u/awongpublic

Post #3 in the Cracking the Budget Series write-ups. This covers all the "non-compensation" Objects which is where contracts live.

With this, we will have covered the entirety of the $1.2 billion spend that the district does annually. Obviously we can go deeper, but if you read all 3 pieces, much of the spending will start to make sense.

The main takeaway is: Purchased Services is where the growth is. Most of it is Transportation and Special Education. However, you cannot likely reduce either without also reducing revenue in a similar magnitude (esp true in Transportation) so, weirdly, the higher spend almost certainly has a far smaller impact on the deficit than the numbers make it look like. And it unless you have a way of converting Buses to people or Special Education services (esp stuff paid by saftey-net funds) into other staffing, there isn't a lot of obvious spots to mess with here either.

Right after saying there's not been much need for mod work, there's been a spate of people jumping in with internet comment troll garbage comments.

For example, jumping in to just ask if someone is a "DEI Hire" is not okay.

First off, at least this mod thinks Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is great so you're not gonna get a lot of sympathy for this (and likely not the other mods either but they can speak for themselves).

But second, if you think about it, this kind of comment isn't about SPS. It's about attacking some ill defined political concept. So it's a rule #2 violation. It's also designed to be flame-bait trolling cause, come on, it's a Seattle reddit. So it's violating Rule #1 and Rule #3.

There could be a reasonable discussion to have about whether or not the way it's been used has helped or hurt. Or how the focus on it might override other things that matter. Might not be popular perhaps but that would be at least adding actual content.

This actually goes the other way [on the political spectrum] too if you just jump in and accuse folks of XXXX.

Jumping in with flame-bait though is not cool and, depending on how the context feels, can rather easily earn you a temp ban.

Don't do it.

And if you see it, please flag it instead of responding cause responding feeds the trolls.

Next of my slow-rolling Cracking the Budget series is up.

I'm kinda excited about this one even though it's long. In a sense, all of the others were basically a build-up of ideas and vocab to do this analysis.

Key things:

• The district office / centrally managed staffing was significantly higher in 2024-25 compared to 2014-15 even though enrollment on the two years were similar. This report explains where much of it is.
• The district office / centrally managed staffing has actually experienced a LOT of cuts since its peak. We forget this.
• Cutting stuff here is NOT enough to bring us back to solvency. We are in real trouble and there is no easy fix.

A lot of this analysis was done around Dec last year, but it got delayed due to "life." However, on the bright side, with the help of AI (I know I know), I actually found a new data trove. Over the past few months, I was able to scrape the entirety of the OSPI website's fiscal report website getting 164k pdf totalling nearly 140 gigabytes of data and then find a way to deterministically parse them to build out a financial history for ALL districts for over a decade. They are all now available in a set of much smaller databases (cause PDF is a horrible data interchange format)

Critically, these reports let me:

• Verify how "Resources" translated to "Programs" which then allowed me to create a reconfigurable Sankey diagram showing money flow from resource down to school that can link into historical staffing, budget, and actual data. This tool is proving to be very powerful and will eventually get a second write-up, but I encourage folks to explore it.
• FINALLY find a source listing the *budgeted* staffing FTE for each year broken down by Program, Activity, and Duty Title. This allowed me update the staffing charts to show the historical variance between budget and actual staffing which visually describes how our budget deficit always look way too large -- our chronically unfilled headcount has historically be huge and has been growing

With this, I think folks will be able to understand the insolvency better and do their own detailed explorations.

Also shout-out to parent Esther Stifano who's 1.5 month long manual work categorizing staff provided a key link to drawing the circle around which part of the org chart grew the most in unexplained ways.

As always, throw questions and corrections. We need folks to understand this stuff.

Hello everyone! We wanted to give an update on moderation.

First and foremost, u/scrufflesthebear has joined the moderation team. Thank you! It's bear-y nice to have you.

Second, we're considering asking people to add user flair indicating whether they're a parent, community member, staff, etc. We'd love feedback on this idea.

Third, as we enter a turbulent period with budget issues, hot-button news items, union negotiations, likely cuts to important things, and more....we want to remind people of Rule #1: Behave like an adult role model, and Rule #3: Be Constructive.

Don't hold your opinion back – don't ever hold your opinion back here – but do express it in a way that creates understanding or adds something. In particular, avoid ad hominem attacks, especially against staff or other people who can't defend themselves here. Causing an informationless pile-on in a recorded, semi-permanent, high search rank, public forum doesn't do anything except validate that the internet is a sucky place.

And now on to stats and patterns.

Mod log stats

In general, we haven't had to do much active modding, which is great. Thank you for that!

Since April 1st there have been 10 post removals and 11 comment removals by moderators, plus 2 automod comment removals for 1 user with very negative karma (it takes work over a long time to get this low). There has also been a smattering of Reddit removals, most of which were false positives – more on that below.

Things taken down were:

• Obvious spam
• Posts not related to SPS
• Cross-posts where the original had been deleted, leaving them contentless
• Comments discussing children
• Discussions that got personal or stepped into hate speech

Nothing has ever been taken down because of the opinion in it.

Patterns that get mod attention

The main one is discussing children. This usually shows up when someone judges the choices of an identified parent (e.g. electing to go private school) – which, if you think about it, creates a public internet record that the kid can later read, where we all got to discuss their parent because of them. That's bad, and it doesn't tend to add much anyway, since it's mostly ad hominem. So let's just not go there.

Put simply: if there’s a chance the child can find the thread, read it, and feel their life was discussed without their consent – especially as a way to attack people they care about – we're in bad territory for a permanent public forum. Such a thing will likely get removed.

The second recurring issue is discussion veering into politics, either devolving into a flamewar about geopolitical events or sliding into name-calling. Luckily this isn't frequent, but if you find yourself heading that direction, try to pull out of it. This is especially true when the subject is staff, since they have no way to respond. Take the extra step of explaining why something is a problem.

A simple test: swap the subject of your sentence for "Harry Potter." If the result sounds like a bad fandom insult like "Harry Potter is an asshole", you're probably violating Rule #1.

Reddit removals

It has come to our attention that Reddit sometimes removes posts silently. This seems to happen when a post contains a URL Reddit has banned. The mods aren't notified when this happens.

If you've posted something and it disappeared without any message, send modmail. We try to explain why things happen so the lack of explanation likely means we didn't do it ourselves.

Discussing individuals in the news cycle

SPS and its staff have been in the news a lot recently, in both good and bad ways. When that happens, it's natural to discuss the individuals involved. But we're still collectively creating a public discourse that search engines will index. People in active news stories get more latitude, but discussion of individuals should never be a free-for-all.

The boundaries here are still being worked out. In the meantime, please think about what it would be like to have a discussion attached to your name 25 years later — because that's what a Reddit thread does to another person.

Dear SPS Families and Staff,

I have made some changes in central office to better support our schools and school leaders. I am excited to announce a new leadership structure for school supervision designed to better align support with the unique needs of students and schools at each grade level. 

Beginning this school year, the district is moving away from a regional model and establishing seven Executive Directors of Schools positions based on grade bands: elementary schools, K-8 schools, middle schools, high schools, and alternative and nontraditional schools.

The reorganization reflects our commitment to creating stronger instructional leadership, more consistent support for principals, and deeper expertise aligned to the developmental and academic needs of students.

The new executive directors of schools are:

• Dr. James Mercer, Executive Director of Elementary Schools
• Dr. Jessica Conte, Executive Director of Elementary Schools
• Dr. Rena Deese, Executive Director of Elementary Schools
• Justin Hendrickson, Executive Director of K-8 Schools
• Dr. Katrina Hunt, Executive Director of Middle Schools
• Christopher Carter, Executive Director of High Schools and Athletics
• Lynn Herink, Executive Director of Alternative and Nontraditional Schools

Read the Executive Directors of Schools Bios and the list of schools they will oversee.

The executive directors of schools will lead the work of putting this new model into action. They will work closely with school leaders to understand the needs of each school and help find the best ways to provide support. They will also play an important role in building strong relationships with families, community partners, and other stakeholders.

I believe school leaders need more collaboration and support, and the new executive director role will help make that possible. This approach will give central office departments a better understanding of the needs of individual schools and regions.

I understand that change can sometimes cause concern or uncertainty. However, I am confident that aligning the central office more closely with the needs of school leaders will help create a stronger, more connected school system.

In partnership,

Ben Shuldiner
Superintendent
Seattle Public Schools

SEATTLE — A Seattle Public Schools human resources investigation lays out allegations, and photos, that devastate Olla Ibrahim and Tyson Marsh.

"My child is 8 years old, and he has learned to not trust the adults in his own community and to feel that he is not safe in their presence," said Tyson Marsh of his son, who KING 5 is not naming.

Marsh said it traces back to what allegedly happened to their son in December under the care of Ibijoke Idowu. 

Idowu is the president of the Seattle Education Association and a special education teacher at Rising Star Elementary School. She has not been arrested or charged.

According to Marsh, Idowu is on paid leave and remains union president.

A statutory referral was filed with the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office in May. Statutory referrals are sent to law enforcement from mandatory reporters - such as counselors or other school staff - which are then passed on to the attorney's office, regardless of whether there is evidence a crime has been committed. Prosecutors must still decide whether they have enough evidence to charge a crime.

Idowu said she cannot comment while the case is ongoing.

Seattle Public Schools says it "takes allegations involving harm to a student very seriously." The district said the employee is entitled to due process, and it is in the early stages of that process. 

The Seattle Education Association would not comment on the issue.

The investigation into Idowu began after Marsh and the boy's mother, Olla Ibrahim, raised concerns over possible physical harm in December of 2025. 

"Finger-mark" bruises were observed on the student's arm, according to an email sent to Rising Star Principal Huyen Lam and forwarded to Misa Garmoe, Seattle Public Schools executive director of employee & association relations.

Ibrahim said she saw "very clear bruise marks that look exactly like fingers and a thumb wrapped around on the other side" of his arm. Her son told her he was hurt by an adult and specifically named Idowu.

These allegations and others were investigated by Seattle Public Schools HR Investigator Jason Dahlberg. Dahlberg released a 14-page report dated June 17. During the investigation, Idowu denied the allegations. It was found that evidence indicated that, "more likely than not," she did grab the student in December, which caused bruising.

Generally, it was found the teacher would yell at students and they would "flinch" when she walked by them in class, according to the investigation. She denied this, but two witnesses corroborated it.

The district will forward the investigation to HR management.

For Ibrahim and Marsh, the investigation doesn't capture the full scope of concerns. They are now calling on school leaders to act.

"We are also deeply disturbed by the actions of the union and union members who continue to sweep this under the rug and hide it from the public view," Marsh told KING 5, adding he cannot trust the current system to take care of his child.

Board meeting transcript up.

Agenda cut/pasted in a comment.

If you're bored, here's today's board meeting!

tl;dr: We have graphs of 10 years of district data. STARS formula is a mess. There's a game you can play to understand STARS.

Over the past few weeks, I used claude to create a dashboard covering school transportation funding in Washington state since 2016-17 forward.

https://www.sps-by-the-numbers.com/analyses/yellow_bus_ledger.html

It doesn't answer every question but it does provide quite a bit of clarity. I have spot-checked some of the results, but do remember this is a AI created data extraction so DOUBL CHECK ANYTHING before coming to a hard conclusion.

The dashboard has school-level granularity data for routes, ridership, and bus fleets for every district in the state. The data is joined with fiscal data from the F195 (budget) and F196 (actuals) spending and allows us to get a better picture of revenues and spending across the entire state while also giving features for zooming down into a district level. It also provides a more user friendly version of OSPI's STARS Simulator spreadsheet and displays the formula in a clear way that lets you understand what's happening.

There is a LOT of information on this dashboard so I will make 2 big callouts. First is the STARS Formula breakdown int he STARS explorer that, very clearly, lays out the inputs used assign the majority of the transportation funding to a district.

Screenshot of STARS formula showing that funding grows has an exponential relation to the number of schools + route distance, but a sub-linear relation number of riders and land area.

The formula can be found in the hidden tab of the STARS Simulator spreadsheet. It got some semantic...quirks (more in the FAQ at the end) because funding growth is exponential with respect to the route distances and number of schools, but sublinear to the ridership.

Playing with this formula will help folks get a better feel for how Transportation policy changes actually impact funding

The second callout is that, state-wide, the largest category of spending is Ops Staff because many districts own and operate their buses.

State wide transportation expenditure breakdown showing that Ops Staff (mostly bus drivers) is the highest spend. This is because most districts operate their own buses.

This is a complete mismatch for Seattle where bussing is outsourced so almost all the spend is in "Purchased Services"

Spending breakdown by component for Seattle showing that Purchased Transportation is the largest item. There is no Ops Staff spending at all.

If you want to compare across districts, there are also some fun scatter plots that let you see it all. For example, this is showing districts of medium size up for all years in a per-pupil (er...that should say per-rider I think) spend by category. It uses the plasma color scheme so you can visualize how a highlighted district (seattle in this one...those are the dots with black borders) change over time and how they compare to other districts.

Expenditure by component scatter graph of larger districts showing how seattle compares to other districts and to itself over the years.

There's a lot here here. Please look it over. And remember that is is AI generated so double check numbers before jumping to conclusions. I have spot-checked stuff but I have very much not checked everything.

====== FAQ ======

How much would it cost to produce 2,979 episodes of Sanctuary Moon?
About $500M. If it makes no sense why one would ask that, read last questions of the FAQ. Then play.

Why hasn't there been a dashboard before?

While this information has always been available on the OSPI website on the STARS reports, it was largely inaccessible for longitudinal analysis because, unlike the SAFS financial data, or the Washington State Reportcard data, there is no way to download all of it at one go. Instead, you have to click through the UI to download each PDF. And then you have the process the PDF. This is where Claude + computer science came in.

I had Claude code up a rate limited content-script scraper (similar the one I used to do for Panorama data before that dropped off line) which downloaded all of the STARS reports PDFs over the course of 2 days. This yielded 15,477 PDFs and DOCX totaling 1.4G of data. I then used Claud Code to

(1) sort the files
(2) pointed it at the schemas I created for the finance dashboard
(3) generate a similar set of schema and extractor code
(4) output the data as CSVs with various domain tables.

the result was 15 CSVs (of which 7 have real data, the rest are domain tables) totaling 74Mb containing ALL of the published STARS Washington state transportation data. This and all other data is available for download on the dashboard methodology page.

Did you just post AI slop?

Basically. Yes. But it's useful slop. Making the finance dashboard took me 1 year. This is an equiv level of complexity so using AI allowed us to make the data available to the general public. However, it means we need to all be careful in consuming it.

Okay, different topic..does that STARS formula remind anyone else of just a really bad game economy scoring system?

You know...now that you mention it. It does kinda look like that doesn't it?

How in the world did we end up with that formula? Did something just [#$#$#$#]?

Okay. So I'm making fun of it here, but let's take a step back. Somehow the need to use a regression analysis was literally encoded into RCW 28a.160.180. I don't know why, but it's there. Also, if you look at the dashboard, overall the funding does roughly track for most districts even if it systemically seems to underfund. So even if the input variables and formula construction imply a lot of weird things (in a sense, taking ln(riders) philisophically says the larger the student, the less important each student is), it might be the best people can do.

Someone recently pointed out there's a bit of an ad-homenin attack trend on this forum, esp against civil servants. There'll be a mod update about that a bit more going forward, but start on this point...let's ensure that if we're gonna roast something, we roast policy or choices and avoid roasting people. Especially folks who cannot respond back.

But, it still looks like a bad video game economy formula. You gonna do anything about that?

Ahem...what do you think?

Of course you would.

Glad you know me. Without further ado, I present

STARS Exploiter

STARS Exploiter screenshot.

the latest in AI Slop Vibe-coded Video Games.

It's actually just a cute wrapper around the STARS formula. You can add schools, remove schools, increase route distances, change the ridership, etc., and then see in real time how it impacts allocations.

Play with it. It'll give you a very fast, visceral, sense for what policy actually impacts revenue. And if you figure out how to game it, you can see how easily adding news schools into SPS will net you enough money from STARS allocations to, say, cover the entirety of the cost for the Ballard Light Rail Extension within one year. Or if you go just a bit further, produce a bunch of trashy...I mean...premium media for your local SecUnit's viewing pleasure.

OMG Did you really Vibe code a game about bus funding???

YERP. Here's the Claude transcript to show how easy it was. I'm sorry.

Is each school in SPS really worth 1/2 a million dollars?

Yup. At least for now. The transit funding value if a school is exponential. So with SPS at ~100 schools, each is about 500k. If you add another 100 schools, each is worth millions.

It's of course possible I made a huge mistake somewhere in understanding, but if you mess with the official STARS Simulator spreadsheet, you can break it exactly like this. It's just not as amusing.

Can we really make STARS allocate enough to SPS to produce all 2,979 episodes of Sanctuary Moon, yearly?

Sure. Add some schools. Like ~130 of them.

Agenda: https://www.seattleschools.org/board-meetings/may-13-2026-regular-board-meeting/

Prompted from a comment by u/Nomadic_Houseplant that their 2nd grade was going to have a class ratio of 28:1, far above the WSS ratio, it occurred to me that folks might want to dice their own purplebook data. In the past, I've written custom parsers, but that's not super accessible. So let's see how to do this with Claude really fast!

First, you download the purplebooks you want from SPS's website. I usually seach "SPS Purple book 2026" and the first link has it.

Then I opened up claude and uploaded the file gave it this prompt:

This is the "Purple book" for SPS district.  After the intro text, it is a 
repeated format listing funding and staffing allocations per school.

I want you to go through all Elementary Schools (first section of schools) and 
for each school:
  (1) Projected enrollment for K-3, and 4-5 cohorts
  (2) find #FTE of Teacher K-3 and #FTE of Teacher 4-5
  (3) Produce me a table of # students per FTE for both cohorts for each school.

Sort the table in order of highest # students per FTE.

This produced a table like the following

Initial Table view of Elementary ratios based on Claude data

Next, I downloaded the two prior year purple books and uploaded them with the following prompt

here are the last 2 years data. Please add to table for comparisons with the current
year. Sorting should be done by current year data.

and yes, I don't bother copy editing my prompts. (It's not really understanding the grammar directly anyways :P). That created an artifact the following where you can see ratios over the years. It's informative to look at best and worst average student teacher ratio. Here it is sorted by worst ratio

3 years of purplebook ratio data put side by side sorted by worst student/teacher ratio in K-3

Here it is sorted by best ratio where you can see shuffling around of FTE along with some dramatic improvements in certain schools

3 years of purplebook ratio data put side by side sorted by best student/teacher ratio in K-3

Of course some of this seems nonsensical. The original comment prompting this was citing two 28-children classrooms this year in the allocation model. So, let's ask claude to do more. Next prompt was

For each school in each year, attempt to assign the teacher FTE to the grade-levels
of students.  Create a table of the results and highlight any situation that ends
up causing a grade to get over target ratio listed in their purplebook.

This produced a graph that is starting to show some interesting things but which also has numbers that seem insane (48 students to one teacher in North Beach 4th grade? No way)

AI Attempt to assign teachers to classes to produce class-ratios per grade

So I fed this back into claude and had a dialogue with 4 more prompts (mid-point artifact elided)

some of these ratios seem impossibly high. 48:1 and 45:1 seem impossible. Update your
assignment logic. Also ensure that the total assigned per grade sums to the right FTE
from the purplebook for the school.

does that mean they have to create a split class?

can you update the highlight background to get more intense as the over-targeting gets
worse?  And can you ensure you are using a color-blind friendly colorscheme?

make this into a single standalone html publishable artifact

Add big caveat that is an AI guess and may be entirely wrong.

The final result was a graph that looked this like the following:

Final chart of AI assignments for grade levels

Some of these still seem insanely high (eg 39:1 in Concord for 5th grade), but as an exploration tool, it can guide focus for questions.

Anyways... point is, if you want to crunch data, you can use AI to help produce these things. But, unless you've verified it is doing the right thing, use it as a way to think of new questions instead of as a definitive analysis. Cause I really don't think we have so many 36:1 teaching ratios across the board.

Here is the final artifact with the AI attempt to assign teacher to grades (low confidence in correctness):
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/44b7b0aa-2c8e-496b-8e34-ed99af0cefb5

Here is the initial Visual Table for just one year (medium confidence in correctness):
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/a86bbe47-f5ec-4b62-8c92-62a81e06975c

And here's the multi-year variant:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b16138de-a86d-4998-b2ba-ea99254fad13

Somehow the cellphone policy got the airtime out of the April 29th meeting, but for me the far more wide-reaching and rich presentation was the "Top 5 in 5" goal framework and the related North Star of

>One North Star: Make SPS the best urban school system in America — where any family can confidently enroll any student and expect a district that is top five in performance within five years, with performance visible across every student group.

Now clearly we're not there and I'm sure there's a bunch of snark that people can throw at this, but at the same time, this is the first time I've seen such a crisp set of goals presented.

Curious folks think?

Also, just as a person note, this is the first time I've *ever* seen the district actually present the General Fund Balance actuals displaying that the Actuals deficit is "only" about 40M, 20M, 30M each year instead of the inflated 100M budget deficit they keep citing.

Screenshot of last slide in dec showing Fund Balance from FY22 to FY25 and projections to FY31

If you want to compare to the SPS by the numbers charts, look at the Vitals dashboard for Beginning Balance and zoom in.

Screenshot of SPS By The Numbers Vitals dashboard for Beginning Balance showing the same numbers. 2023 here is FY22 in the SPS presentation.

This is heartening for me to see the real numbers show up.

And not to tangent too far away from the 5x5 goals, but one thing that worries me still about the fund balance is that it does indeed swing by ~100M from the high in Sept to the low. in June. So looking at the Feb 2026 report page 4 chart, we are not in great shape.

Feb 2026 Fiscal report chart of General Fund balance by month. June low is the balance low-point. 2 years ago it was ~40M. Last year it was ~20M. This year consistently ~15M lower or more at every data point. What will happen?

I wonder what Jun will look like. We're skirting $0.