrolled grades/areas and moved to the top of the substitute teacher list. They all are being paid their full contracted salary all year. But it is disruptive for sure in a lot of ways, both for teachers and students. It's definitely not improving quality of instruction.

What happened is at the beginning of the year the district agreed to a contract with their teachers that they couldn't actually fund. So they are now moving teachers around so all classes are as full as legally possible, and they don't have to pay extra for the first 22 substitute teachers this year. The underlying issue is that recent legislative actions to help increase K-12 ed funding state-wide have actually reduced it in Seattle. And yes, imo the admin side is bloated, as is true with most public administrative units.

@6

OK, so it sounds like zero adminstrators are being let go to help balance the budget?

I don't like the wedges and divisions some people on that faculty create by blaming everything on rich white people whose kids take AP classes. News flash: AP classes are open to all students in SPS, for free! Also: health is a graduation requirement that, yes, even rich white students have to take. PE is also a requirement, but you can get a waiver if you play on a sports team. With PTSA-supported scholarships and other funding, all low-income students who want to play on a sport get to do so. You may be aware from your own high school daze that geeky kids who take a lot of AP classes are not necessarily so big on team sports, so a lot of them are in fact in PE. So it's not like PE is just low income students, and it's not like health is just low income students. So two lies right there.

They also did not pick non-AP math/science/SS/language arts. It has literally nothing to do with AP v. PE, or white v. black. Third lie.

They picked PE and health because they are literally the two least academic subjects taught in high school. Period.

@8 Stop making excuses for the powerful. What say did the kids have?

if you get moved from a permanent position to a substitute position, even if you pay doesn't change, you have been demoted. It is a loss of status and an insult.

The teachers just signed a contract 20 days ago. Maybe they should have read it.

@10, no, it’s how the district manages under enrollment and it’s spelled out in the contract. Let’s not make this personal.

I agree @10, sucks for those teachers who were in a classroom making a career and got yanked out for a worse job and backward career step. It's a passive aggressive move by the district after they caved on contract negotiations to avoid a strike.

The school district didn't project enrollments well this year. But there are other players here worth mentioning. First a larger than normal number of students left public schools for private school, and didn't inform the public schools. They just ghosted and so large #'s of kids were on first day rosters who didn't show up. So some blame for the whole mess is on hear parents and some private schools for not prodding them to let Seattle schools know their kid had other arrangements. And many newcomers to the area didn't inform public schools of new students until too late in the game. A bit more civic responsibility would have taken a bit of the edge of this chaos.

@11 they did read it. Across most schools the teachers who got displaced and demoted were the newest ones. Union rules. The faculty at large knew this might happen but most were protected from its effects. It's a shame because on the whole those younger teachers were a lot more motivated and better educators than a lot of the dead wood counting the days.

The administrators should be crucified in public and they have a nerve taking my taxes when I want it to be for serving the kids with more teachers and services and not their fat overpaid asses.

@15 it's a problem. If you look at historical averages all of education has moved toward spending more on administration. Public university budgets in the 1940's were around 60% instruction 40% admin. Now those numbers are getting close to reversed. It's salaries yes, but maybe more so that an indicator of successful administration is doing new things, and doing new things requires more administration.

Take for example when Phyllis Wise made provost at UW. Immediately she tries to separate A&S into a College of Arts and a College if Sciences. In theory an interesting idea - and pure gold "big move" on her resume, golden ticket to a university presidency - but if successful would have created costly administrative redundancies.

It's tricky though. Mostly all the new stuff admins create happen under the rubric of progressivism and serving the underserved. Streamlining administration and spending more on "core" instructional curriculum is by nature conservative. So in a place like Seattle it's hard to say no to the new stuff, much less take away existing "non-core" programs in the service of smaller math classes for instance.

Stir a couple of unions into these dynamics and it's pretty clear the Titanic is not going to steer away from the iceberg. Public school will continue to decline and those teaching in them will continue to get squeezed.

Gee, I wonder how many admin. positions got cut? They’re probably thinking they can all get new chairs and water coolers for themselves with the money they save cutting teaching positions.

here's what's bugging me lately is the expected "good little progressive" reaction that's expected, based on reductivist and essentialist SJW/marxist calculus. by that I mean, you take the identity of whoever is in the news story and jump to: Teachers ALWAYS get screwed, Black people are ALWAYS the innocent victims of oppression, rape ALWAYS happens like this... these days it's all about the WHO in the news as opposed to the WHAT. me as a white guy saying this under these circumstances will only ever be White Guy speak. have it your way, but I'll just say I am not a fan of this bullshit. good points about administrative bloat and the issue of burnt out dead wood teachers awaiting retirement. I just had to jump in with a few cents about this new way of reading and reacting to the news.

" It was updating parents but doing it in a way that seems very dangerous and scary."- dangerous? How exactly is an update dangerous?

Shorter @18:

"I'M A GROUCHY WHITE GUY - LISTEN TO ME!!!"

20 - you just proved my point you fucking poser

and i proved yours i guess. fuck it then. you are a total poser though, guy. i've read this shit longer than i have posted, and I for one, think you are an unoriginal mind that will probably remain middling until you become even more underwhelming due to age or illness.

MOTHER FUCKER. The school situation here is way more complicated and deserves a much deeper dive than this. Y'all, we are in deep shit here, and if we are ever going to dig our way out we need some better coverage of this issue. We need some deeper conversations. We need some hard core soul searching and some really painful reality.

Our schools are both better, in so many ways, than people acknowledge, with impressive things happening that average person would be amazed by and also, they are so much worse than average person knows in ways that are dangerous, horrifying, and inequitable. There are people fighting the good fight, advocating their asses off and doing their damn best. There are people who are cynical, jaded and just trying to get by. There are people who actively suck. You know what - reality is it is a big gigantic messy complicated system.

But what we don't need is more lazy ass coverage because lazy ass coverage of our schools won't get our schools fixed. Nathalie - if you are going to be the one covering schools for The Stranger than get off your butt and learn about what is going on. Maybe start by going to the WA State PTA Legislative Assembly https://www.wastatepta.org/events-programs/legislative-assembly/ Start talking to people like Heidi Bennett. Go to Jill Geary's weekly meeting at Zoka. Talk to Liza Rankin. Talk to Jesse Hagopian. Talk to Chandra Hampson of the SCPTSA. Talk to Summer Stinson. Interview some principals. Go visit Northgate Elementary. Go to Lowell. Go to Ranier Beach. Go to Beacon Hill. Look at the distribution of disabled students in the district.
Talk to the folks at The Arc of King County https://arcofkingcounty.org/ Start heading to the SPS board meetings.

23

Ya, but hanging out on cap hill and getting high is, like, way more fun.

Agree @23, very important issue and an enormous amount of information available. Covering it shallowly is irresponsible, far worse than not at all.

Tough place for a deep dive though, given how partisan and baroque each truly qualified perspective seems to be. I've had conversations with a variety of power players in Seattle schools, and they each seemed quite reasonable in defending their POVs and visions. Ultimately I can't figure out who's right. And the Stranger hasn't seemed up to this sort of challenge for a long while now.

I predict that the ship continues to sink as players beneath the surface row furiously in different directions. But I'm pessimistic in general that as we continue on our arc from a Canada-like to Argentina-like ultra-stratifed country, all public institution are doomed to degradation. Where are those rat-sized life vests again?

@23, nailed it