"The teachers were sent to schools who have higher enrollment rates than predicted. Districts further south, for instance, saw increased enrollment, SPS said."

So no teachers lost their jobs. What a nothing burger. It wasn't about race. It wasn't about poor kids. It was simply about lower enrollment.

Don't fret, Kshama certainly got her 15 minutes of fame.

So a couple of things;

this is not "nothing" - it severely impacts school communities and teaching corps at any given school
the district makes it a big deal ("$7M!) but then tries to say they were only off by 1.4%. They can't have it both ways.
it's bad for teachers to support each other? Didn't know that.
the district seems to refuse to see that there are more private schools and charter schools in Seattle and, apparently, are cutting into their student population.

@2 Seattle School budget is somewhere in the neighborhood of $877,000,000 MILLION.

$7,000,000 is a lot of money. 1.4% is not far to be off.

What exactly were the teachers supporting? Wait, no-one got fired. The teachers were supporting teachers who were being moved to other school. Cool.

Private schools are great. They lessen the burden public schools are already under.

This IS a nothing burger. This exercise happens every year. Affluent schools lost teachers too - View Ridge, Roosevelt, Queen Anne neighborhood schools, to name a few. September cutbacks are no fun, but so is losing $7M in funding. Our district doesn’t have the funds for the luxury of hiring extra teachers.

Please tell me why shrinking enrollment is a bad thing for students (teachers are not the customer here). This is right sizing, plain and simple.

Also the Garfield teachers need to reign it in. Intermingling class time with political/union activity is manipulative and inappropriate use of taxpayer funds. This is begging for a lawsuit from the right wing groups that took down public unions via Janus, if not parents of students, or Seattle taxpayers.

I see you are reporting on K-12 education again, Nathalie. Yet you were, once again not at SPS Director Geary's Weekly Coffee. If this is your beat, get your butt out there and get to work. Director Geary talked about the annual teacher displacement at coffee today. She answered questions. Wish you'd been there. Maybe you're going to the board meeting tonight? Would love to read your reporting on that.

Demographic numbers were off this year by 1.4%. That is millions of dollars we won't be getting, but it is also a tiny percentage.

Seattle's demographers are good, but where are the models for the kind of growth and wealth we've seen in Seattle? San Francisco. We can't assume that things would be exactly like that though, right? So what models are we looking at? Where are the families going? Is it just the case that when people decide to have kids they have to move out of Seattle?

Last 2 years we have had more mitigation money. We had less this year. Lower mitigation money, more disruption.

Now, lets talk about this equity stuff. This gets more complicated. Wealthier neighborhoods where families own their homes and don't move so much during the school year - their school populations are easier to predict. Wealthy schools with stable predictable populations are unlikely to be over or under enrolled. SPS isn't seeking to target less wealthy schools, but with this model, isn't that what happens? Also, historically we've seen that wealthy PTSAs will sometimes foot the bill to keep staff while other schools don't have PTSAs or have PTSAs that are struggling to cover costs for things like copy paper.

For most schools, the early student counts gets the movement out of the way early in the year and settles things down faster. But for schools like Nova, where they accept students throughout the year, and they get a bump in their student population after the counts come in but they don't get a bump in staffing later, it can feel very unfair when teachers get displaced.

SPS doesn't have enough money. What the fuck are they supposed to do? How are they supposed to handle this? What is the solution? They have to get the teachers where they are needed. The places that have higher enrollments than predicted need teachers. The fact that SPS is forced to run things so close that there isn't any cushion is ridiculous.

We go through displacement every fucking year. It has become normal. It is fucking ridiculous that displacement is normal here. This is not normal everywhere. I tell people in other parts of the country that this goes on and they think I'm fucking joking.

This isn't simple. This shouldn't be district vs teachers vs .... This is a damn complicated mess and I'd love to see some really thorough reporting on this.

I fail to see the problem. The district is deploying staff where they are needed. That seems like a smart move.

I don't get it. The gymn teacher was sent further south and most likely to an even more "diverse" school? How is this racist? Seriously.