Rainy Day Roundup December 16, 2024
Rainy Day Recess Season 1, Episode 4

[00:00:02] Christie Robertson: Welcome to the Rainy Day Recess podcast, where we study and discuss Seattle Public Schools. This is Christie Robertson. 

[00:00:11] Jasmine Pulido: I'm Jasmine Pulido.

[00:00:12] Christie Robertson: Today we are bringing you your Rainy Day Rundown, where we talk about the last week or so related to Seattle Public Schools.

Listener Feedback

[00:00:21] Jasmine Pulido: We are piloting a new segment on listener feedback because we actually do get a lot of great emails from our listeners. 

[00:00:27] Christie Robertson: We're going to highlight a couple today, with permission from the people who wrote in.

[00:00:35] Jasmine Pulido: do you want to start with the first one, Christie?

[00:00:37] Christie Robertson: Sure, here's what the listener said. 

"Really appreciate the focus on covering the meetings and news and the way that I, a working parent with three kids in SPS, can digest and understand. Keep up the great work." 

Thank you. 

"Also, I'm very curious about an SPS public policy survey I was sent by text in November. The questions were about if our households had considered private school, what we valued about our experience, and how the district met or didn't meet our expectations. What influenced my decisions? How I felt about SPS and public education in general. 

Honestly, shocking that they haven't done this before. I'm a UX designer, and this sort of customer experience data is the starting point of any successful service or product design. 

Do we know when the district is going to be getting that done? Publishing reports? 

This information seems super important, given the closures. I'll only speak for myself, but we relish the smallish elementary school our kids have attended, and honestly, would probably not have considered a 500-plus student school for K-5 a valid option for our family. The district has admitted that it really has no clue who they are serving or what parents want, so this is crucial data."

[00:01:47] Jasmine Pulido: What'd you think about the email?

[00:01:49] Christie Robertson: it was great to hear what kinds of questions they're asking. To answer the question about when is this getting done. We think January is when the results are supposed to come out, which is very soon. And I would think they would have to be done actually collecting the data very quickly because they have to have time to compile and analyze the data. 

[00:02:07] Jasmine Pulido: I wonder why it took so long to actually conduct an enrollment study? Were they just not concerned about enrollment? 

[00:02:16] Christie Robertson: No, I think that losing enrollment in my history of Seattle Public Schools has not been a focus.

[00:02:21] Jasmine Pulido: For what reason? 

[00:02:23] Christie Robertson: I think partially because of trying to center more marginalized families and voices, there's also been a move away from the concerns of families who have the money to leave. 

[00:02:37] Jasmine Pulido: Oh, I see.

[00:02:39] Christie Robertson: So that's my perception of the change. 

[00:02:44] Jasmine Pulido: this is a good nudge to us to get an enrollment expert on maybe to talk more about what's going on there, especially around enrollment and waitlists. 

[00:02:56] Christie Robertson: And option schools and HCC all are part of that conversation. 

[00:03:01] Jasmine Pulido: it's all together. 

[00:03:01] Christie Robertson: Do you want to take care of our other listener?

[00:03:04] Jasmine Pulido: sure. This was actually in response to our first episode, Bomb Cyclone, about the school board meeting in which they ended up planning to pull the preliminary recommendations to close up to four schools. So I will read it to you here. 

"First of all, thank you for this podcast. I had heard about it from other parents and have essentially binged it over the past month with all the pending school closures. With the recall failing, I was prompted again to reach out. After watching the board meeting online, I was mostly stunned. The board was the impetus for the superintendent to close schools, right? It was frustrating to watch Liza break down in tears and promptly cancel plans over something that has been driving district leadership for easily six to twelve months. I still cannot understand this about-face. How much money has been spent on this potential closure plan? How much agony, anxiety, and emotional toil has this caused students, families, and teachers? 

But what I wanted to really reach out about was Michelle Sarju saying during her response time, 'Do we need to close schools? The answer to that is yes'.

So I guess I'm left with, what is the plan? Will the district come back with another slate of schools to close? Were Liza and Michelle just disappointed the district didn't propose closing the schools with a more concrete plan? And then I read today Liza is still talking about school closures, so did Michelle talk her into it? Was it just a bad day for her last Tuesday? 

And maybe SPS does need to close schools, but just not the schools they selected? I think parents have proven closing schools will not effectively make any sizable difference in the budget deficit. And maybe SPS operates too many schools, but that issue may need to be separated a bit from this, quote, crisis.

 Liza may have her heart in the right place, but I do think it's pretty clear we do not have the leadership right now in the district that our students need or deserve.

 Keep up the good work. I'm sharing your podcast with others."

[00:04:59] Christie Robertson: So, thanks so much for writing in. Yeah, what do you think about that, Jas?

[00:05:03] Jasmine Pulido: the first thing I thought was I think there are a lot of listeners that have all of these same questions. And I would be really curious to get an answer to how much money was spent on this potential closure plan. This is an interesting point where the listener has discerned between the district operating too many schools and this quote-unquote crisis.

[00:05:28] Christie Robertson: Yeah, I think in the interview with director Mizrahi at Seattle Hall Pass, he talked about as a union leader, if they were going to downsize an organization, He would want it to be with an idea toward what's the ideal size of this organization and how can we plan for that to be done effectively. And that would be so much better than "Oh my God, budget crisis, cut some people right now." And that it's going to be much less effective to do it the second way. Cause you're not able to really think through and plan 

[00:06:01] Jasmine Pulido: Right, coming from a reactive place. 

[00:06:04] Christie Robertson: So he was saying maybe the district does need to right size, but that should be separate than the budget conversation and should be done very thoughtfully and in a long term thinking kind of way. 

[00:06:17] Jasmine Pulido: Mm hmm. And just to answer some of these questions, will the district come back with another slate of schools to close? I'm going to say probably. 

[00:06:24] Christie Robertson: Not for 25/26. 

[00:06:26] Jasmine Pulido: not for 25/26, but there's been a lot of conversation around, we're not saying that we're never going to close schools ever. We're just saying we're not going to close it for 25/26 because the plan on how we're going to do it isn't enough for us to vote on it. So that answers the other question, were Liza and Michelle just disappointed the district didn't propose closing the schools with a more concrete plan? And the answer is yes. Correct?

[00:06:52] Christie Robertson: But here's the thing, Jas. The first plan was all about option schools and getting rid of all or most of the option schools. And then they heard back from community that, Wow, we really weren't taking into consideration all the different roles that option schools fulfill. And how important those schools are to our overall school community. So then they said, forget it, we're not going to close any option schools. And what's important is that we keep schools together, and we'll pick four schools that are gonna be able to be completely merged together into one school. And theoretically. I think they were just as bought into that idea as they were theoretically bought into the option school idea.

But then, once you start actually digging into it and talking to community, you realize, "Wow, that doesn't make things easy. There's still so many issues to consider." And "Wow, this is having a big impact on kids with disabilities." And "look, there's going to be problems with capacity" I can't see how they can bring a school closure plan that is going to resolve every single issue that comes up when you're talking about actual school communities. So, how is there ever going to be a plan that is going to be satisfying?

I really liked what Alex Wakeman Rouse suggested, which is if we can put a task force together that will be able to talk about the trade offs instead of bringing the community in at the very last step. I think there would be a lot more buy-in into how this happens.

[00:08:38] Jasmine Pulido: you sent me that link a little while ago about the problem with community hearings. It was this short video that was about how community input is like the very last step. And because that is the default structure for a lot of government entities, What ends up happening is that it really doesn't matter what the community says because they've already put all of the steps into place, And the community input is more of a check box part of the process than "we are really listening to community." And so, one of the things the video suggested is putting community input in the beginning. And one of the ways you can do that is with a task force. 

[00:09:13] Christie Robertson: Yeah. And I remember another thing that the article talked about is with community hearings at the end, like a just show up and testify that does give more voice to the privileged voices. And if it gets derailed, it often is because it's like someone from that legislator's district or somebody who can muscle the power to just scare them out of the plan.

Putting it at the beginning also helps with that because you can thoughtfully put together a task force or a group of citizens that you want to get feedback from.

[00:09:45] Jasmine Pulido: And it also was saying, when you put it at the end, the people that come out are usually the people who just don't want it to happen. And I'm sure that has other implications as well, like, maybe legislators just are so desensitized to the fact that they know community is just going to say no over and over again. And they're like, "They're saying no, but...” 

[00:10:03] Christie Robertson: "But they always so no." 

[00:10:04] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, “they always say no, and we need to do something. And so we don't want to start over.” And that's kind of what we've seen happen here. So I will link that video in the show notes because it was really interesting to think about. 

So, I think that there are some things we could do structurally that can make it a more intentional process. Shoreline has been dealing with their own deficit. They had put together a task force for the entire year to figure out what school or schools were going to close for the following year. They came down to one school and guess what happened? Their enrollment went up so they didn't have to close any school. That process was having the same time as our up to 20 schools closing. And I was like, " Why are we doing it this way? Like look, there's this district right next to us that has a similar problem and seems to be approaching it in a much more intentional way where communities brought along." 

[00:11:03] Christie Robertson:  We also discussed with Alex the idea of task forces, and then in the previous episode, we talked about the audit meeting, and President Rankin pointed out that this is the fewest number of task forces and such advisory groups that she's ever seen in Seattle Public Schools. We really have a hole there right now.  

Special School Board meeting, Dec 11, 2024

[00:11:21] Christie Robertson: let's talk about the December 11th special school board meeting. This meeting had one agenda item, which was to get a draft set of goals and guardrails for the strategic plan for the next five years. 

This process began in August with the brainstorming session, and they've gone through a couple of back-and-forths with the district. And this was the day they needed to settle on what goals and guardrails they're going to have.

The district proposed three goals. Basically, the same genre of goals that we've had, which is third-grade reading, seventh-grade math, and a life-ready goal. The board after about two hours of discussion, settled on two goals. They picked the reading goal, but they focused it on second grade instead of third grade, And then a life-ready goal. 

The early literacy goal is: 

"The percentage of students in second grade that meet or exceed key grade-level standards for foundational literacy skills will increase from a baseline yet to be named in June 2025 to a target yet to be named in June 2030."

They haven't named the specific percentages, but they did decide that they are basically looking for a 10% increase in five years.

[00:12:39] Jasmine Pulido: Okay,

[00:12:41] Christie Robertson: What are your thoughts on that? 

[00:12:41] Jasmine Pulido: I guess my first thought is the number 10% , is it arbitrary? Have we seen other school districts able to do this sort of increase? Is it realistic to think of a linear increase?

[00:12:54] Christie Robertson: they had a big discussion about that. If you remember, the current goal was 

[00:13:00] Jasmine Pulido: Exorbitant. Like, 35% or something. 

[00:13:05] Christie Robertson: specifically targeted at African American males, which this one is not. This is a general goal. 

[00:13:09] Jasmine Pulido: Oh, that's good to point out.

[00:13:11] Christie Robertson: I think their idea was if we aim high, then maybe we won't get that high, but we'll get higher. But they all said, "Okay, lesson learned, that was too high. "

Here's Director Sarju, you expressing that sentiment. 

[00:13:22] Michelle Sarju: 40 to 70%, that was, I mean, woo wee, lesson learned for the adults in the room.

[00:13:29] Jasmine Pulido: Hmm. That's good. I'm glad they reflected on that. 

[00:13:32] Christie Robertson: and Michelle Sarju specifically did say “Are you telling me that 10% growth over five years is ambitious?” 

[00:13:37] Michelle Sarju: Did you just say 10% over five years is a stretch goal?

[00:13:43] Christie Robertson: And Brandon Hersey, who was a second-grade, ELA teacher, said, “yeah, it's both attainable and ambitious.” S,o he thinks it is in the sweet spot.

[00:13:54] Brandon Hersey: having taught second grade, I think that 10% over 5 years, especially if you're thinking about the target population and where they are now, is both reasonable and a stretch goal, right?

[00:14:10] Christie Robertson: So here's my concern, especially given Student Outcomes Focused Governance, where the board's attention is supposed to be basically solely on measuring the goals. 10% growth over five years is 2% growth a year. The variation between years is just the random variation is going to be in that range. And they're supposed to be doing quarterly monitoring of goals. So you're going to be monitoring this goal, and you're going to have no idea. If it went down by 1%, that might not mean anything. So, any individual data session is going to be meaningless until you get to that five-year mark. Then you maybe can look back and say, did we go up 10% or not? Meanwhile, kids have gone through five years of school. 

[00:14:29] Jasmine Pulido: Some will have been in middle school and graduated by then, yeah.

[00:15:04] Christie Robertson: And this makes me super question this model because I agree that 10% probably is around the right target. So you're looking at, if it's 2% growth a year, it's like you're looking for half a percent growth per quarter. You're not going to be able to tell that. And so then the board is basically being useless in those monitoring sessions. Meanwhile, they're not supposed to comment on any of the practical things that I think they and the communities that are talking to them know could make a difference, such as they had a discussion on how school counseling could really impact kids. But they're not really supposed to talk about that. 

They're talking about leaving the audit committee. That's where a lot of the strategies that the school district takes. They're moving themselves more and more out of weighing in on those things. So if the only thing that can weigh in is a half-a-percent growth per quarter that is well within the margin of error... 

[00:15:53] Jasmine Pulido: And they're not commenting on any technical or tactical strategies. 

[00:16:07] Christie Robertson: right. So the questions are supposed to be like, “How did the strategies that you picked work?” Like even if, say, it went up 2% in a quarter, which I still just wouldn't be surprised about happening in a random manner, but say that it went up and their role by Student Outcomes Focused Governance would be to say, which of the strategies that you are using, caused this 2% increase?

And that's the second problem is that this framework isn't designed to answer that question. Like they are throwing a bunch of strategies at the wall. And there's no way for them to tell which one is working or not working, or again if it's random variation. So there's no way for the district to really answer that question if they do ask it. So another way that I think that this role is not going to be effective.

[00:17:00] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, I hear that. 

[00:17:01] Christie Robertson: I think that on the top line, this is a good goal. But I guess that, unfortunately, all this makes me think about is the difficulties with Student Outcomes Focused Governance. 

[00:17:12] Jasmine Pulido: And before Student Outcomes Focused Governance, did we have goals that looked like this? Or is this model all related to Student Outcomes Focused Governance? 

[00:17:21] Christie Robertson: That's a good question. The sitting and measuring the outcomes is totally new. Those documents that come to them. Which I generally really like. It's so great to see data. And to know that they're actually paying attention to data on that level. It's the time scale of the changes that make it a problem for the board to really have any kind of influence. Let alone that board terms are like four years. And 

[00:17:48] Jasmine Pulido: Oh, right. 

[00:17:49] Christie Robertson: there's change outs every two years.

[00:17:51] Jasmine Pulido: I guess the other thing I think about is the way that we're measuring outcome is by testing and yeah, I don't know about that.

[00:17:58] Christie Robertson: I want to play an interesting clip of Brandon Hersey regarding that. 

[00:18:04] Brandon Hersey: at some phase, when you boil it down, there's not a big difference in teaching the test and teaching a child to read. I think that there is an over reliance in some spaces of like, oh, like you're teaching to the test or X, Y, and Z. At that age, it's teaching a kid to read, right? I think it's the way that we do it and the tools and the resources and the energy that we put into it, but the content and the context are largely the same. 

[00:18:32] Christie Robertson:So he feels if you're teaching to the test, you're teaching to, "Can kids read?" And that's okay for this particular case. 

[00:18:38] Jasmine Pulido: so there's a reading one, but then is there still a math one? 

[00:18:42] Christie Robertson: No. 

[00:18:48] Jasmine Pulido: Oh, there's no math one. Okay.

[00:18:52] I guess maybe you would say, so all we care about for third graders is they read? Because you can't measure like, are they good citizens or do they feel emotionally comfortable? Are they excited about learning, or... 

[00:18:57] Jasmine Pulido: Oh, gosh, yeah, there is a question to be had about whether this structure is distracting us away from the wholeness a student. If the board's only focus is test scores for reading in second grade, what might we be sacrificing outside of that so that we can feel good about this one metric or two metrics because we have two metrics? The other one is life-ready, yeah?

[00:19:34] Christie Robertson: that's a big question. Playing the advocate of SOFG - making sure that other things aren't unduly sacrificed for that goal could sit to some degree in the guardrails. Make sure on the way to this, you don't do these things. But that's just something to ponder.

Oh, were we going to talk about the life-ready goal?

[00:19:57] Jasmine Pulido: Maybe we could just say a word or two about life-ready goal

[00:20:04] Christie Robertson: Okay. so the life-ready goal was: 

"the percentage of students who successfully complete a state graduation pathway plus any additional requirements to take the next step they want to pursue after high school." 

Initially, they were playing with an idea called Diploma Plus and they ended up ditching that. One question came out of the audit committee. Should we invent a whole new term and a whole new concept versus we know what's going to help? Like just kids need more counseling on their future. And Director Bragg, who is a student director, had some great thoughts on this. 

[00:20:59] Colin Bragg: From a student perspective, Diploma Plus once again comes into just adding on to stuff we already should be working on, and you brought up counselors before I was actually going to. A lot of students don't even know how they graduate. They don't know what the requirements are. They need to know how they get there and they need support within their schools. I need to be able to say that I've met with my counselor more than two times about my readiness plan. We talk about pathway learning a lot. Most students don't know what pathway they're on. If I ask anybody at my school, “Hey, do you know what the CTE pathway is?” They have no idea what I'm saying. So a strong finish, to me, does not look like Diploma Plus. It looks like students knowing how they finish and getting the support within their schools. 

[00:21:27] Christie Robertson: And then Sarju also raised the same point about “we just need to put more effort into actual counseling students because it seems like it's not happening.” 

[00:21:37] Michelle Sarju: I've been watching you nodding your head. I don't know, are you in high school? Okay, so we got somebody in the audience who's been nodding the whole time. I think we need to listen to the experts in the room. They're telling us that if counselors actually had the capacity to do their jobs, they could actually fulfill what is the state plan. And that's what we need to focus on. 

[00:21:57] Christie Robertson: One last note I want to say about this is they've talked about that budgets are moral documents. The budget should reflect what their goals are. So this would be a great place where I would expect, if they do develop a strategy of increasing counselor access, to actually say, “how much money are you going to put? How many more counselors?” I would love to see strategies come to the board on that level. “Our strategy is more counselor time, and here's how much it's going to cost, and here's what we're going to take it from, because we think this actually will lead to better outcomes than the other thing that we were doing.”

[00:22:34] Christie Robertson: So the other part is the guardrails. I find the wording really confusing. 

[00:22:39] Jasmine Pulido: I know. 

[00:22:44] Christie Robertson: I'm going to read the ChatGPT version. 

[00:22:47] Jasmine Pulido: how about I read the original guardrail, then you read the ChatGPT version. 

[00:22:52] Christie Robertson: Okay. 

[00:22:53] Jasmine Pulido: Okay. 

[00:22:53] Christie Robertson: but dude, somebody in the office needs to the guardrails through some kind of simplifier because it's supposed to be understandable to, like, a sixth-grade level. 

[00:23:01] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah. And as a writer, I grit my teeth when I'm reading this.

[00:23:04] Christie Robertson: because ten people wordsmithing this in public at a limited-time meeting is the worst way to get the right wording. 

[00:23:10] Jasmine Pulido: So I'll read the first one and then you read the ChatGPT version. 

 "The superintendent will not allow inequitable access to high-quality instruction and educational opportunities for any student."

[00:23:24] Christie Robertson: Okay, ChatGPT says 

“The superintendent must not allow any student to be denied equal access to high-quality education or learning opportunities." 

[00:23:32] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, that sounds way better. Okay, second one. 

"The superintendent will not allow learning environments that do not promote physical and emotional safety."

[00:23:41] Christie Robertson: ChatGPT says, 

"The superintendent must not permit any school environment that compromises students physical or emotional safety."

[00:23:49] Jasmine Pulido: And number three, 

"The superintendent will not allow the use of curricula and materials that do not reflect the diversity and anti-racist values of Seattle Public Schools."

[00:23:59] Christie Robertson: Number three, 

"The superintendent must not allow the use of teaching materials or curricula that fail to represent diverse cultures or uphold the district's anti-racist values."

[00:24:08] Jasmine Pulido: The next one is 

"The superintendent will not make major decisions or bring major recommendations to the board without first implementing an engagement strategy, including students, parents, educators, and community members."

[00:24:21] Christie Robertson: Number four, 

"The superintendent must not make major policy decisions without consulting students, families, educators, and community members. 

[00:24:27] Jasmine Pulido: And the fifth one is 

"The superintendent will not allow the allocation of resources to be distributed inequitably."

[00:24:34] Christie Robertson: Number five, 

"The superintendent must not allow inequitable allocation of district resources, including funding staff or materials."

[00:24:41] Christie Robertson: Okay, last note. None of this is going to matter if they don't monitor the guardrails, which they stopped doing. They put them as an appendix at a board meeting. 

[00:24:49] Jasmine Pulido: Oh, that's right. 

[00:24:50] Christie Robertson: That's not enough attention.

[00:24:51] Jasmine Pulido: it was brought up in testimony a couple of times. 

Legislature

[00:24:57] Jasmine Pulido: Should we talk about the legislature? 

[00:24:59] Christie Robertson: Yes, let's talk about the legislature. There were two committee meetings this week that would be of interest to our listeners, I think. 

[00:25:05] Jasmine Pulido: And can you tell me, because I'm, very new to legislature stuff, but how do you find out about these meetings, Christie?

[00:25:12] Christie Robertson: Okay, so I signed up for an alert to tell me what committee meetings are happening over the course of each month. Then I just look through the agendas of those meetings and see if there's anything that I'm interested in, like, every single Education Committee meeting of the House and the Senate, I'm definitely interested in. And Appropriations and Ways and Means are the monetary committees. Almost every bill that goes through education will also go through there to talk about the money. 

[00:25:38] Jasmine Pulido: And then how many Education Committees are there 

[00:25:40] Christie Robertson: There's one in each body. 

[00:25:43] Jasmine Pulido: And what are they called?

[00:25:44] Christie Robertson: The House Education and in the Senate, it's called Early Learning and K12 Education

[00:25:49] Jasmine Pulido: Cool, okay. 

Education Committee

[00:25:50] Christie Robertson: So the House Education Committee meeting covered three topics: science of reading, education services for justice-involved students, and professional training and development around restraint and isolation.

Education: Reading Instruction

The science of reading report was really interesting, and I want to play just a few quotes from the presenters. Here are Tara Haskins and Makiko Overstreet  

[00:26:03] Tara Haskins: while approximately 35% of students may acquire reading skills with relative ease and will benefit from systematic instruction, 65% require explicit, systematic teaching to succeed. Among these, 12% of that 65 will find learning to read one of the most significant challenges they face in their schooling. 

[00:26:39] Mikkaka Overstreet:  as of spring 2024, all 50 states have passed literacy policies meant to improve widespread adoption of evidence-based practices in K-3. However, despite all the best intentions of new policies, frameworks, standards, and so on, changing classroom practice is still a really arduous process. Teachers and school leaders need significant support to enact change in classrooms that really last. 

[00:27:05] Christie Robertson: She talked about three components that are key to making real changes in the way reading is taught. The first piece is professional development for teachers and leaders. The second piece is high-quality instructional materials, both in the classroom and in teacher training, and to move away from teachers providing their own materials, which happens a lot. And the last piece was collaboration among teachers. And she said it's very typical for new programs to fail if there is not buy-in from the teachers.

[00:27:39] Mikkaka Overstreet: We know it takes a strong leader. We know that after teachers, school leaders have the most impact on student achievement. As a matter of fact, according to a 2021 Wallace Foundation report, replacing a below-average principal with an above-average principal, simply doing just that, led to an increase of 2.7 months of reading per student per year. The change in leadership had a greater impact than about half of all the reading interventions we typically use.

[00:28:11] Christie Robertson: And here's what was said in response to a question about states who have seen improvements. 

[00:28:18] Mikkaka Overstreet: Tennessee worked to design and implement this statewide literacy reform over a five-year period and focus their investments on high-quality instructional materials, and they hosted regional workshops to walk lead district leaders through the evaluation process for choosing quality literacy curriculum, which led to 50% more districts choosing state-approved curricula because they have been walked through that. 

Education: Justice involved youth

[00:28:45] Christie Robertson: The next topic on the agenda was the delivery of basic education for justice-involved youth. I was shocked last year to learn that until House Bill 1701 passed last year, nobody was in charge of this. It was being done piecemeal, sometimes by districts, sometimes by educational service districts, sometimes by the institutions, nobody was monitoring this. And so this bill was to put it under the office of the superintendent of public instruction, which is where it should have been all along, like all other education. This is like a five year transition process to get all that ramped up.

[00:29:30] Jasmine Pulido: Can you just enlighten me about what does justice-involved students mean?

[00:29:36] Christie Robertson: Kids who are like in corrections facilities. 

[00:29:39] Jasmine Pulido: I see. 

[00:29:41] Christie Robertson: The presenter from OSPI talked about a lot of the difficulties that have come up and the work that they're doing to try to improve the situation. And I'm really glad they're doing that.

Education: Restraint and Isolation

[00:29:51] Jasmine Pulido: And then the last topic was restraint and isolation? 

[00:29:55] Christie Robertson: Mmhmm. This is a story that I've been very involved in. There was a bill called 1479 that ran for two years, where they were trying to make isolation illegal in the state of Washington and greatly reduce restraint. And it has been rejected for two years in a row. It's super upsetting to those of us whose kids have been through this. What the people who were pushing for this did manage to do last year was to get what's called a budget proviso. And this is in the discretionary spending portion of the dollars in the budget. They were able to get just a line item in there that says give OSPI some money to develop some training materials and train teachers and other folks on reducing restraint and isolation. The project at OSPI that came out of this is called Reducing Restraint and Eliminating Isolation, RREI. And this was the report on how that last year of spending from that has gone.

[00:30:59] Jasmine Pulido: And what did the report say? 

[00:31:03] Christie Robertson: The report said it seems like it's going really well! They're basically in a pilot phase. They've identified a set of schools. Some of them are demonstration sites they're good examples of schools that have reduced restraint and isolation. And you can actually visit the schools and see how they're doing it and hear their story.

And then the other set of schools are pilot schools, where generally they've had like high incidences of restraint and isolation. And they get grants and training to reduce the incidences. And the numerical result is that 36% of the pilot districts reported a 50-plus% reduction in restraint and isolation incidents after implementation.

 So this is great and just really shows us that training is the main key. There's a mindset shift involved, and there's trainin,g and those require money. 

[00:32:03] Mikhail Chernitsky: I think the biggest takeaway for me for all this is that it really takes the whole program. One single training isn't going to be effective. If you have all the teachers take a training, that's lovely, but do the leadership at the district and at the school building level also receive that training? Are they bought into the process? Is the school board familiar with it? If that doesn't happen, things fizzle out. So, making sure that the entire school ecosystem is engaging, this has really been effective 

[00:32:30] Christie Robertson: and so I presume that what's gonna happen at the end of this pilot and the budget proviso is that they're going to be able to come back with more leverage to say, "Now we need to roll this out to all the districts. And here's how much money it's going to cost." 

I did watch the recording of the principal at Gatewood. Yes. Gatewood is a demonstration site. I'm really excited because, before this restraint and isolation reduction project, there was an inclusionary practices project. And those two projects are sort of merging at this point. But, it has been really upsetting to me over the years and to a lot of other special education advocates that there's never, at least to my knowledge, been a Seattle school that was a pilot site for the inclusionary practices project.

That's like money that could have been coming into our district and training and resources that we have not been willing to collaborate with the state on that. I'm so excited that there is a Seattle Public School that is involved in this project

[00:33:35] Jasmine Pulido: we can play a quote from here, right? 

[00:33:37] Christie Robertson: Let's play her introduction and then the take-home messages from her experience. 

[00:33:41] Kyna Hogg: My name again is Kyna Hogg, and I am the principal here at Gatewood Elementary School in Seattle Public Schools. Gatewood is located in West Seattle, and is really fortunate to be a recipient of the OSPI grant, specifically around reducing restraint and eliminating isolation. 

 It goes without saying that when you're engaging in this work around inclusionary practices, and you're asking people to change the systems, change the structures, change their daily practices, the most important thing to start with is really mindset and beliefs. And that includes me as a school leader. There were several years where we had self-contained classrooms. And as a new principal, as a new community member at that time, I didn't have the courage that I really needed to try to disrupt that system. 

...

That brings me to my second key reflection, which is that nobody is alone in this work and the importance of leaning on not only the skills and practices of your teaching community, but also leaning on the skills and practices of your parent community and of your broader community as well. For me, having an inclusionary steering committee to say this is the work that is most important to us and to set goals around that work and progress monitor it has really given me a lot of the courage and strength that you need while you're doing some of this work in revisioning schools That being said, mindset and beliefs is actually not enough. There are actually skills and strategies and tools that all of us need when we're making these different shifts. So I think it's really important that while you're thinking about your own journey or the journey of your school community, that you're building in opportunities for teachers and paraprofessionals, instructional aides to learn about the new skills and to learn about different ways of approaching instructional practices. 

[00:35:30] Christie Robertson: it's only a half hour video, so I recommend watching all of this video of the principle, but I'm gonna link specifically to the short description of Gatewood's journey under this principle from 2017 to 2024, and how they actually made that transition from segregated, high restraint programs to an inclusionary, low restraint, much better outcomes for disabled kids situation. It's just so inspiring. Send it to your principals, spread the word around. Gatewood is going to be a site that's able to be visited. And so I hope that at that point, all the board directors and administrators and other principals go and see what they've done.I also want to just publicly thank the school board, especially President Rankin and the district staff who have been leaning in toward inclusion and against isolation and restraint. And I do encourage them to stay on this until we manage to make all of our schools welcoming and effective for every student with disabilities and behavioral challenges. Which also happens to make our schools more welcoming to everybody.

[00:36:40] Jasmine Pulido: Awesome. Wow, we are really studying Seattle Public Schools. This is all new information for me that I would not at all be able to dig into by myself. Yeah, this is so revelatory for me.Thanks for going over that. 

House Appropriations Committee

[00:36:56] Jasmine Pulido: what happened at the House Appropriations meeting?

[00:37:01] Christie Robertson: I mainly only want to point out this: if you're interested in budgeting by the state, they had a good description of what drives the state spending. And so, I will link to that part of the video in the show notes. so what drives spending would be some things that are completely mandatory, like constitutional requirements or federal requirements. And some things are mandatory by law, but the law can be changed. And then some things are totally discretionary. And I just found the way they presented it to be clarifying.

[00:37:36] Jasmine Pulido: Just a couple things I'd like to point out. One is that K 12 education as the largest single driver of operating budget was in the $31. 2 billion range. And then the second to that was DSHS, which was $8. 8 billion. So a pretty big difference between even the first and second.

[00:37:57] Christie Robertson: Right, which is currently 43%. Yeah, and I'll just remind folks that education spending used to be 50%. And so that's a talking point definitely for going to legislators.

[00:38:10] Jasmine Pulido: And then at the end of it, there is going to be five reasons why this upcoming budget session was going to be a more challenging budget development environment than previous sessions. 

1) revenue growth was slowing, and revenue forecast declined. 

2) the caseload increased in some program areas. 

3) the policies that were written are now Being implemented.

4) inflation. And really interesting, inflation exceeds the national average at approximately 3% as according to the Seattle Consumer Price Index. 

And then 5) federal funding relief ends. 

This is a little scary especially as K 12 education is the highest driver of operations spending, and we're basically going to try to advocate for more

[00:39:04] Christie Robertson: We're trying to advocate to raise it by like $4 billion.

[00:39:08] Jasmine Pulido: If you're someone who's sitting in the state legislature, I can see why you would really need a lot of community to advocate in order for there to be a closing in that very large gap. 

News and Community

[00:39:22] Jasmine Pulido: So let's do the community stuff. 

[00:39:26] Christie Robertson: Ok. 

[00:39:27] Jasmine Pulido: Let's first talk about Albert Wong came out with an op-ed last week, about two days after the recall ruling, in which they dismissed the recall petition for President Liza Rankin. And then this article came out that essentially was asking for the resignation of school board directors that have been on the board for a year or more. What do you want to add to that, Christie? 

[00:39:36] Christie Robertson: Basically saying like this whole school closing debacle was so problematic that anybody who was involved in the formation of that process, he thinks should step down.  Right? Is that kind of the main gist of it? 

[00:40:12] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah, and the person who wrote this, Albert Wong, is a very data-driven person and has been very involved in crunching the data on SPS from a lot of different angles as a parent. And has their own website, SPS by the numbers, which we will link to that has like a lot of different data analysis on SPS. And what is apparent to me is this is not a person who just sat down and wrote an article. This is a person who's done hours and hours and hours and hours of data collection on SPS and analyzed it. And, when you read through it, it's pretty clear that this person is very informed about the data behind SPS was my take from this, and put a lot of links to what data is supporting his suggestion for resignations on this. I also found the article very concise. It's short. And that it's possibly strategic for it to come out a couple days after the recall ruling. 

This article came out on December 3rd, so I looked up to see who would under this criteria of being on the board more than a year. And President Rankin would be included in that. Director HerseyVice President Sarju. And then, Gina Topp started November 2023. So, by that criteria, would also be on it. And then, Director Briggs also was elected November 2023. And then Director Mizrahi and Director Clark were appointed earlier this year, so they would not be on that. So this board has changed a lot in just the last year. 

I'm not saying I disagree with his analysis but what I am thinking about is There's no guarantee that the people that take their place would be better. And the people taking their place, if we went by this, could end up being a voting majority. 

we will link it in the show notes and you can make your own decisions about what you think about the idea of resignations and email us if you have thoughts about it. We'd love to hear it. 

[00:41:22] Christie Robertson: The next item was just an interesting article called SPD reveals derailed plan to return officer to Seattle high school, saying that SPS had been on the brink of actually bringing a resource officer back and then that had been ditched at the last minute. That relates to a Seattle Hall Pass episode where we interviewed a bunch of community voices, students, teachers, and parents. Season two, episode 10. One of the students, Raffi Brewer, talked about how he had been part of a kind of a task force making plans for potentially having a resource officer in Garfield. We definitely had other voices in that episode who talked about the problems with resource officers. I imagine some of that came into play in that decision.

[00:43:22] Jasmine Pulido: And the actual video, we'll link, it is only four minutes, and it's about the, who is it?

[00:43:23] Christie Robertson: Sue Rahr. 

[00:43:24] Jasmine Pulido: Yeah. 

[00:43:25] Christie Robertson: She's the interim chief of police, 

[00:43:29] Jasmine Pulido: Interim chief thinking that the plan was to have an officer on site and then not finding out until when? 

[00:43:37] Christie Robertson: just before the press release. But she said they were to the point of picking the uniforms and...

[00:43:41] Jasmine Pulido: they were very seriously talking about it. And then suddenly, the plan changed. And they were talking specifically about Garfield? 

[00:43:50] Christie Robertson: Yeah.

Last thing. The Billion Dollar Bake Sale, which we've mentioned in a couple of episodes, is an effort that started earlier this year and is ramping up. It is a statewide effort to raise awareness of the budget problems that districts all around the state have. I just wanted to put a call out to our listeners who are in Washington but outside of Seattle that they are looking for more districts from outside of the Seattle area. The more that we can get from all around the state, the better. They have tons of resources on their website. It's billiondollarbakesalewa.com, and there's active folks there who are happy to help with planning and resources and anything else that you might need. A lot of people are just having a table at one of their school's existing events to just pass out flyers and postcards that people can fill out to send to their legislators. It could be really easy. Highly recommend doing that. 

Outro

[00:44:53] Christie Robertson: Hey, thanks for listening to our Rainy Day Rundown. 

[00:44:57] Jasmine Pulido: You can find our show notes at our website, www.rainydayrecess.Org, or you can also subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. 

[00:45:04] Christie Robertson: If you like our work, please consider donating to us at our website. The price of a cup of coffee once a month is so helpful to us. And thank you to our current donors. 

[00:45:13] Jasmine Pulido: Yes. Special thanks to Lester Mayo and Manzana Movement for our music. 

 I'm Jasmine Pulido. 

[00:45:19] Christie Robertson: I'm Christie Robertson. Stay curious, stay cozy, and join us next time for Rainy Day Recess.