r/seattlepublicschools

Per an email in response to a request from Supt Shuldiner to get in touch with me about some concerns I'd raised, Paula Montgomery, the district's director of highly capable programming, wrote that "While there was not an announcement there was a system decision that a student’s special education service model was not a barrier to enrolling in HC sites."

In an email to me, she said parents with questions about this can email her at plmontgomery@seattleschools.org

So parents with kids in Extended Resource or other SPED programming beyond Resource who are also HC eligible: your kid can go to a cohort school AND get their SPED supports.

But I think the district needs to hear that it's not cool that this systems was made, but not communicated to families. Or at least not done so in some way that'll get the information out broadly. (I followed up with an email to Ms Montgomery & Supt Shuldiner pointing out how problematic this is.)

[removed]

Here we go again.

Trying to do more of a newsletter update with this one, covering three topics:

1. Shuldiner spoke more directly about school closures on KUOW this week. And it kind of sounded to me like he contradicted himself at times, saying we're in a "budget crisis" and we can't take ideas off the table, but then that closures are "not really about budget." I heard echoes of Brent Jones and Fred Podesta in 2023-24 right there, honestly. But Shuldiner doesn't have concrete plans and says he doesn't want to do closures "by fiat." We'll see what happens...

2. At Wednesday's board meeting Shuldiner took a moment to encourage people to push the state legislature to raise levy caps. He's right, but it's also going to be controversial, for reasons I get into in the article.

3. SEA sent a letter to Shuldiner expressing "deep concern" about Anitra Jones being appointed principal at Adams and that SPS hadn't properly investigated her at Rainier View. blukoff posted about that letter here earlier this week.

What did she actually do. I don’t care that there were a lot of complaints. I don’t care that people feel like she created a “hostile work environment.” I don’t care that complaints were ignored by SPS. Frankly, people turn up the volume on their indignancy for every damn thing so I don’t trust any of it. So I want to hear from someone who actually knows - what decisions did Anitra Jones make at Rainier that actually made things worse?

The Upshot posted an analysis of national school enrollment trends this week. I took a minute to see where Seattle fits in. TLDR:

• We are not alone. School districts across the country are facing declining enrollment and budget shortfalls due to demographic declines, and a crash in the fertility rate after the financial crisis. But, there are other factors, and some are hit harder than most.
• Districts that were impacted the hardest had these factors in common:
  • High housing costs driving families to the suburbs
  • Competition from private schools that kept students after the pandemic
  • Large immigrant populations in decline due to the recent crackdown

Here's where Seattle fits in:

• Washington enrollment grew 2% over the past decade
• Pudget Sound grew 1%
• Seattle Enrollment dropped -8.2% 2019 - 2025 (the years available)

That puts us on par with the top 25 districts losing students, but nowhere near as bad as LA, Houston, and Chicago.

Check it out:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/upshot/public-schools-enrollment-crisis.html

https://www.seattleschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Seattle_Enrollment-Demogr-trends_March_2024_ada.pdf

Seattle vs National Trends

I remember reading here how we are below where we need to be and are now goaling to become top 5 in 5 years. Are these two reports looking at different data?

I just saw them post this on Facebook -- but it's a PDF (https://www.washingtonea.org/file\_viewer.php?id=67562). So here's the extracted text:

>Dear Superintendent Shuldiner,

>In recent weeks, you have announced the placement of Anitra Pinchback-Jones at Adams Elementary despite years of allegations of harm to students, staff, and families.

>In a meeting with Adams Elementary families on April 20th and at the SPS Board meeting on April 22, you stated that there are no disciplinary actions in Ms. Jones’s personnel file despite founded violations of state labor law and IDEA during her tenure at Rainier View Elementary and that her evaluations show no indications of performance concerns. This also means that the many complaints and allegations from families either were not investigated or resulted in no findings.

>This has caused great concern for SEA leadership and our members.

>SEA is deeply concerned that District leaders failed to act on founded complaints that Ms. Jones violated state and federal law and SPS policies and a disturbing pattern that all concerns investigated by SPS resulted in no findings. A special education complaint filed by RVE PTSA to OSPI found violations of IDEA and concluded that District policies and processes were not followed at RVE during her tenure. Did the district investigate whether Principal Jones was responsible for these violations? In November 2024, Ms. Jones was found to have violated state labor law for discriminating against and retaliating against staff who exercised their union rights. SPS policy prohibits retaliation. Did an SPS investigation occur as to whether the actions of Ms. Jones violated SPS policy? In April 2025, the Attorney General filed a lawsuit against SPS for violations of state law providing workplace protections for pumping and pregnant people. This stemmed from multiple complaints from RVE educators in the 23-24 school year. Was Ms. Jones investigated for violating state law and district policy at this time?

>We call on you to conduct an investigation into the failure of SPS leaders to investigate and address with fidelity, family and staff complaints, and founded law and policy violations against Anitra Jones. District leaders who are responsible for failing to hold Jones accountable should themselves be held accountable. All investigations conducted into parent and staff complaints/allegations about the conduct of Anitra Jones toward students and staff should be reviewed. We ask that you review all complaints lodged against Ms. Jones and confirm that they were investigated. If uninvestigated complaints are found, we ask that you take immediate action to investigate those complaints.

>We believe that the record will show that multiple individuals still currently holding SPS leadership roles did not respond to, investigate, or act on concerns/complaints/allegations/violations with fidelity and in alignment with SPS policies and procedures. If so, those individuals should be held accountable.

>You have also stated that state law and an internal SPS document require you to place Ms. Jones in an elementary principal position. This “internal document” should be shared publicly and reviewed as to the legal viability and authenticity of such a document. We ask that it be confirmed that this internal document was actually approved and signed by former superintendent Brent Jones.

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

Apologies it took a week to get this one written up and published, but it's a big and important article. I thought what Shuldiner presented last week was a genuinely major update on SPS budgeting, signaling *potentially* major changes to what the district funds and how it operates.

I emphasized the word "potentially" there because it's not yet entirely clear what specifically is going to change in the coming years. There's $30M in savings projected in 2027-28 and who knows exactly where that comes from (changes to the SEA contract? closing schools? something else?).

But if Shuldiner is serious about a genuine "per-pupil" funding model, sometimes known as "student-based budgeting" then the impact could be far-reaching.

It's also possible that it could cause a strong pushback. SEA is already clearly unhappy with the current staffing changes and is speaking out in large numbers at tonight's meeting.

Whatever happens in the future (months of conflict? kumbaya and happy days?), I think 1) this is a significant moment and 2) it was really good to see a no-BS budget presentation from SPS leadership for a change.

Surprised not to see this up yet! Blaring closure vibes. I admit as a parent and advocate I am not that moved by the thought that we should create school deserts to give teachers exact same grade colleagues in the building, but our split experience was bad enough (and shared by so many of our peers) that avoiding those might be worth a couple mergers.

I'll set aside whether it's a good metric or biased but I want to highlight something that I think is important. If the district is going to goal on this, they should goal on 5th grade and 8th. If the only goal is at 6th grade math, nobody will own the results. The middle schools will say the foundations are not there, they came to us without hitting the standards and there is only so much we can recover in a year. The elementary schools will continue to not be held responsible. If we have one at the end of the elementary and end of middle school, you will have a much clear picture of how each school is growing their students.

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

Hi! Contemplating moving my family to the Seattle suburbs and looking for specific schools to build our house hunt around. I'm looking for public or charter options that are forest schools OR a school in a beautiful natural area that has a strong STEM program or leans heavily into project based learning OR a charter Montessori that has a strong outdoor componet. Any leads? Thanks! Also, just adding that we are relocating from Orange County, CA where the concept of a forest school is....well....non existent here so I have heard there are a lot of schools like this in the area but if you could give specific recommendations that would save me in my searching which is harder than I anticipated.

Written by Claire Bryan, Seattle Times.

Here is the link to the post from last week about SEA election results.