Surging enrollment blindsides Seattle schools

At John Hay Elementary School in Queen Anne, 20 fourth-graders attend class in the second-floor hallway.

Across the city at West Seattle’s Schmitz Park Elementary, 190 students spend their days in portable classrooms installed on what used to be the playground.

And at nearby Lafayette Elementary, a special-ed class meets in an indoor playcourt.

Scenes like these reflect a surprising reality: Enrollment in Seattle Public Schools is skyrocketing.

Normally, growth in enrollment would be good news. But officials didn’t see it coming and didn’t prepare for it — resulting in serious overcrowding at several schools.

The district’s 2011 head count, released Friday, shows this year’s enrollment is about 1,500 students higher than last — a 3 percent increase. Overall, enrollment has risen 7 percent in the past three years, and it’s expected to climb another 10 percent over the next three years.

In West and Northeast Seattle, where the growth is largest, class sizes are up and some teachers are leading classes in cafeterias and auditoriums.

“We are bursting at the seams,” Thornton Creek Elementary parent Cristina McGlynn said. “If you walk through the hallways now, it’s impossible to get from one side to another.”

The district is now reopening some of the same schools it had closed in 2006 and 2009 amid fierce opposition from parents and community activists.

By next year, about half of the 12 shuttered schools will be back in operation — after millions of dollars were spent in closing and reopening costs. But the reopened school can’t accommodate all the extra students, and a tight budget prevents any new building construction until at least 2016.

So the district is scrambling to form a short-term strategy. The plan, which the Seattle School Board will vote on next month, is expected to include using 35 more portable classrooms over the next four years.

The district is also trying to figure out why it was blindsided by the sudden enrollment growth.

After years of declines, enrollment increased modestly between 2007 and 2009, then shot up. District officials say factors they could not predict — the recession and the district’s new student-assignment plan — caused much of the growth.

But a comparison shows Seattle Public Schools uses fewer data sources in its projections than many districts. Most notably, information about housing starts and development projects plays a much bigger role in other districts locally and around the country.

Seattle officials said they’re rethinking their projection methods, with decisions coming next month.

“Seattle Public Schools is working closely with experts in demographics, along with the community, to ensure we have the most accurate data moving forward,” Interim Superintendent Susan Enfield said. “But predicting enrollment isn’t a perfect science.”

Warnings ignored?

Asked why officials didn’t predict the enrollment increase, School Board member Peter Maier’s answer is simple: “Conditions changed.”

He pointed to the new assignment plan and the recession. But several parents dismissed those factors, complaining district officials ignored warnings about the possibility of rising enrollment.

The assignment plan, adopted in 2009, guarantees students a seat in the school closest to their home. That’s important because under the old choice system, some parents — especially those arriving in the middle of the school year — decided to avoid the risk of having their children assigned to a faraway or low-performing school by not enrolling them in the public system. Those families are now coming back, officials said.

At the same time, the recession has rendered some families unable to afford private school, officials said.

“No demographer can predict what the economy’s going to do,” said Holly Ferguson, head of communication strategies. “The economists can’t even predict what the economy’s going to do.”

That may be only part of the story, though. Admissions officers at several Seattle private schools said their enrollments have suffered only slightly since the recession.

When Seattle started closing schools in 2006, demographers predicted enrollment would continue its long decline. They made similar predictions into 2009, even after the recession had started and the assignment plan was put in place.

Kellie LaRue was one of several people who tried to convince the district otherwise. LaRue, a parent and systems engineer, believes district leaders were so used to declining enrollment and so focused on overall enrollment that they dismissed data showing the beginnings of a baby boom in the city.

By the time officials noticed growth actually was occurring, “it wasn’t growth — it was a tsunami,” LaRue said.

Tackling projections

Projecting enrollment is a difficult combination of science and art, said Tracy Libros, Seattle’s longtime manager of planning and enrollment.

In Seattle, demographers first analyze trends of the percentage of students who move from one grade to the next, Libros explained. They then apply that percentage to the number of current students at each grade to predict how many students will be in each grade the following year.

For kindergarten, demographers look at county birthrates and something called the “birth-to-K” ratio — the historical percent of newborns who show up at kindergarten five years later.

“It’s a very standard methodology,” Libros said.

While demographers at school districts across the country use the same method, many also consult other data.

In Boston Public Schools, demographer Jerry Burrell said he relies heavily on housing patterns and immigration trends. The basic methodology is “just a tool,” said Burrell, noting it often is late in picking up on major trends. “You have to look at all these other pieces.”

San Francisco and Sacramento, Calif., officials agreed. Even in smaller Puget Sound districts, nondemographic factors are an important consideration, officials said.

Lake Washington tracks housing developments, said Deputy Superintendent Janene Fogard, adding the district correctly predicted an enrollment spike similar to Seattle’s in 2009.

Those types of factors are not an important consideration in Seattle’s current method, officials acknowledge.

Les Kendrick, an enrollment-projection expert, told Seattle officials in June that their projection methods didn’t consider enough data sources. He recommended considering housing trends and state growth reports, among other sources.

The district is now working with Kendrick to identify additional sources to incorporate in its model, Assistant Superintendent of Operations Pegi McEvoy said. It’s also stepping up its cooperation with city of Seattle demographers, she said.

Unhappy parents

The changes can’t come soon enough for some parents.

At a recent meeting in West Seattle, 30 of them complained about ballooning class sizes, rooms ill-equipped to handle more students and the use of portable classrooms.

At Schmitz Park Elementary, 10 temporary structures have been erected outside the school in an arrangement referred to as a “portable village,” PTA President Fiona Preedy said.

The portables have made teaching more difficult and forced administrators to “focus on things like traffic flow in the building,” said Principal Gerrit Kischner, although he emphasized that the school has adapted well and “things are working.”

In Northeast Seattle, about 175 frustrated parents turned out Tuesday for that area’s meeting on overcrowding.

At the meeting, officials presented a $15 million draft proposal to reopen a handful of schools, install 35 more portables and make minor school-boundary adjustments.

The plan doesn’t including building additional schools — money for construction of new buildings won’t be available for at least five years.

Several parents called the plan “a bandage.”

“You can give students a seat to sit in and a teacher in front of them, but there’s so much more to a school than that,” said Christopher Wright, whose children attend Bryant, which would get four portables under the proposal.

The portables, in particular, have irked parents. At $135,000 each, the structures are a cheap way to add space. But parents deride them as poor learning environments and complain they lead to more students trying to squeeze in the main building’s bathrooms, cafeterias and libraries.

Officials said they’re still soliciting input on the proposal, but the board must make decisions for next school year by next month.

School Board member Michael DeBell is among those who prefer a different plan. He’s directed district staff to explore various options to address overcrowding, including the possibility of dipping into funds earmarked for minor maintenance.

“For me, this is probably our highest priority,” he said.

FACTS

Overcrowding response

Seattle Public Schools officials have proposed the following actions to address overcrowding in Seattle schools over the next four years:

* Reopen Boren, Columbia and old Van Asselt elementary schools. Consider reopening Hughes.

* Install 35 portables at schools across the city.

* Make minor school-boundary adjustments to the neighborhood assignment plan.