This is what Tacoma school budget cuts look like on the ground | Opinion

As a child, I learned a lot from school. Not only did I learn the educational stuff, I learned what would be expected of me as a member of society, about hierarchy, about proximity to power and, by default, the lack there of. As a parent of children in Tacoma Public Schools, the learning continues. My kids go to Blix Elementary, are students in their dual language program and until recently, until this 2025-26 school year, they had a beautiful educational experience.

But this year has been different.

A week before school started, parents with kids in the dual language program at Blix received an email from the principle informing us that administration made the decision to split the 4th grade dual-language cohort in half and put half of them with the 3rd grade and the other half with the 5th. The projected enrollment didn’t drive the amount of teachers needed, was the explanation given. So instead of three teachers to teach three classes, the district had allocated us two.

Thankfully, the email continued “the teachers will be working diligently to meet each student’s needs.” And, promised this week-before-the-start-of-school email, “We plan to support the 3-4/4-5 DL team with whatever they need for success.”

All this year, the two teachers for these three classes have worked as hard as any two teachers possibly could. They have been wonderful. And it hasn’t been enough because the principle, administration and school district have patently refused to honor their beginning-of-the-school-year commitment to support with whatever needed for success, instead blaming funding and then the teacher’s union, and all to the detriment of our children.

Within the first couple months of the school year, it was painfully obvious the promised support was needed. Students were struggling educationally, socially, emotionally and mentally. Bullying, previously a non-issue in these three separate cohorts, became rampant when the three were made two, which makes pretty good sense.

One of the advantages of the cohort model is the social dynamics are stable, cohesive, everyone grows together. But when three cohorts are forced into two, the stability is shattered, cohesion destroyed and the resulting void creates a need to establish a new hierarchy, new friend groups, new leaders and new pariahs. A well resourced classroom with multiple adults and a carefully planned social-emotional curriculum can manage the chaos and turn it into a successful school year, even a life lesson. A last-minute staffing allocation decision that dumps sixty students on two teachers who are each then responsible to teach two grades, two curriculums and in two different languages results in exactly the educational experience our kids are having; a desperate need for support.

And so we’ve asked. My kids are being bullied. My kids are testing below grade level. My kids are coming home frustrated with themselves and asking if they can stay home, and they never used to because Blix is a great school and the dual language program is run by a dedicated big-hearted group of uber-effective teachers. But this year there’s not enough of them. This year we need para-educators to fill the gaps.

So we’ve asked. We asked the principle for help, received platitudes and encouragement to take the request to the district. So we went to the school board, three times now, a larger group of parents each time, making the same reasonable ask and getting no answer. Finally, we had a sit down with TPS chief of schools last week and made our case. His response was an emailed denial due to lack of funding and a plastic excuse about how the union contract that defines class size parameters shows we are not over.

We were over at the start of the school year, before parents started pulling their kids out of the class due to the lack of needed (and promised) support. But that didn’t matter. Only now.

Now, I can’t help but think about how the district resolved their $30 million deficit last June, the 105 provisional employee contracts not renewed and the 118 education support professionals whose positions were impacted. I don’t have the advanced degrees our TPS decision makers do, but it seems a reasonable assumption that the district’s reluctance to provide needed para-educators in my kids split classes is not unrelated.

Because when you balance a deficit on the backs of the lowest paid staff, those most impacted, the students, suffer the consequences. And here we are. I am sure there are students in split classes all throughout the district dealing with the same struggles my kids are. I hope to hear from those student’s parents at the next school board meeting, so we can organize, build power and force a solution to get the students the support they need for success.

Ours need Paras. Three of them. Yesterday. Time to settle up TPS.

Jake Nau is a homeless outreacher at St. Vincent de Paul and an organizer with Common Good Tacoma.