SEATTLE — Two Seattle lawmakers say it’s time to take radical action to fix Seattle Public Schools.
State Reps. Eric Pettigrew and Sharon Tomiko Santos have jointly proposed a bill that would break up the state’s largest school district into two or more pieces.
They said the school district can’t keep doing the same things over and over again and expect the results to change.
However, the president of the Seattle School Board is a little baffled by the proposal and another one from Pettigrew to allow the Seattle mayor to appoint two school board members.
She said Seattle doesn’t need to be saved.
“The claim that Seattle Public Schools is failing is just simple wrong in the facts,” said school board president Sherri Carr.
She sited improving graduation rates, improving test scores and progress on narrowing the achievement gap among ethnic groups.
“The fact is that these schools are working very hard. We are seeing evidence that they have been making great gains,” Carr said of the schools in Settle’s south end that serve a diverse group of students.
Santos, who is chair of the House Education Committee, said she and Pettigrew haven’t always agreed about what should be done to address their shared concern about the way students of color have been served by the Seattle school district, but both agree change is needed.
They believe that with nearly 52,000 students, the district can’t support its schools and communities in the same way a smaller district can.
“The district has gotten further and further removed from the actual buildings,” said Pettigrew, who has sent his two kids to Catholic school, because he didn’t trust the public schools to help his African-American son succeed.
Their proposal, House Bill 1860, does not set new boundary lines or even suggest how the district should be broken up. If approved, the bill would prohibit school districts of more than 35,000 students and appoint an independent panel to figure out what to do when a district gets that large.
Carr said she suspects people would try to divorce the high-achieving north end from the mixed picture in the south end of the district. She said the costs to run two districts would eclipse the cost to run one and the loss of operational efficiencies would take money away from the classroom.
The next biggest school districts in the state are Spokane and Tacoma, with just over 29,000 students in each district.
