Hello! If you’re only now awakening from a two-year-long coma, then, first of all, welcome back. Glad you made it. We’re all a little jealous, actually, because while you were away a deadly respiratory virus broke out and fucked up life for everyone on the planet. Big bummer, we know.
Mass sickness, death, anxiety, political madness, and the emergence of necroeconomics strained or broke nearly every system around the globe—and that very much included our fragile schools.
Teachers, students, staff, and administrators faced a fuckton of challenges in switching (back and forth) to remote education. Instructors were forced to choose between their health and teaching in a classroom, learning was lost, test scores and mental health tanked, and a bunch of racists went on an anti-Black crusade at school boards. Sorry to keep up this buzzkill bit, but all that shit is still happening.
Fallout from all that led to a big drop in enrollment, which put Seattle Public Schools in financial trouble. At a Jan 19 meeting the school board announced that the district is facing a $70 million shortfall next year (though that could drop to $47 million if Olympia comes to the rescue). That figure assumes Seattle voters will renew the two levies that will appear on Feb 8 special election ballots, which should hit mailboxes by Jan 21 or Jan 24.
If Seattle rejects those levies, then the district will find itself in a deeper, darker, and much less ventilated hole than the one it’s already in. That’s because the levies fund important operations budgets and long-overdue building projects that we need to keep kids learning in safe environments. Since we clearly lack the political will to slow climate change, patching up a leak or two in the schools and paying for nurses seems like the least we can do.
