The district can save money and improve the student experience by consolidating students into fewer buildings and concentrating resources on those schools. According to SPS, these actions are the path toward equity. Some parents, like Samanta Gutiérrez, want to know how.
“I came out here because I’ve been a little concerned that there hasn’t been a lot of information about dual-language immersion,” said Gutiérrez, a parent of a first and a third grader at John Stanford International Elementary, during a public meeting at Chief Sealth International High School earlier this month. “And I feel like the community of [people]that utilize this program across the district … including the option schools, is not necessarily having a lot of representation.”
Gutiérrez’s family is a bilingual Spanish-speaking household, and enabling her children to learn content in Spanish is important to her. At John Stanford, an option school that enrolls students by request and reserves a limited number of seats for students whose first or heritage language is Spanish or Japanese, students can spend part of their regular school day learning in one of these languages.
If John Stanford closes, the family might have to leave the home they’ve rented for 13 years in north Seattle to find a neighborhood school that offers dual language teaching.
Seattle resident Chris Jackins, a Ballard High School alumnus and longtime activist in the school system, was handing out flyers opposing the closures at the Chief Sealth entrance before the community meeting began.
Jackins said the school board didn’t seem to be listening to public input in considering closing schools, or considering that different schools might not need the same resources.
“You can waste a lot of money to give resources where people don’t need them, or don’t even want them, just because it’s in the formula,” Jackins said. He thinks the district should focus more on what each school needs to be successful rather than just following a district-wide formula for success.
During the Q&A portion of the meeting, Superintendent Brent Jones responded to a question about the district’s support of dual language instruction by stating that racial equity analysis is built into the district’s DNA.
“I know there’s been lots of questions about how will this impact our students of color for educational justice,” Jones said. “And we do this analysis ongoing, this formative analysis … we were one of the nation’s leader[s] in identifying more racial equity work … I just want to reassure this community that racial equity analysis is something that we do across the board in all of our programs in the Seattle Public School district.”
This version of the story adds comment from the school district.
Julia Park
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