October 5 General Meeting: Liza Rankin, District 1 School Board Director

Liza Rankin, Seattle School Board Vice President, visited HLCC last night and spoke to us about what School board directors do, as well as some of the challenges faced for Seattle schools.  Liza also attended the HLCC candidates night last month.  

Liza "schooled" us on how the board works.  She is one of seven board directors for Seattle schools.  Each director represents approximately 100K people in Seattle.  She noted that the board is very diverse with a great cross-section of Seattle itself.  All discussion among board members must be public.  They even limit any email discussions between themselves.  The board is focused on students:  setting strategy and assessing results.  The business of education and working with teachers is left to the superintendent.  Budget issues are worked on by all.  Agenda for board meetings is set by the superintendent and the board president.

We discussed a number of challenges faced by Seattle Schools.  There have been less students attending and this has led to budget shortfalls for the last 2 years.  Budget cuts were instituted last year to balance the budget.  But, measures to take this year are still under consideration.  One controversial way that Seattle could provide more services with less budget might be to consolidate some schools into larger schools with a wider variety of services.  This idea has been met with criticism from community members that love their small neighborhood schools.  Liza mentioned that, while the pandemic did impact the number of students attending Seattle Schools, the current number is not far from what was predicted to occur before the pandemic.  The choices are difficult though.

Liza spoke about how Seattle Schools has started to use data much more in the last 2 years to determine if goals toward board strategy are being met.  She noted that the board has learned a great deal about how different schools are doing from this data.  As an example, she noted that one school showed a very high graduation rate while testing in math showed a very low percentage of students meeting the minimum bar.  It raises the question of whether the school might be engaging in "Social Promotion".

Thanks Liza go giving HLCC a bit of your precious time!