District dialectics in Olympia
The tiktok requests are coming in fast these days. This time, someone asked me to look at Olympia, Washington.
What I found is a great example of the dialectic between school district communities led by coalitions of educator labor unions and school district management, typically led by school boards, superintendents, and ‘concerned taxpayers’. I also found a master class in constructing a labor counter-narrative against capital. Let’s get into it.
MGMT: birth rates and land banks
Size of the district’s budget hole: $3.5 million, which management attribute to “loss of funds and low enrollments.” After a court case trying to slow down the closure of elementary schools, the district is starting that process again due to the budget crunch.
“The district has experienced lower enrollment in the last few years and is operating on a budget deficit, and projects continued enrollment decline and budget shortfalls in the years ahead. The Board is considering possible school closure and consolidation as one way to address this budget shortfall,” OSD Board President Hilary Seidel said.
Most recent news coming out of the JOLT (Journal of Olympia, Lacey, and Tumwater—doing a good job from what I can tell, btw) is that the city council got together with school leaders to talk about what to do about this. Management’s line on this is declining enrollment:
OSD Supt. Patrick Murphy highlighted the declining enrollment numbers, which have dropped nearly 7% overall since 2019 - 2020. He said younger grade levels have been particularly impacted, with a 13% decrease at the elementary level.
We have to look at exactly why there’s declining enrollments, though. People—by which I mean management types—tend to leave it at that, assuming that somehow the schools are bad and there’s nothing to do for it except cut, fire, and close. But we get more details in this article and some interesting thinking from city council, etc.
"When I first arrived in Olympia School District seven years ago, we were averaging kindergarten cohorts of about 700 kids. And now, they've been around 565 to 570 in the last couple of years. We have about 130 fewer kids coming into those younger grades. And moving up, the whole system gets smaller," Murphy said.
Murphy attributes this situation to birth rates. Now, why would there be lower birth rates you might wonder. Could it be that people can’t really afford to think about having kids? Maybe they don’t have the social benefits that that entails?
"What we've been hearing from a lot of people is that they can't afford to live in Olympia anymore," OSD Director Maria Flores said, adding that the surrounding school districts were also having similar struggles.
What do you do about birth rates? City Council has some thoughts about housing, affordability, and some other structural type policies. That’s a good direction, better than most would go I think, and it turns out Olympia has an ongoing program of land-banking that moves housing into the non-profit sector to push down prices and keep people there. The housing person on city council said this:
The housing director mentioned Olympia's strategy, land banking, where the city purchases land to sell at a reduced cost to nonprofit partners who develop "deeply affordable" housing units available for people living at 30% of the area median income.
But she also mentioned incentives to developers, taking more from the neoliberal playbook, but even these sound pretty good: reducing parking fees and strengthening the multi-family tax exemption. I mean, pretty cool right?
But maybe it doesn’t have to be that complicated.
The counter-narrative: simplify
It could be that management’s line isn’t the only story. A group called OSD4All, a community group supporting public education in Olympia, has materials on ways to save money, saying that certain calculations and costs are the issue here, not something overwhelming and eugenic like birth rates.
They point to expensive consultants that got stuff wrong about the district in the last year in their timeline on how this happened. It’s actually a good lesson on how to construct and propagate a counter-narrative.
Look at how calculations occurred, demystifying and denaturalizing the quantitative premises of the austerity. In this case, it’s enrollment projections.
Find the parties responsible, in this case the school board and superintendent hired two consultants, FLO Analytics and Western Demographics.
Target the people who have power to make different decisions with demands. In this case, it’s the capital side of the dialectic. I’ll get to the demands in a moment.
Here’s their timeline:
They break down exactly how FLO analytics and Western Demographics got it wrong when it comes to enrollment projections:
Finally, they lay out their demands in a clear way, getting deep into the weeds and finding ways to save that don’t involve closing schools or firing educators, including:
removing excess contingency from expense forecasts (being less stingy in future planning),
getting efficient about staffing rather than firing through backfill policies,
looking at administration’s hiring and structure to see if there are places to save (like putting in a 5% cap on district office spending),
reviewing all kinds of spending, not just salaries and benefits: materials, maintenance and operations, contract renegotiation
Honestly, this stuff looks great. Very detailed. They come from a place of not closing schools and saving the district money. I’d look to these folks as a model for the kind of work all labor-side groups need to do.
The key thing is that management has to admit it hasn’t thought of some things, and maybe made mistakes along the way. That’s a tough pill to swallow in the dialectic. And sure, generous housing strategies should happen, but maybe in the short-term it’s more simple. We don’t have to close schools or start getting overwhelmed about birth rates.
Regional coda
As a coda, something I’m seeing is that this crisis is spreading to other districts nearby, also attributed to districts’ “banking on enrollment increases after the COVID shutdowns”:
This past week, the Yakima School Board approved a plan to trim more than 100 positions — mostly paraeducators, academic specialists and counselors — from their payroll in an effort to save $19 million in next school year's budget. Yakima's enrollment has dropped 9% over the last five years.
Up north, the Wenatchee School District is considering cutting 63 jobs in an effort to save nearly $9 million next year. With enrollment expected to continue declining there, the district might also close an elementary school.
And further down the Columbia River, the Vancouver Public Schools board this month approved $35 million in budget cuts for next school year that will see 262 jobs — including 113 classroom teaching positions — vanish.
Union is at least quoted as saying it’s “avoidable.” And that’s the rub: the labor side of this school district dialectic will always have to push, use a little fire, to make sure that the capital side of the dialectic sees the light. It’s just not in capital’s interest to tell on itself and admit mistakes.