Waitlists in Seattle Public Schools

This is a VIDEO.

This episode explores the questions surrounding school waitlists in Seattle Public Schools — particularly for option schools — including how they’re handled, why they often don’t move, and what the impacts are for students and families. Thanks for the many contributions from educators, students, and community members. including:

• Liza Rankin
• Shraddha Shirude
• Janeal Maurera
• Jessica Baxter
• Erin Combs
• Kaitlin Murdock
• Vivian Van Gelder / SESEC
• Leslie Harris
• Sue Peters
• All Together for Seattle Schools – ATSS
• Seattle School Options Coalition – SSOC

See more in our Show Notes.

   -- by Dawson Nichols

Subscribe to our podcast at rainydayrecess.org

Support our work at our Patreon.

Contact us at hello@rainydayrecess.org.

Transcript

Waitlists in Seattle Public Schools

Rainy Day Recess Episode 34 - April 24, 2025

This is a VIDEO  |  See our Show Notes  |  Contact us at hello@rainydayrecess.org  |  Support our work at our Patreon

Each person’s opinion is their own.

Christie’s Intro

​Christie Robertson: Hi everyone. Christie Robertson here, and you are listening to Rainy Day Recess, a podcast that studies and discusses Seattle Public Schools. Today's episode is hosted by Dawson Nichols, who brings his usual thoughtfulness and care to a topic that should be simple – school wait lists, who gets in, who doesn't, and who decides. Dawson's reporting takes a close look at how the district handles enrollment and why thousands of students are on wait lists that often don't move even when there's space. 

This has been a district wide issue and lately it has been the topic of much discussion. I wanna ground us by hearing from a teacher and a student at one of the schools that has most actively spoken out – Cleveland High School. 

Shraddha Shirude: My name is Shraddha Shirude. I am a math teacher at Cleveland Stem High School. I use she/her pronouns.

We are actually a majority of students of color school. We actually have a huge percentage of staff of color here. And it's intentional. The location of our school, the history of our school, the purpose of our school has been actively to dismantle these systems. 

We have students who are first time English speakers, working alongside students who are in the highly capable cohort, next to another student who is in our extended resource program in special education, right? Like we have all of those kids in the same space learning together. And I think that's really a narrative that's missed 

We have so many families fighting for choice schools. We have so many families fighting for access to advanced learning curriculum. We have so many families and students advocating for better supports for special education students. But because our school has just been constantly come for with budget and with blocking our enrollment, we can't even do the things we know work.

Christie Robertson: And here's testimony from the March board meeting from Cleveland Junior, Janeal Maurera.

Janeal Marrera: Cleveland has capacity for 900 students, but the district is only projecting us to have 660 students, which is about 75% of our capacity, empty. Every year, many students are applying and having to be waitlisted, and they are not being let in even though we have space for students... We are projected to lose 3.5 FTE for our school next year. 

Christie Robertson: I will include a link to Janeal's full testimony in the show notes. We are really grateful to include both of their voices in this episode. 

And now here's Dawson.

Dawson’s Intro

Dawson Nichols: I was recently having what I thought was a productive conversation with the Director of Enrollment for the Seattle Public School District, when I asked for what I thought was pretty basic information – who is on the enrollment planning team and how and when do they do their work? The response I got was flabbergasting.

“After consulting with leadership, it has been determined that it is in the district's best interest to refrain from responding to any further inquiries regarding waitlists.”

Wait, what? Enrollment decisions are some of the most important decisions that a school district makes. In our district, funding follows the student. So whoever controls enrollment decisions controls not just the number of students in the building, but also the number of teaching staff and the amount of support staff that they get, the resources that they get, the offerings that they can offer. 

This is really important stuff, and we are not allowed to know who makes these decisions or how they go about it, really? In a public school system? 

Many people in the community feel that waitlists are being unfairly manipulated. Last year, thousands of students never got off of the waitlists, despite the fact that there was room in the buildings. Shouldn't we get to know why this is happening? I put this question to school board director Liza Rankin this way: 

“Given the discussion that we just had about waitlists and the need for the district to staff buildings not according to building capacity, but according to their idea of what their idea of what the projected numbers are going to be, why have waitlists at all? Isn't it kind of a shell game? Because they're not really waitlists if people never get off of them.” 

Liza Rankin: Yeah. And I have said this too. Like, are we giving people a choice or not?

​Dawson Nichols: Okay.

The Problem

Welcome to Rainy Day Recess. My name is Dawson Nichols. I work in early childhood education with the preschool set. My wife teaches in SPS and my two daughters went to the Seattle Public Schools. We are great believers in public education, which is why I want to talk about waitlists – a surprisingly contentious topic.

It is also a topic that when we look at it, we see some problems that the SPS has been dealing with for many, many years. Lack of transparency. Lack of accountability. Lack of responsiveness to parents. Problems that go unaddressed year after year. A school board that is reluctant to exercise authority over an unresponsive and unaccountable administration.

Before we get onto the interviews that I've done, I wanna look at some basic information about waitlists in the Seattle Public Schools. For those of you who are listening to this, do be aware that there is a video as well. You can go to our show page and click on the link that will take you to YouTube. And there you can see the interviews that I conducted with people, along with some charts and graphs that hopefully help make sense of some of this information. 

So – waitlist basics. Here we go. 

Waitlist basics

Waitlists. What are they for? Well, they're used for enrollment. Any child enrolling in the Seattle Public Schools is assigned to a neighborhood school. But every child also has the option to try to get into a different school – either a different neighborhood school or one of the district's option schools.

To exercise this choice, you need to fill out this school choice form and get on the waitlist. So the waitlist is only for parents who want to enroll their child in a school that isn't their assigned neighborhood school. 

SPS has some great neighborhood schools, so for many, probably the majority of students, there's no need to bother with the waitlist. But there are any number of reasons another school might be a better fit for a particular student. Schools offer different services. They have different strengths. Some offer different teaching styles or curricula. So some families do want to choose a different school. How does the waitlist work? Well, you fill out the form, ideally in February, for admission the following fall.

It's a little confusing, even as explained here on the SPS website. You can fill out the choice forms through the end of May. But waitlists are compiled at the end of this February period. If you submit the form later, you're added to the end of the already compiled waitlists, so your chances of getting into the school of your choice are greatly diminished.

Okay, so these choice forms are processed at the end of February. First accepted are those who have siblings in the chosen school. If there is still space available after that, children who live in the school's “geozone" are accepted. The geozone is the area around the school designated by the district. More about these later. 

After siblings and geozone students are accepted, the remaining choice forms are placed in a lottery and given a random number. This is the waitlist. Any available space remaining in schools is given to those on this waitlist in order of their number. So, those are the basics. And they seem fairly straightforward, but let's talk about how this actually works in practice.

After discussing this with dozens of people, it became apparent that there were two kind of buckets of problems. They are: 

Number one: it's too complicated. And partly as a result of that complication, it institutionalizes unfairness and inequitable access. 

Number two: enrollment planning is secretive and manipulative.

Problem Bucket 1 - Complicated waitlist navigation

Let's start with what may at first seem like a superficial complaint, but that really turns out to be something that reinforces disproportionate access to educational options. I've already mentioned that the SPS website is not very clear on this. It is hard to find out just about school choice. But then it is even harder to navigate the school choice system.

Erin Combs: Yeah. So you know, as I mentioned, the only way that I, that we, my family even found out about the option school that we go to, Thornton Creek, was through an email that came through our preschool. 

​Dawson Nichols: Mm-hmm. 

Erin Combs: Even with that information, where we went to tour the school, we met the principal... Even with, you know, these multiple conversations and multiple touch points, it's really difficult for families to figure out how to enroll in option schools. You have to go through the open enrollment system and, like, the open enrollment process that SPS administers every year. It's on a different timeline than regular enrollment. There are different choice forms you have to fill out. The communication around those choice forms is really convoluted. It's difficult to get answers. The timelines don't match up. Like, actually navigating the system to first find out what these programs are – how they're different from your neighborhood schools, and then actually figuring out how to navigate the process to enroll is, you know, is really cumbersome for the families that have the most resources in this city, right?

And so if your kid is not in a preschool where you're getting that information, or you're not, you know, receiving that information – if you are a family that doesn't speak English as your first language or, you know, has, you know, two parents working off hours and are not able to attend open houses – all of these barriers are set up that would make it really hard for parents with less resources to be able to navigate. 

Jessica Baxter: So it's just been such a long couple years of trying to make it through. And then I found out about Hazel Wolf and signed my child up for an option. And I'd heard that it was really hard to get them in, so I wasn't very confident that it was gonna happen. And then around the time when you're supposed to hear back, I didn't hear anything. I didn't hear anything from them at all until July the summer before. And then I got a “Welcome to Hazel Wolf” email. So I really don't know how that happened. I honestly have no peek behind the curtain on that.

​Dawson Nichols: Yeah. 

Jessica Baxter: But fortunately they did get in. And it changed everything for them. Absolutely everything. 

Erin Combs: And so we had heard that pre-covid waitlists for some of these option schools were extraordinarily high. Some of the more popular ones like the STEM learning schools, the language immersion schools, also Thornton Creek – we had heard that these schools historically had really high waitlists. And so we weren't even sure that we were going to get in when we tried to enroll. 

​Dawson Nichols: Mm-hmm. 

Erin Combs: Upon sort of finding out and learning more about how the system works, we learned more about the geozone boundaries that are drawn around option schools. We are lucky enough that we were in the geozone for Thornton Creek, and so we were not waitlisted that year. There were other families that were waitlisted and came off the waitlist and ended up enrolling. Since then, we've found out, of course, in the last couple years that that practice has changed. But for us, we were not affected by waitlists. Although we had heard sort of like urban legend. 

Kaitlin Murdock: Looking at Pathfinder enrollment, if you look at it going back five years, approaching six years now, to 2019, what you can see is that enrollment has dropped from 494 students down to now 403, is officially on the record. It's about a 90 kid decrease over the past five years. Or, you know, 17% of our population. Despite every year finishing enrollment with children on the waitlist. So it's very clear that the district is not letting in as many kids as want to attend.

And one pattern that we see over these past years is that the enrollment prediction that is made in the spring for the following fall is not being filled to capacity. So in the spring, what is being staffed for is then in the fall not being filled. So that we have more staff, quote unquote, than we have the children for.

Erin Combs: Because the open enrollment system is so complex, and so opaque and difficult to manage, or difficult to navigate, option schools, you know, have to go out and do their own... Like PTAs, parent volunteers, have to go out and do their own awareness within their local communities. And so for my own school, Thornton Creek has worked really, really hard coming out of the pandemic and been very intentional about reaching out far and wide to invite students and families and communities to come in.

And as a result, our waitlist was close to 80 kids in 2024/2025. And those kids just weren't let in. And so you have these schools that are going out and, you know, talking about their curriculum models and, you know, reaching out to communities, and then, just being cut off. It just... it destroys the trust between the community and the district. It's harmful to our schools. 

Dawson Nichols: Yeah. I was talking yesterday with one of the co-presidents of the PTSA over at Queen Anne. 

Erin Combs: Oh yes. 

Dawson Nichols: Which is another option school. And she was discussing how, you know, two years ago, they went and did so much outreach and really worked the community and went to preschools, and did all these things. And, you know, they built up a great waitlist. And people were not let off. And she says it's a lot harder this year to get people motivated. 

Erin Combs: That's right. 

Dawson Nichols: To go out and do that kind of, you know, outreach. Which, again, from the district's perspective is free. And presents the schools in the best possible light. These are people who are promoters, people who want to embrace families and bring them into the district. 

Erin Combs: That's right. 

Dawson Nichols: And, we are, you know, pushing all of those people aside. It's crazy. 

Erin Combs: That's right. And the district ran this enrollment... got $100,000 from the state earlier this year to run this enrollment study. And in that study, they did not talk to any families that were waitlisted and not let in. So, unfortunately, we don't have hard data to know where those families are going. 

Anecdotally, what we have is a long list of anecdotes from families that toured option schools, were waitlisted, and then either went to private schools, decided to homeschool Because, for whatever reason, that felt like a better option than their neighborhood school.

And that's not a slight on neighborhood schools whatsoever. I think we have some very, very strong neighborhood schools. But when parents are selecting the right option for their kid, and then they don't get that option, they're gonna choose the next best thing. And that may not be the public system.

And that's really unfortunate because that's where you start to lose... you know, in marketing we call it a “leaky funnel”, right? That's where you start to lose families out of the funnel. 

Jessica Baxter: I don't know how that's gonna work. I don’t know... You know, once you put in the application, there's no way to follow up on it. You just have to sit and wait and bite your nails and freak out until they tell you otherwise. And then I've looked at... I mean, I'm very proactive, so I was emailing everyone I could think of – absolutely everybody. You know, representatives, the mayor, the governor... 

Kaitlin Murdock: If there truly are schools that we do not wanna let kids enroll from, tell the parents when they're filling out the choice form! Why, why are we wasting the time of families, and why are we giving them hope, if there is no hope for their child to go to the school that they would like their child to go to? Why are we making them wait... April, May, June, July and August, 5 months, you know, 6 months from when they filled out the form? Why are we leaving everybody in limbo? And I know parents, multiple parents, that every week were checking the waitlist to see their status and if they moved. It is causing undue stress on so many families for seemingly no reason.

Jessica Baxter: I still haven't gotten a clear answer. And I do... I feel like I've researched it as much as I possibly could to find out: Why are they doing this? Why are there waitlists that haven't moved? Why are they under-enrolling schools? You know, that whole death spiral, basically, that's been happening the last couple years of – it's under-enrolled, so we let staff go, but then because we don't have enough money, we can't let all these people on the waitlist.

I mean, it just, I don't know. It feels like, it just feels like someone is trying to tank the concept altogether. And I don't know who that is. You know, I know it sounds paranoid, but it's... I've been trying to make sense of it for so long and I can't make sense of it.

Dawson Nichols: Yeah. Yeah. So if SPS really believes in giving parents options, they could put a lot more effort into making things less complicated. They could make sure that parents know that they have options. They could certainly streamline the system so that it's easier for parents to navigate their way through it and exercise those options. And finally, they could revisit policies like the policy of having geozones for the option schools that seem to bake unfairness into the system. 

Problem Bucket 2 - Waitlist manipulation

Okay. Let's look at enrollment planning. Managing enrollment is tremendously complicated. We all get that. But the enrollment planning team does nobody any favors when they do their work in secrecy, because no one has any way of knowing if they agree with the decisions that are made. And no way of petitioning the district if they want the district to make different decisions.

Vivian Van Gelder is the lead researcher on a comprehensive history of the Seattle Public School system that was recently published. If you want details on how the district has been managed over the last 30 years, this one is for you. Lots of details. Here is how Vivian describes the situation. 

Vivian Van Gelder: If you look at the funding model for Seattle Public Schools, you won't find anything in there about option schools. They're funded the same way as comprehensive schools. There is a certain school size that's efficient, right? 

Dawson Nichols: Efficient? Toward what? 

Vivian Van Gelder: Economically efficient. 

Dawson Nichols: Thank you. 

Vivian Van Gelder: Economically efficient. Yes. Yes. No, economically efficient for sure. You can certainly have educational efficiency at all different sizes. But, economically speaking, there is a certain school size that's efficient in the sense that, you know – every school has a principal. Every school gets a secretary. And there's fixed costs. And obviously, basic, you know, Econ 101 – the fewer kids you have to set off those fixed costs, the more expensive they are per unit. We're talking about kids as units here, right? 

So if you have option schools drawing enrollment away from... First of all, if you have a huge number of comprehensive elementary schools, and you have falling enrollment, you are going to start straying into the territory where a lot of these schools are going to be a size that is not economically efficient to run.

If you then have option schools that people can choose from in the same area, and those option schools attract families who would otherwise have gone to those neighborhood schools and bumped up that enrollment so that it got closer to, or went over, that threshold of, you know, economic efficiency.

Dawson Nichols: Right. 

Vivian Van Gelder: Then in that sense, yes, they are drawing resources away. It is the most facile argument, because it's starting at the end. It's saying all we need to do is cut off that particular avenue for families... 

Dawson Nichols: That choice.

Vivian Van Gelder: ...and we fix the problem. Whereas the problem as I, and this is me pontificating, I'm just on my soapbox here, so take this with a grain of salt, but to me the problem is – you have option schools... So like, I started my whole journey into this very much from a budget perspective. So I believe you have to think about economic efficiency as well. We have a finite... we will always have a finite budget. It's a finite planet. Yeah. Like at some point you have to fit what you can do into what you have. 

Dawson Nichols: Right. 

Vivian Van Gelder: At the same time, to me, the issue that is raised by the popularity of option schools is that these schools are providing something people think their kids need. And that is not being provided in the neighborhood schools. But for the love of God, why aren't we looking at those option schools and what they're doing right and what people want from them and start replicating that in neighborhood schools?

And then maybe, if once you've done that, you know, in a sustainable, predictable, and consistent way for, I don't know, 5 years, 10 years... Now you've moved that over to neighborhood schools, if that's what you need to do in order to maintain economic efficiency and to keep yourself afloat in a financial sense. Then you can start talking about removing the option schools.

But right now, it just seems like the most... I can't even think of a word. It just doesn't make sense to me to say, “well, you know, we have this budget problem. And if we could just get everyone to go to their neighborhood schools, then we would solve our budget problem. Therefore, we're gonna close option schools.”

By not explaining it, by... not even explaining it, but by not inviting any dialogue around it. 

Dawson Nichols: Yeah. 

Vivian Van Gelder: It just looks like something nefarious is going on. Even if it's not. And it's very high handed. And people like, you're just upsetting people for no reason. 

Dawson Nichols: It does look like something nefarious is going on. What might that be? Well, there are really two parts to this. We will get to frozen waitlists in a moment. But first, let's talk about space availability. 

“Space availability”

First, we need to recognize that the term “available space” does not refer to available space in the building. This is not like a parking space where if it's open, you can go there. No. Space availability refers to student capacity the district has funded. Which is decided by enrollment planning. 

Remember, in our system, funding follows the student. But the district will not always fund a school up to that school's capacity. So although there may be space available in that building, and although a student may want to go to that building, and although the funding will follow the student to that building, still the district will say that there is no available space.

Why will they say that? We don't know. We do not know who is on the enrollment planning team. We don't know when they meet, where they meet, what is on their agenda. We don't have their minutes. We don't have a list of principles by which they make their decisions. We don't know. 

One thing we do know is that option schools are chronically, purposefully enrolled under their building capacities. This is true despite the fact that these schools have waitlists. 

Here is a list compiled by the Seattle Student Options Coalition, one of several parent groups that has organized to try to keep option schools strong within the SPS system, organized in response to what they perceive as bias against option schools from within the SPS. This shows the waitlist numbers from August of last year. In other words, this shows the number of families that jumped through the hoops and tried to exercise their choice, but were denied. Why were they denied? Again, we don't know. 

But we do know that it's intentional. Como News asked the district about their waitlist practices, and the response was that the enrollment planning focused on balancing system-wide enrollment through strategic waitlist moves. It's not exactly clear what is meant by “strategic waitlist moves”, but it certainly sounds like the enrollment planning committee is reserving the right to suspend the rules. When? Why? Under what conditions? With what rationale? For what purpose? We don't know. 

Liza Rankin: By having too many buildings in operation, we are forcing these decisions, because the margin of error is so small. There's no buffer. So we are literally choosing to pit option schools against neighborhood schools, and neighborhood schools against each other, in a way that is really unfair to all students. 

Where do we go from here?

Vivian Van Gelder: There's such a deep reservoir of support for public education. 

Dawson Nichols: Oh yeah. 

Vivian Van Gelder: People are so engaged. You know, and so, and sometimes that breaks into factions and fights and what have you. But, like, I think it's such an incredible gift and an incredible asset to have people who are so engaged and educated that they do get passionate about it. And they do get up in arms about it, and they do fight with each other. It's like, they care about it, you know? And it's like, you have these people here who, yes, like, sometimes we're all way too loud and sometimes we're shouty and sometimes we aren’t our best selves. But, like, we're passionate because we want things to be better. We want to improve things. 

Use that. You know, channel that for good. Don't just shut the door in people's faces. It's just, yeah, I dunno. 

Kaitlin Murdock: And so if you have the desire of families to enroll their children in schools that they think will be a better fit, and schools that were designed to be a little bit of a different fit, why are we preventing children from getting what they need and families from getting what they want? 

Dawson Nichols: Yeah. 

Kaitlin Murdock: And then, I mean, doing it all in the dark. You know, doing it all in the dark without transparency. If it is too much of a strain on the system, and if it is causing systemic problems and inequities, then we need a systemic approach to fix it. And we need that to be public and transparent. 

A few people in an office downtown doing things in the dark that nobody is seeing and making decisions on behalf of the entire district is not the way to best serve the needs of kids. I don't believe it's the intention of the board that that is how our schools should be run. And I don't think that the public trusts a system that makes decisions that way. 

If you wanna have the discussion about whether option schools should exist or not, let's have it. Let's not manipulate enrollment and refuse to move waitlists such that we starve schools into a spiral of diminishing resources, when seats have been allocated, and the desire is there, and it may draw in people to the district or force people away from the district.

Dawson Nichols: So decisions about available space, meaning the funding for schools, these decisions are made independent of the actual capacity of the school and independent of parents' expressed desires. Waitlists are not really waitlists, and the rules for them can be suspended apparently at certain times. So enrollment really is just whatever the enrollment planning team says enrollment is going to be. 

This at a time when Seattle is second only to San Francisco in the percentage of students going to private schools. Is it any wonder that people are concerned? Parents with choices are exercising those choices and leaving the district. They are homeschooling, or going to private school, or just leaving.

And it's doubly unfair to those people who cannot exercise those options. People without means – they can't make that choice. And the district seems to be undermining the choices that they have within the district. 

Jessica Baxter: Totally. I mean, that's why it's called... It's called an Option School for a reason. And it's... I mean, at the moment it feels like it's more of an illusion of choice. But you know, it should be, it should be an option. 

Dawson Nichols: Parents are not the only ones who perceive an animus toward option schools. I want to play a couple of clips from interviews I did last year with former school board members. This was for an episode we did on the plans for school closures at the time, but waitlists and option schools were a part of that discussion.

Leslie Harris: Alternative schools. K-8 schools. There is a very strong, very long-held perception that administration wants to do away with those two types of education in this city.

Sue Peters: So, and the fact that the district has not been that supportive of our option schools, of any alternative programming, that it has targeted, like I mentioned, the Montessori schools, the gifted program, alternative schools, advanced learning, Walk to Math... All those sorts of things, one by one, the district has been targeting and getting rid of, leaving people with more of a cookie cutter, one-note option. The sort of things that keep people, parents interested in the school district, this school district has been getting rid of. 

Leslie Harris: You know, we don't move waitlists and alternative schools. Alternative/option schools. 

Dawson Nichols: Yeah. 

Leslie Harris: How does that make any sense? And then you, I was looking at numbers all day today. And I see that so many of the K-8s and the alternative schools that are less than 500 – they're 450+, right? Between that bubble. Well, at 500 you get an assistant principal.

Dawson Nichols: Yeah. 

Leslie Harris: So if you're not moving the waitlist... Again, a cynical person would say, you're gaming the system. 

Listen, my kid's a rockstar. And she's not a rock star because of her parents. She's a rockstar because of Pathfinder. She is still in touch with those people. They taught her how to learn, in kindergarten. The expeditions, we still laugh about it. Out of the top 10 kids at Chief South International when she graduated in 2015, eight of them were Pathfinder kids. 

And when we take all the numbers together, are they doing better? Are they off the charts? I don't know. That's not the point though, is it? Isn't the point to give people what they need and not to push them out of the district when we're already bleeding students and families?

Dawson Nichols: School board members seem to think that the administration is not treating option schools the same as other schools. Parents certainly think this way. The media has picked up on this too. Danny Westneat, for example. When school closures were being considered last fall, a disproportionate number of option schools were targeted. As Danny Westneat lamented last September, “it's as if officials drew up a list of what their customers are clamoring for the most, and then instead of doing more of that, they said, “let's axe it.”

What's going on? We don't know. We won't know until SPS daylights some of its enrollment practices. 

Now I wanna be as fair as I can. As I've said, enrollment planning is really difficult and SPS is notorious for kicking the can down the road on difficult decisions. Over-capacity has been a problem for a long, long time, and this is wrapped up in that. Director Eliza Rankin can explain this much better than I can. 

Liza Rankin: The problem that we're facing now with people saying, “Well, you should open all the waitlists and let everybody go where they want to go,” is: because we are operating too many facilities, there's no way to do that without causing harm to another building.

Dawson Nichols: I get that and I hear what you're saying about capturing, you know, the economy of scale. 

Liza Rankin: Yeah. 

Dawson Nichols: And making sure that the buildings are populated to a level where they're not breaking the budget of the district. I get that. But what I don't get is why there should be... why option schools should be preferentially chosen for closure.

Liza Rankin: I don't... Why would they be?

Dawson Nichols: There certainly is the perception that that is the strategy of the district.

Liza Rankin: So, when the initial recommendations of the superintendent were revealed in May or June or whenever that was, that was a big surprise to the board and in opposition to what the board directed to see. All of our questions were, “what is happening to option schools? What is happening to dual language? What is the actual... is this a, basically, is this a recommendation to eliminate all of those? Or what is this? 

Dawson Nichols: Yeah. And what was the answer? 

Liza Rankin: We never really got one.

Dawson Nichols: It appears, from the outside, that the administration is trying to undermine option schools. The school board is not getting answers. Parents are not getting answers. You know, teachers will often ask the students in their class to show their work. Because when a child is coming up with the wrong answer, it’s really helpful to be able to look back and see what they were thinking – know where the mistake crept in. I would suggest the same is true here. We do not know how the enrollment planning team is going about their business. 

We don’t know what their thinking is. But insofar as they are intentionally or unintentionally undermining option schools, there’s a mistake. Because choice, within the district, is absolutely crucial to the health of the district. 

I really feel that we have an administration that is so far separated from the work of the district, from the education that is going on, separated from the schools, from the teachers, from the children, from the families... So separated that the budget is more real to them than the people that they are meant to serve. And so they make enrollment decisions in order to solve budgetary problems, rather than doing the really hard work of making budget decisions that will help ensure that every child in the district has the best possible education that they can get. At some point, I think this needs to change. 

We need to have an enrollment planning team that shows their work. We need to have an administration that is more responsive to the people of the district. We need to have a school board that is willing to drill down into administration enough so they recognize when things are going wrong. 

I interviewed a great many people for this episode - parents, teachers, principals, administrators, researchers. Many of them did not want to be identified for this episode. They were worried about retaliation for having an opinion on this topic. Which is pretty messed up, and tells you something about our district. 

So, I want to genuinely thank everyone who was willing to go on record. I really appreciate it. Because this is what we need to do. We need to talk these things out with one another, even when we disagree. We have to work together and listen to one another. 

Which is why, here, at the end, I want to thank you, too. And you’ve been listening a long time. And for caring enough about public education that you will listen to a really long podcast like this. I appreciate it. I think that it is worth fighting for. Now more than ever.