Welcome to School Board Director (District IV) Michael DeBell's Blog
The new Student Assignment Plan
On June 3rd a comprehensive overhaul of Seattle's assignment plan will be introduced as a board motion. There will be a public hearing on June 10th (sign up to testify at the Board office 252-0040) and a vote on June 17th. This is the next step in a process that began two years ago with a framework adoption and will continue into the fall with the drawing of attendance area maps (also to be voted on by the Board). Over the past forty years, Seattle has had mandatory desegregation busing, a phase out of busing to controlled choice and for the past twelve years, open choice- the ability to choose any school in the district. Each of these has had their major problems and unintended consequences- books have been written about these issues so I won't elaborate. I will observe that the goal of better serving poor students of color in meeting their academic potential seemed to get lost in the efforts to desegregate individual school populations. Transportation costs drain resources from instruction and ease of movement, decentralization and lack of accountability weakened many high poverty schools.
The new plan seeks to retain some choice (with less all city transportation) while also supplying a predictable pathway for every household K-12. This is a move toward the enrollment patterns of most school districts in the United States. Open choice and its variants are relatively rare and have been costly and complicated in districts like Boston and San Francisco. Presently, a majority of students in Seattle do NOT attend their reference area (typically nearest) school. Open choice has lead to careful searches by many parents to find a school or program that is the best fit for their student. This will not disappear with the new plan but it may diminish over time. An option (alternative or non-traditional school) choice will be available for every student at the K-8 level and two options (Nova and The Center School) at HS. Additionally, families can still apply to any school with a chance to enroll based on space availability. Sibling is the first tie breaker (after attendance area which is an assured seat rather than a tie breaker), followed by lottery.
I believe this is a good balance between choice- a recognition of the range and variety of schools and programs at all grade levels and stability and predictability which reduce anxiety, promote neighborhood involvement, insure a nearby school for all families and may increase public school enrollment. The biggest challenge is insuring that all schools are high quality, which goes back to the earlier point about decentralization and accountability. The new input provided to high poverty schools under open choice was money- a necessary but not sufficient factor. Under the Excellence for All strategic plan, a range of interventions and accountability measures are designed to make maximum use of the extra resources. It has been a slow process to develop but it holds promise and has been effective in other urban districts. A cautionary note- earned autonomy is supposed to insure the continuance of creative and high performing schools. Intervention in low performing schools should not translate into standardization at all schools. That would certainly diminish the accomplishments of the last dozen years in developing high achieving, neighborhood engaged schools across the city.
Public input is welcome and needed as the School Board takes the next step in this process.
06/02/2009 | 
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District Four includes Ballard, Queen Anne, Magnolia and Downtown as well as the following schools:
- Adams Elementary
- Ballard High School
- Catherine Blaine K-8
- The Center School (non-traditional) HS
- Coe Elementary
- John Hay Elementary
- Lawton Elementary
- McClure Middle School
- Salmon Bay K-8
- Secondary Bilingual Orientation Center 6-12 English Language Learners
- West Woodland Elementary
3 Comments |Add your own
1. Karrie Sanderson | June 2nd, 2009 at 1:48 PM
Thanks for all of your hard work - it is much appreciated. The new SAP is very much a step in the right direction in many aspects. I only have one issue. I am VERY concerned that the sibling tiebreaker is not first (or that reference area comes first, however you want to phrase it). This will break up so many families. OR those families will choose to pull their upper grade children out of their current school and send them to the reference school. That could create a lot of chaos at the upper grades at the expense of the intended less chaos at the lower grades. Please encourage the staff to reconsider/reorder these tiebreakers. Regards, Karrie Sanderson
2. Charlie Mas | June 3rd, 2009 at 1:54 AM
The New Student Assignment Plan is generally good and it is a positive step forward. The real benefit doesn't comes as much from the right-sized attendance areas as it comes from the assurance of access to your attendance area school. Good job. Shame it is two years late. It could still use some work. The New Student Assignment Plan doesn't offer enough equity in access to unique CTE programs in the high schools. There is no provision for it at all. I thought one of the primary points of this effort was to improve equity of access to quality programs. Some of the highest quality programs in our high schools are CTE programs and academies. They are not equitably distributed around the district, so some effort is needed in the rules to create equitable access. Making Cleveland an Option school would be a good first step. The suggestion that every elementary school will have an ALO is absurd. The District cannot assure the quality and efficacy of the few it has now. Without quality assurance they will be ALOs in name only - much as we now have Spectrum in name only at a number of locations. Why is it necessary that every elementary school offer an ALO but not necessary that any of the middle schools offer one? That just doesn't make any sense at all. A student in an ALO in the fifth grade is doing sixth grade work. Then that student will repeat the sixth grade work in the sixth grade. Is that the plan? The Board needs to use the opportunity of the New Student Assignment Plan to place north-end elementary APP in the north-end. It is what makes sense, it is the best practice in program placement, it is required by Board Policy C56.00, it is required by Board Policy D12.00, and it is the improved access that was promised with the APP split. What next? Will you place the Montessori program for West Seattle at Hawthorne? It is unclear what will happen with the space available in schools after Open Enrollment. It seems that Open Enrollment will be followed by a sort of a Land Rush as the District announces five available seats here and two available seats there. How many seats at each school will be held open for students who come after Open Enrollment or might move into the neighborhood between March and September? It's not clear and needs explanation. What will be the target sizes of the attendance areas? If a school can hold 350 will the attendance area be only so big that it captures 350 schoolage children? Will it be bigger so that it captures 350 public school children? Will it be bigger than that so that it captures 350 public school children who are likely to choose an attendance area school? Where is the Board guidance on attendance area capture?
3. Cecily Novak | June 16th, 2009 at 5:11 PM
Please consider grandfathering in sibling attendance as the first assignment criteria. Having a family split between two schools really is not an option for the great majority of families. The only viable option then - taking a child out of a his school community - is a painful and I think, unnecessary route.