Issue 34 – Athletic Fields, Principal Assignments, and Fiscal Oversight

A few quick updates from recent events in Seattle Public Schools:

• Shuldiner’s Lincoln Athletic Fields Decision
• Seattle Times Obtains, Publishes Anitra Jones’ Employment Letter
• June 3 Board Meeting: PTA Fundraising Vote
• Liza Rankin Protests Contract Approvals
• Parents Testify about Middle School ELA

Shuldiner’s Lincoln Athletic Fields Decision

Superintendent Ben Shuldiner went to a student assembly at Lincoln High School on Wednesday to announce his decision to build a new athletic field for the school at Aurora Avenue North and North 50th Street, on what is currently a gravel parking lot within Lower Woodland Park. Shuldiner added that Seattle Public Schools would seek to renovate the track at Lower Woodland Park Field #7.

SPS describes this solution as “based on the concept presented as Option B” at the April 25 community meeting, which Julie Letchner covered for the Bulletin. 

The district’s announcement added that more decisions remain to determine exactly how to orient the field “to reduce impacts to trees and surrounding areas of the park.” The goal is to open the new field in 2029.

The president of Friends of Lower Woodland Park told the Seattle Times he was “delighted” with Shuldiner’s plan for not using soccer field #2, and would shut down their petition against placing Lincoln’s field there.

Tom Fuculoro of Seattle Bike Blog hailed the decision for preserving the BMX dirt jumps, noting that the parking lot where the athletic field will be built “sits empty 99% of the time.” He also noted that the City of Seattle still needs to improve pedestrian access to the park for Lincoln students, and should consider deleting or narrowing the diagonal Green Lake Way North that connects Aurora to the five-way intersection at the southeast corner of the park.

While the Lincoln community welcomed the decision, it isn’t the end of the story. The district still has to go through an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process, which will give potential opponents an opportunity to slow down or block the project.

Seattle Times Obtains, Publishes Anitra Jones’ Employment Letter

Claire Bryan at the Seattle Times obtained and published the letter from former Superintendent Brent Jones to Anitra Jones (no relation) promising that Anitra Jones would be placed as a principal at an SPS building in 2025-26. 

The unusual letter was cited by Shuldiner at a contentious community meeting in April at Adams Elementary School, where Shuldiner had appointed Jones as principal. Shuldiner claimed that the letter forced him to place Jones as a principal, and that given the fact that Adams Elementary’s regular principal had to go on medical leave, he thought it best to appoint Jones to fill that role.

According to Bryan’s article, SPS cited three sections of Washington State legal code, as well as the concept of “promissory estoppel” that led them to conclude that the promise Brent Jones made to Anitra Jones of being placed as a principal in SPS was legally enforceable.

The letter had caveats. It only applied to the 2025-26 school year, which ends on Wednesday. It also said that “the assignment will likely be back to an elementary school,” but that the Superintendent reserved the right to place Jones as principal elsewhere if necessary.

Jones began as principal at Adams Elementary School in late May. No word yet on whether she will be the principal there in the fall.

June 3 Board Meeting: PTA Fundraising Vote

Last week the school board met in a relatively brief public meeting. (Click here for the transcript, and here to watch on YouTube.) 

One of the notable items they approved was a grant from the PTA at B.F. Day Elementary School in Fremont. The grant is for an additional $92,500, bringing the total grant from this PTA to $339,500. 

The additional funding would “provide teachers with professional development from Lives in the Balance (Ross Greene) and University of Washington’s Haring Center designed to help teachers meet the needs of neurodiverse students and students receiving special education and highly capable services.”

This is notable because it’s the first time in recent memory that SPS has approved a PTA grant totaling over $250,000. This was the subject of controversy at a March board meeting. Director Vivian Song had proposed a motion to increase the threshold for board approval of grants to $500,000 and reduce the threshold for board approval of contracts to the same amount.

Directors Liza Rankin and Evan Briggs opposed this, and proposed an amendment to retain the $250,000 threshold for grant approval. Director Song, along with Directors Joe Mizrahi and Jen LaVallee, pointed out that this $250,000 grant threshold had been used by SPS staff as a hard cap to limit PTA fundraising at their schools.

In response, Rankin and Briggs claimed that they would certainly vote to approve PTA fundraising grants above that amount, and that the issue was simply that the SPS website was wrong to claim that $250,000 was a hard cap. Rankin’s amendment passed by a 4-3 vote, with Director Kathleen Smith voting yes out of a belief that this could be resolved simply with a change to the website.

Last week’s vote on the B.F. Day grant was therefore the first test of this claim. It was not a foregone conclusion. Public testimony included many members of the B.F. Day community speaking in support of the proposal. Later, B.F. Day’s new principal, Kristen Eckert, spoke about the value the grant-funded program would bring to the school. As it turned out, the board did unanimously vote to approve the grant, with little discussion.

Liza Rankin Protests Contract Approvals

However, a series of contract approvals that had been placed on the consent agenda received much more scrutiny – in the form of a protest from Director Rankin.

Rankin removed all contract approvals from the consent agenda and insisted on a separate vote on each of them. She did this to complain about the board having to approve contracts that have already been spent – but also because, apparently, she doesn’t think the board should have to approve it at all.

“I want to talk about the way that the BAR (Board Action Report) process and our own policies have been used to control and coerce the board, how we have given up our authority, and also interfered with the superintendent's authority.”

Rankin went on to complain that these contract approvals were “oversight theater” because the services had already been provided and thus the board couldn’t really vote no. In her view, this process “has been used to frankly bully the board.”

But Rankin then seemingly contradicted herself. She claimed that “Most of the things in a district of 50,000 students should be up to the superintendent and his staff, not up to us.”

As the longest-serving member of the board, Rankin didn't explain which of the board's past decisions she felt was giving up their power, or whether she had supported those decisions. 

This leaves open the question of whether Rankin’s concern is with the quality and effectiveness of the services provided in the contracts, with the fact that the board is being asked to approve them after the services had been provided, or whether it’s that the board is asked to approve them in the first place.

It also contradicts Rankin’s argument from the March school board meeting that the $250,000 grant approval threshold needed to remain, so that the board could scrutinize and approve them.

Ultimately, Rankin’s complaints appear to be an effort to cling to Student Outcomes Focused Governance (SOFG). That’s the widely-disliked governance model Rankin championed, in which the school board abandoned its role of close oversight of district operations to instead just rubber stamp administrators’ actions. The board has moved away from SOFG in recent months.

One of the main jobs of a school board director is to ensure proper fiscal oversight, a job that is all the more important when schools across the state are facing budget problems. Anyone who does not want to closely examine and approve contracts should not be serving on a school board.

Parents Testify about Middle School ELA

During public testimony at the board meeting, Julie Letchner testified about the middle school ELA curriculum that was the subject of her four-part series that we published last week. She did a great job covering the topic and suggesting solutions:

Also testifying was Miranda Hoffman, a parent at Hamilton International Middle School and herself a middle school teacher, who spoke directly to the concerns about SPS teachers being told not to teach whole books:

SPS leaders have not yet publicly addressed the problems with the ELA curriculum or the directive to teachers to not teach whole books in middle school.