Seattle Public Schools lifts waitlists at popular schools after public outcry

Seattle Public Schools is letting more students into some of the district’s most popular option schools next fall, amid mounting pressure to change how it manages enrollment.

The public outcry came as new data suggested the district’s waitlist system had driven hundreds of families out of the district — at a time when it’s grappling with an ongoing financial crisis fueled in part by declining enrollment.

“We heard our community, and we’re supporting their wants,” said Faauu Manu, the district’s director of enrollment planning and services. “At the same time, we’re trying to really balance the rest of the schools and making sure that they have the resources they need.”

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As part of the district’s school choice program, every student is guaranteed a spot at their neighborhood school. But families can apply to switch schools — to a different neighborhood school or a school with specialized learning programs.

Families who apply in February typically learn which option schools students have been assigned to in April. Students who don’t secure one of the district’s limited school choice placements are added to a waitlist.

But parents say those waitlists have not moved in recent years, even though there was physical space in many schools. That’s the basis of a formal complaint filed to the district ombudsperson in December by the Seattle Student Options Coalition, a group of parents and caregivers from 11 option schools.

The group accused district leaders of intentionally starving enrollment — which dictates how SPS allocates teachers, staff, programming, and other resources — leading to staff reductions that undermine the district’s goal of “advancing the academic success of students furthest from educational justice.”

Dozens of parents and educators attended an April school board meeting to call for changes to the district’s waitlist system, among other enrollment practices.

New data shared with the school board at that meeting found that, of the more than 2,700 students who didn’t make it into their first-choice school for the 2024-25 year, about or 20% of them (450 total) either left or never enrolled in the district afterward.

In an op-ed in The Urbanist last month, Seattle School Board members Joe Mizrahi and Sarah Clark said the enrollment decline resulted in the loss of $12 million for the district.

Mizrahi and Clark, along with parents and teachers, connected the alleged intentional under-enrollment of option schools to the district’s mass school closure plans.

One of the district’s initial proposals last fall to shutter as many as 21 elementary schools would’ve eliminated all option schools.

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The district later scaled back the closure plan to just four schools, then abandoned school closures entirely a month later.

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“Each closure was estimated to save about $1.5 million per year,” Mizrahi and Clark wrote in the op-ed. “Why were we ever discussing closures when the district knew it was leaving eight times that amount on the table by ignoring families’ choices?”

When pitching school closures to the community, district officials said they were necessary to better balance enrollment and resources across a smaller footprint of schools. And they took a similar approach to defending school choice enrollment practices earlier this year.

In April, district leaders said they strived to balance giving families educational choice with ensuring enrollment and resources are stable at all schools across the district — including neighborhood schools where enrollment has especially dwindled in recent years.

While balancing enrollment is still a concern, district leaders say they’re rethinking their approach in response to the community backlash.

In an interview last week, Marni Campbell, who oversees school operations, enrollment, and admissions, acknowledged the district has “more work to do” in finding the right balance between stability and choice in its enrollment processes.

“It’s a big ‘and’ — choice and stability are both important,” she said. “For student outcomes, maintaining some degree of stability is a value. But we also need to be open to and responsive to the needs of families and students, as they’ve expressed it through choice.”

These short-term changes are also necessary, Campbell said, because of the district’s continued budget crisis.

“Some of the practices around waitlist movement were geared toward making sure that those attendance area schools are healthy and strong,” Campbell said. “At a time when the district was growing in terms of enrollment, that worked fine. We’re now at a space where that is not the case.”

Manu, the director of enrollment planning and services, said the results of the district’s recent enrollment study are also illuminating.

It found that almost 60% of SPS parents surveyed said they’d considered leaving the district due to concerns about education quality. And nearly 90% of the families who had disenrolled from the district said education quality was among the top three reasons they’d left.

“We need to start driving and motivating and really improving the health of our district,” Manu said, adding the study “really opened our eyes to resetting and rethinking the way we do our business in general.”

Manu said she sees this moment as an “opportunity” for the district to look at high-demand choice schools and consider how they can bring those qualities to all neighborhood schools.

For now, as a short-term solution, enrollment officials are focused on moving as many students as possible off the waitlists at 10 of the district’s highest-demand option and neighborhood schools. Those include Asa Mercer International Middle, Hazel Wolf K-8, Salmon Bay K-8, and Roosevelt and Cleveland high schools, among others.

So far, Campbell says the district has offered more than 2,500 students seats in the school of their choice this year, through the choice program. The district will continue to offer some families spots at option schools through Aug. 31, but Campbell noted most waitlist movement will have occurred by the end of June.

District enrollment officials use many factors to determine whether they can move students into the school of their choice, including whether there’s space available in the school, as well as the impact it would have on the school the student would be leaving.

Going forward, Campbell said the district will consider bigger policy changes, such as revising the timeline of when families apply to switch schools. The district could start the application process in the fall, rather than in February. But, Campbell said, that has downsides: Some families may not know where they want their child to attend school so early.

Another change the district is considering, Campbell said, is its process for assigning staff to schools. The district currently estimates fall enrollment in February every year, then allocates staff based on that — before the choice process ends.

There are also staffing adjustments every June, based on revised enrollment projections, and again in October, a month and a half into the school year, when enrollment is pretty much set for the year. But, Campbell said, those adjustments can result in disruptions.

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Campbell warned families that all this movement will lead to more staff churn than usual this year.

“We made the commitment to moving waitlists this spring knowing that it would result in a little more turbulence,” she said. “Nothing’s without its cost.”

Campbell said she’d also like to improve the district’s transportation offerings for students attending option schools.

“We cannot say we’re offering choice if we’re not also committed to say that we’re going to limit barriers — like if families did want to choose a different school, but didn’t have the capacity to get there,” she said. “We need to make sure that it’s an authentic choice for everyone.”

But whether the district makes these longer-term changes will be up to its next superintendent. The district is in the midst of a search for its next leader, after Superintendent Brent Jones announced his intention to part with the district in September.

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Parents who have been fighting for enrollment reforms have mixed emotions about the district’s recent about-face on waitlists.

Erin MacDougall, a leader of All Together for Seattle Schools, a parent advocacy group, said that while it’s “encouraging” that some waitlists are moving, they continue to have “serious concerns about the district’s lack of transparency.”

MacDougall said the group would like the district to provide more information on their approach to lifting waitlists, including the specific policies and procedures they’re using to decide who can move schools.

She also said the district should spell out to families how likely — or unlikely — it is that they’ll move off the waitlist after this month.

“They’ve done nothing to communicate to waitlist families what they’re doing,” MacDougall said. “As rumor mills go around that some kids are getting in, they’ve not communicated what the plan is.”

MacDougall is also worried the district won’t adequately staff option schools to account for the new students being let in. If a class goes from 20 to 27 students, for example, that’s bad for kids and adding an additional burden to teachers., MacDougall said.

“We want those kids,” she said, “but we want additional staffing as an outcome of those kids.”