SPS Official talks future of growing district with PTSA

Several schools to open or expand; parents wonder district-wide which students will populate

Elliot Bailey, A&E Editor
Originally published February 10, 2016

As Seattle Public Schools’ overcrowding issue continues to grow, so does the angst of district parents and in these troubled times, Ballard PTSA meetings have become a more popular event than ever. District Official Flip Herndon spoke in the library on February 4 at the PTSA General Meeting, met with an audience of parents from around the district.

Herndon is Associate Superintendent of Facilities & Operations for SPS. He was there to field questions about a number of issues, but at a time when Seattle schools are swelling with new students and the city is actively finding solutions for where to put them, overcrowding quickly became the biggest issue in the room.

According to district projections, Seattle schools will take on 4,229 students by 2019, kindergarten through 12th grade. One beacon of light penetrating crowded SPS hallways is the resurrection of Lincoln High School.

Lincoln was closed in 1981, but after Seattle voters approved the Building Excellence IV (BEX IV) Capital levy in February of 2013, funds were put to work renovating Lincoln. Seattle’s comeback high school is scheduled to open in the fall of 2019. According to Herndon, 1,100 kids will report to class on opening day. They’ll be joined over several years by classmates who will fill the building’s total 1,600 seats.

“To what extent can SPS feasibly accommodate the needs of students and parents while opening new schools, filling them, reducing portable use and successfully diverting overcrowdedness? ”

Lincoln’s not the only school that will take on new students in the foreseeable future. There’s also been a renovation at Ingraham High School that will create 500 new seats there.   

“Now wouldn’t it be great if all those students fell into those two boundaries, but we know that’s not going to be the case,” Herndon said. 

This means students from outside Lincoln and Ingraham boundaries will have to fill seats at those schools. Redrawing boundaries, the responsibility of the SPS Enrollment Planning Department, is one way this problem will be solved.

“So we’re trying to address that, but drawing the boundaries is a challenge,” Herndon continued. 

How the issue will be solved, namely which students will go to Lincoln, where they’ll come from and what choice SPS parents will have in the matter, is a gray area at present, because Enrollment Planning hasn’t begun recasting boundaries yet and won’t until spring. 

Among the parents at Thursday’s PTSA meeting, questions about this transition, and what it will look like, were of urgent importance.

“[Drawing boundaries] becomes a very emotional issue as well as a logistic one,” Herndon said to the crowd.

Emotional, because many Seattleites have deep connections with their area high school. One of those Seattleites is Shelagh Bradley who spoke to the crowd Thursday night, touting her love for BHS, tugging proudly at the chest of an old Ballard sweatshirt. Many of the parents in the room understood her sentiment. One mother said she sent her kids to Ballard for it’s academies and was worried the Lincoln reboot would jeopardize opportunities for students like her own.

Right now, if a high school student lives in Ballard, he has the option of going to BHS, regardless of the school’s overcrowded classes. The district won’t deny admission to that student, nor will they send him to another school with empty seats. If you live in the school zone, you go its school. 

That’s a plus for parents who’ve come to Ballard to send their kids to its schools. But that’s also why Ballard has 1,711 enrolled students rather than the 1600 seats it was built for. This accommodation will be hard and harder for SPS to sustain as the district grows over the next few years.

Elise Kim, the mother of a sixth grader at Hamilton Middle School, is worried she’ll lose the ability to decide where her child goes to high school by the time Lincoln opens in 2019. Her youngest started at Hamilton this year, but in eighth grade will be transferred to the soon-opening Robert Eagle Staff Middle School. 

Robert Eagle Staff serves the same purpose as Lincoln, providing relief to overcrowded schools. 

“It’s a discomforting thing, especially when my son and others will have already been pulled out of their middle school and the thought of him being pulled out of a high school, that we’ve chosen, to populate a brand new school is unacceptable,” Kim said.

Kim asked Herndon whether the district could offer “an assurance of thoughtfulness,” whether it will work to make sure students like hers don’t have to leave the high schools they entered as freshmen.

This is one of the larger questions determining the district’s actions in the next few years: to what extent can SPS feasibly accommodate the needs of students and parents while opening new schools, filling them, reducing portable use and successfully diverting overcrowdedness? To what extent will students and families have to go along as the district irons out these overcrowding solutions?

“I feel like [SPS] really have to bend over backwards to accommodate kids and they haven’t done that, but [Herndon] can’t please everybody and there are going to be people who, in this next round, when they open Lincoln, are going to be disappointed,” Kim said. 

It’s unclear whether the district will bend over backwards to keep kids in the same schools, or whether that’s even possible while filling seats at Lincoln and Ingraham. 

For now, the best parents can do is sit tight and wait for the district’s word in the spring.