A bill that would split Seattle Public Schools (SPS) into two separate school districts is expected to have its public hearing before the House Education Committee in Olympia sometime this week.
State Reps. Sharon Tomiko Santos and Eric Pettigrew, both of the 37th District representing much of Southeast Seattle, sponsored the bill, explaining to their fellow legislators that SPS wasn’t doing enough to bridge the achievement gap in those neighborhoods’ schools and that “there’s nothing to suggest the district is serious about making a change on its own.”
The school district is in need of a major reorganization, but this isn’t the route it should take. If the school district is to be divided into small districts, it should be done in real partnership with educators and school administrators who work in the field every day. They know best what is needed for all of their students to excel and how that could best be achieved with our tax dollars. Politicians with little experience in education shouldn’t determine how the school district should operate.
The city — which created its own Department of Education and Early Learning and will manage Seattle’s new preschool program — should also stay out of education. The legislators have introduced another bill that would allow the mayor to appoint two school board members, but the last thing the school board needs is to be more politicized.
City officials have enough to oversee, including the infrastructure that’s needed just to get students to school. And the city doesn’t need any more tax dollars to misappropriate toward special projects that serve relatively few. Instead of focusing on the achievement gap in schools, the city should focus on the gap it’s creating by ignoring public needs (bridge and road maintenance) and catering to the needs of special interests (developers, bicyclists).
Also, while managing few students in a smaller school district would be ideal for smaller jurisdictions, Seattle is a major metropolitan city, where its students share similar urban challenges. If its aim is to be the world-class city, Seattle and its public school system needs to grow with an increasing student population. The 52,000-plus students enrolled in Seattle’s 97 public schools doesn’t rival New York City’s 1.1 million students in more than 1,800 schools.
The legislators’ actions should serve as a call to the school board and new Superintendent Larry Nyland that they need to do more to directly serve its current students and plan for the future, instead of being encumbered by its own internal politics. The last thing the bureaucratic school district needs is the involvement of more politicians.