That’s not what I’m going to do.

Since my sophomore year at Garfield, I’ve been hearing my fellow students talk about how the school is dying, how there’s not enough spirit anymore, how we’re divided, and how it just isn’t as awesome as it used to be when the Class of (fill in the blank) was here.

I agree with a lot of these statements. The school is ridiculously bureaucratic, none of the adults trust the students, and our lunches are now only 35 minutes long. There’s a lot to be upset about.

Recently though, I met a lot of kids from all over the country during my college visits, and after hearing them talk about their high school experiences, I can honestly say I’m so glad I go to Garfield High.

I began high school back in 2006 as a fairly awkward freshman girl who was still taller than most of the guys in her class. I was too afraid of standing out to wear colors other than black, white, and grey (swear).

Maybe at some other high school, I would have been lost in the fray.

But Garfield didn’t allow me to be left behind. This school of ours is still unique, still worth bragging about, because here, anyone can do anything if they have an open mind.

Yes, there are cliques. It happens in high school. We are by no means immune to the fallacies of teenagers everywhere. That doesn’t mean that our school has failed. As long as a student like me can change for the better as much as I have in my four years here, Garfield is still something to be proud of.

When someone asks me why I like going to Garfield, there are a dozen reasons I can rattle off: the diversity, the superior academics (well, at times), and the urban setting are just a few. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that none of those descriptions truly encapsulates Garfield.

Unfortunately, one does not generally think of “quality education” when the words “urban public school” come up. Nor does the phrase “outstanding academics” bring to mind an “insane man throwing bread into the street outside the window of your sixth period class.” But Garfield is an exception.

Each Garfield student has the opportunity to become someone not defined by one label. If I’ve gotten to the point that I can simultaneously make horrendously nerdy jokes about epic Latin poetry while screaming profanities at the away team during a school sports match—and be comfortable with myself—a varsity athlete can certainly pluck up the courage to audition for a Drama Club production. The best part? This is completely normal, and even encouraged by the Garfield community.

Instead of constantly complaining and pointing fingers about the things our school has lost, we should be celebrating the amazing opportunities Garfield gives us. Yeah, we have an oppressive attendance policy and there’s a serious lack of murals in our hallways.

These are minor issues, some of which will change with time.

We cannot allow things like this to define the experience we have here, because there are so many better experiences that make our small grievances trivial.

So, I’ll use my final words to encourage everyone at Garfield to go out and make the most of the time they have left in high school. And above all: we need to wear more purple.

Working in the fast food industry has a pretty bad reputation these days: long hours, unfulfilling work, and a minimum-wage salary. However, driving that greasy food to people who don’t want to come get it themselves can have some great benefits. Pizza places generally pay drivers gas money for every run they make, in addition to their hourly wages. If you have a car, this gig is pretty sweet—drivers can make up to $100 in tips for one good night. Unfortunately, delivering can also be dangerous on occasion, and most places won’t let women go on delivery runs.

Soccer Referee

This option is fairly well-known amongst people who play the sport, but from my experience, the SYSA doesn’t actually require their officials to know much about the sport other than what they learn at a daylong clinic, so don’t let that stop you. Reffing soccer is a flexible job, and pays extremely well for minimal work—older teenagers can make $40+ per game, and most people can do multiple games in one day. Plus, soccer is pretty much a year-round sport in Seattle, and the leagues are always looking for more people to ref. The only drawback? You will sometimes have to watch thirteen-year-olds play rec soccer, which can be extremely painful and boring.

House Cleaner

Adults working independently can make about $30 an hour doing this. While nobody is about to pay a teenager that much to clean their house, it will certainly be more than you would earn as a cashier at a grocery store. If you don’t mind picking up after other people, offering your cleaning services to busy working adults can pay off. Since most people can’t afford to have real cleaning services come to their houses, but still care about their living space being clean, a trustworthy teenager can make a tidy profit in this area. Just don’t break their stuff, and you’ll probably get repeat business.

Working at a Construction Site

Although they won’t let you run the bulldozer, construction companies will hire teenagers to direct traffic and make sure people don’t knock over those orange cones. If you’re skittish around cars or machinery, this isn’t for you. Otherwise, contact local companies to see what positions are available. You too can be a part of the irritating roadblock that is construction on major streets.

Unfortunately, I started to dislike him almost immediately after he began talking.

Davis’ website proclaims that his school assemblies are “primarily designed to motivate youth to reach their potential.” Maybe that would be true if this was the 1940s, and men were still expected to go to college and/or enter the workforce while women stayed in the home. Now, I can appreciate a good “make me a sandwich” joke, but in all seriousness I have higher aspirations than being some guy’s wife. Keith Davis, however, directed all of his “go to college, stay off the streets” statements at the guys in the audience. His advice for women was simply to find a man who will “treat you like a queen.” Oh, and don’t have sex with your boyfriend.

A note to ASB: Our school is totally broke. Next time, don’t pay hard-earned money for a speaker whose message can be summarized by Coach Carr from Mean Girls: “Don’t have sex. Because you will get pregnant. And die.” Perhaps the first clue should have come from his website, which lists “abstinence” AND “promiscuity” as some of his topics. All I could do was sit in the bleachers and shake my head as I heard girls around me cheering for some of the most ridiculous statements about sex and relationships I have ever heard.

Look, I’m glad that Keith Davis changes lives. The task of keeping teenagers out of gangs and off drugs is an important one. I just think it’s unfortunate that he preaches such a backwards message about relationships.

It’s even more unfortunate that girls take it to heart without question. According to Davis’ logic, a girl shouldn’t have sex with her boyfriend if she hypothetically wouldn’t be willing to give him $250. “If you wouldn’t give him that, why would you give him your body so easily?” he asked. What? That made about as much sense as his bit about how “change isn’t change until it’s change” and yet girls were still cheering.

Davis advised us to “build relationships on the front seat of respect, not the back seat of disgrace,” adding that he dated his wife for two years without sleeping with her, because “she’s a queen” and “deserves the best.” Not only was this way too much information, it was misinformation. It is entirely possible to be in a healthy relationship that involves sex, but Davis insisted on reinforcing unfair stereotypes of men as deviant sex maniacs and women as unable to make smart decisions about whom they sleep with.

Ladies, while it is true that boyfriends should never pressure their girlfriends for sex, there is no way that so many of us should have been cheering for Davis’ speech. He and his friend were promoting outdated views on gender roles that are incredibly limiting to women. Instead of clapping, we should have been questioning why he wasn’t telling us we could go to college, or why he was acting like there is only one right course in a relationship.

Davis’ attempts were admirable, but his message needed refining. In this day and age, it is completely unacceptable to walk into a public high school and tell all the girls that if they think they want to have sex, they’re wrong. That kind of close-minded attitude should have no place at Garfield. Also, girls should probably not expect their boyfriends to be drawing them baths with scented candles every night, or whatever it was Davis’ friend was talking about.

That’s just silliness.

I have compiled student stories of these traumas, from the humorous to the “Oh god, what just happened?” Enjoy, and perhaps take warning. This could happen to you too.

“A teacher talked to me for literally 18 minutes into break about college and time management after class, and then when it was 10:08, she said, ‘You’re going to be late, you should hurry.’ (I had tried leaving after she had finished some of her sentences.) So I hinted to her that it would be nice to have a pass so I didn’t have worry about being stopped by an administrator and given Saturday school, by saying, ‘Yeah, my class is on the third floor at the opposite end of the school …’ And she responds with, ‘Well, you better start runnin’.’”

“A teacher almost gave me a referral for throwing a snowball at him while he was teaching class.”

“I had to send off a letter of recommendation to a college. I had an extra letter from him, but it wasn’t in an officially sealed envelope. So I came to his office that morning to get him to officially seal the envelope. He looked at the letter with the school letterhead and his signature on it and said, ‘How do I know you didn’t change this?’ And he rips it up and asks me to come back during lunch for him to print me out a new one. I know there are ‘official logistics,’ but ironically, he lets you read the letter beforehand and make any change you want.”

“A teacher once gave me zero points on a three hundred point test because I wrote my heading wrong.”

“In eighth grade, my science teacher threw a glass beaker at me. He was pissed off because someone squirted water on his back with a micropipette. I think he kicked a chair at someone that day too.”

“Freshman year, I didn’t do my homework one day, and as the teacher was walking around collecting it, she turned to me and said, ‘Well, I see that once again you’ve come to class empty-headed.’ That was the day I learned what a Freudian slip is. After I didn’t do a few assignments, the same teacher asked me if I had a learning disability, if I had ever been ‘checked out’ by a psychiatrist, if I was in any ‘special programs,’ and if I had diabetes.”

“In seventh grade, my teacher sent me out of the classroom for drawing on my own pants.”

“A teacher called me a whale once.”

“We asked our teacher about her weekend, and she said she didn’t want to talk about it. Then a student said she couldn’t talk about her own weekend, because thankfully she couldn’t remember it. Ignoring the obvious illegal implications, our teacher stared ahead and said in an ominous voice, ‘I’ve done some things I’d rather forget.’ What could she have done?”

“I was attempting to leave school early to go to a Running Start appointment, and in preparation I had taken my physics test a day early. The teacher told me that I was free to go as long as I got my absence excused. Unfortunately, my mother had written the time of my appointment on her note, so the administrators in the attendance office wouldn’t let me go, and they were insisting that it wouldn’t take more than three minutes for me to get to Seattle Central. I argued, saying that I had done all my work, had taken my test, and had the teacher’s permission, so there was nothing for me to do in class. The response I got? ‘I don’t care if you have anything to do! You just have to be in that classroom.’”

“A teacher told me I had reached my capacity to learn in Pre-Calculus class.”

Recently, a sizeable group of second-semester seniors was called to the counseling office, just before five-week grades were due to be published. They were told that, oops, turns out the district has decided that certain theater classes they all took freshman year from one teacher don’t actually count for fine arts credit, because the teacher wasn’t “certified” to give them. Now they are all missing a graduation requirement.

This is completely inexcusable on so many levels. Waiting until the middle of these students’ final semester to drop the bomb that they’re missing a class, after assuring them for three years that it would count? Maybe that would be more understandable if the district had just informed the school that there was a problem, but I took one of those classes freshman year and my counselor told me that it wouldn’t count as fine arts way back in October. Yet the school neglected to make the information common knowledge until now, thereby forcing seniors to drop classes out of their full schedules to take fine arts classes.

This whole mess can be chalked up to horrible bureaucratic stupidity: the district is saying that classes have to be grouped by their code prefixes. Therefore, at my senior meeting in October, I was told that my drama class from freshman year can no longer count as a fine arts credit. According to this logic, the same classes we took our freshman year will count as fine arts this year, because the teacher is now certified. It is the same class, taught by the same teacher. This teacher hasn’t changed the curriculum, but the district is petty enough to deny credit to graduating seniors based on a code prefix, even though it is now giving credit for the exact same class. In fact, the school put some seniors back into the same class that didn’t count freshman year, so they could get the credit this semester.

One of the things that’s so upsetting is that the district clearly doesn’t care what students are learning, as long as the class names match up to its arbitrary requirements. If the men and women in charge at Garfield and at the district were thinking about these students’ educations, they would have warned them before five weeks into the semester. They would realize that the material taught in the class has the same value despite the prefix on the code. If they cared about students’ futures, they would not punish them for somebody else’s clerical mistake by pulling them out of an honors physics class and throwing them, bewildered, into a music class. The worst part is, there is no reason that they couldn’t make an exception. This is certainly a unique situation, it came about through no fault of the students’ own, and it would be better for everyone if things were allowed to continue without messing up a bunch of schedules. But that would actually make sense, and that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?

“I’ve been sensing a lot of dissatisfaction in the past couple years,” says Junior Statesman of America (JSA) member Caleb Raible-Clark. “Students are upset about schools closing, the WASL, district dance policies, and standardization of classes, among other things.”

The idea was first vocalized in a meeting of the Garfield JSA club, and has since gathered a strong following on Facebook through the group “Lower Voting Age for School Board Elections Across Washington State.” Advised by political organizations such as the Washington Bus and the National Youth Rights Association, Facebook group is made up of over 1,500 online supporters. Its goal is to amend the bill RCW 29A.08 in order to provide students entering high school the right to vote for their district school board. According to Raible-Clark, once the group reaches 15,000 supporters, they will start talking to state legislators in order to craft a bill that a representative would bring to the House floor. If the bill passed, it would allow students to influence policies that directly affect them and, supporters hope, inspire Washington’s youth to become more interested in politics.

“Politics is not a spectator sport,” says Raible-Clark. “This initiative could help to foster a political mindset earlier on.”

In the spirit of this goal, the group also hopes to use the interest and support they have generated to get a student representative on every school board in the state, in a non-voting, advisory role. Each representative would be in charge of counseling the board as to what students  in their area really want.  Students hope that having the attention of board members will lead to policies more in keeping with student needs, even without student board votes.

“When a group of people is removed from the electorate, it’s easy to pass something that sounds good, but … will upset students,” says Raible-Clark.

As with any revolutionary idea, the proposal to lower the voting age also has its detractors. Many students have argued on the group’s discussion board that their own age group is not yet politically aware enough to make such decisions, citing problems from student indifference to organized resistence.

“Students might be impatient and not be willing accept the difficult decisions school board members must make,” writes one critic. Another says that “students (in general) want stuff like less hours, more breaks, more dances, and other nonessential and non/anti academic things.” It certainly is a valid concern that high school students will be less than enthusiastic about voting – after all, America’s youth consistently have one of the lowest voter turnouts in national elections. However, the National Youth Rights Association believes that in general, granting youth the vote at an earlier age will form good habits and have “a direct effect on their character, intelligence and sense of responsibility.», and that such generalizations are not representative of the overall student population. Meanwhile, the students behind the movement believe that the fact that voters will be participating in elections that affect them more directly will have a positive impact on turnout.

“The reason why we are bringing up the idea of lowering the voting age for the school board is because we want our voices to be heard,” says JSA member Annie Schlossman. “You can claim that there are irresponsible students, but as a group we are not irresponsible. We care about where the money for our schools is going, we care about who represents us, we care about what decisions they make and we believe that we should have a vote for the people that will be making the decisions.”

There is also the thought that simply giving students the right to vote would increase interest and activity in politics in schools.

“The voting could be offered in schools,” says Raible-Clark, “which would increase turnout and give teachers incentive to discuss politics more in the classroom.”

Those involved in the movement are encouraging students to make their opinions on lowering the voting age heard by writing letters,  to and otherwise contacting members of the Seattle School Board and representatives in the state House and Senate. There will also be an after school event at Garfield High School in the near future to raise awareness of the issue.

The new student assignment plan is the district’s latest attempt to streamline a convoluted enrollment process. Rather than requiring incoming students to fill out forms, rank their top school choices, and wait to find out where they are assigned, the district has created new boundaries around each school. Students will be automatically assigned to their attendance area school based on their addresses, from elementary school to middle school to high school. For example: Garfield High School’s attendance area reaches from just south of the I-90 bridge up to 520, and west until the waterfront and Denny Way/Broad Street by the Seattle Center. All incoming high school students who live within these boundaries will be assigned to Garfield. According to the school board, these boundaries are based on school capacity and travel time for students.

Although the plan is slated to begin in the 2009–2010 school year, there will be a necessary transition period. Students currently enrolled in a non-attendance area school, will be “grandfathered” into that school, and allowed to complete the highest grade level there. Families will also have to adjust to limited choice within the school district. According to the district website, students may apply for assignment to other schools, but will only be considered for enrollment once all of that schools assigned students have been enrolled. Students may also apply to “option schools”: The Center School, Nova, and, as of next year, Cleveland High School.

“We need a student-assignment plan that is equitable, predictable and easy for families to understand,” wrote Goodloe-Johnson in her June 2009 guest column in the Seattle Times. In the same piece, she states that the primary goal of Seattle Public Schools is to “provide an education that prepares each student to graduate from high school ready for college, careers and life.” This is a phrase that is repeated multiple times in other components of the “Excellence For All” plan; a mantra for improvement. However, many families are questioning whether or not these two goals can be achieved together.

The question everybody’s going to have is, ‘Is there quality in my neighbor-hood?’” says Garfield principal Ted Howard. “They want to know, is there a college prep program in my kid’s school?”

Parents who have lived in the Seattle area for long enough will recall the scandal that plagued the school district in the mid-1990s when it decided to send incoming high school students in Magnolia and Queen Anne to Ingraham. Though they were relieved to finally have a high school for their children, parents quickly became upset when they realized that Ingraham was not as highly ranked as Ballard or Roosevelt. Ingraham now boasts the International Baccalaureate program, but improvement in one school has not placated current Seattle parents who are still concerned over their child’s placement in a school not of their choosing.

The district has backed up its decision by promising that they will make “every school a high quality school” through their “Excellence For All” plan. However, there is some conflict over exactly what that means. Seattle Public Schools has made a commitment in the plan to raise standardized test scores and increase graduation rates, and these goals do not often coincide with the college prep they have also promised.

“I visited my son’s high school for his freshman orientation, and I was amazed by how much time the prin-cipal spent going on about the new standardized tests,” says one Ballard High School parent. “He and the other administrators spent most of the time talking about how they needed to meet the standards.” Although Ballard is widely acknowledged as one of the best schools in the district, it still has struggled with low math and science scores on the WASL in the past, and is focusing on bringing them up. Unfortunately, this isn’t the most rigorous of academic paths, though it is one many schools are taking.

“The state has set the bar really low,” says Howard. “What they’ve said to me is that there are certain standards that need to be taught, and that we need to monitor. The real question is: how are these standards going to be taught?” That, and “how is this going to affect my student’s options for college?” are what many parents are asking.

According to Dick Lilly’s October 5 article on Crosscut, the new plan sets Rainier Beach, a school that has been consistently under-enrolled for years, to have over 1000 students four years from now. Higher numbers lead to greater generation of funds, which in turn leads to more academic course and program offerings. This would alleviate some of the concerns of parents whose children will be assigned to schools like Rainier Beach, but some students have a different perspective.

When the student to teacher ratio is lower it helps the kids feel like they have more one-on-one time with the teacher,” says Rainier Beach student Lisa Montgomery. She then elaborated on the other issue that causes parents to shy away from Rainier Beach, which she considers more of a problem than under-enrollment:

“I would like to see less fights every day. Kids are constantly using violence as a form of problem solving, and coming from a different part of town, it’s shocking. I think they should focus on violence control because I don’t see teachers or staff members breaking up the fights quick enough to ensure the safety of other students.”

While increased enrollment could still benefit Rainier Beach, that’s not the case with every school. The new assignment plan has Garfield High School facing a multitude of issues, one of which is over-enrollment. The full school already has a long waiting list, and the new boundaries and rules have the potential to magnify the problem.

“From a broad standpoint, it may over-subscribe Garfield,” says Ted Howard, “and push certain programs out.” Howard has shown concern that Special Education and bilingual programs will lose their places at Garfield as the district discusses whether or not their students (many of whom do not live near Garfield) should be moved for greater cost efficiency. Meanwhile, more and more students attempt to find a way to get enrolled at the school.

“I have families literally talking about moving to be in Garfield’s attendance area,” says Howard. Meanwhile, the district has confirmed that students in the APP will still feed into Garfield, regardless of whether they attend Washington or Hamilton Middle School. With the district promising spots for APP students, attendance area students, as well as space for out of area applicants and a desire to retain special programs, Garfield will be under some serious strain over the next few years as the school attempts to accommodate everybody.

Ted Howard still has one more question for the district: “Why are you going back to something that was already in place that wasn’t working?” The district has done much to tout the benefits of reverting to the old “neighborhood schools” idea that Seattle did away with years ago, but has given few concrete details as to how it will improve the inherent problems with the change. Parents ask why their children have to go to schools with low test scores. Students wonder if they’re going to be able to get into the same colleges as their peers at other schools. Everyone wants to know what will happen to diversity in the public schools. District officials will have to answer these vital questions and more in the coming months, since their plan has left so many of them unanswered.

Senior Laura Muñoz, like many other Garfield students, received an incomplete schedule at the beginning of the year. When she went to the counseling office to get her required health class, she was told that all of the Family Health classes at Garfield were full, and that the other classes were freshmen-only.

“If I hadn’t taken the initiative,” she says, “I wouldn’t have been able to graduate. Now I have to miss school to go to my Running Start appointments.”

Although many seniors would like to blame staff members for the confusion, much of the blame lies with the school district. Until this year, Garfield was one of the only public schools in Seattle that didn’t offer any freshmen-only health classes. When the district decided that Garfield needed to change this to fit the “standard,” and to fit in a required P.E. class for freshmen, Garfield counselors had to rearrange schedules, often leaving seniors with no choice other than taking health through Running Start, an option that is generally acknowledged to be more difficult than the in-school class.

Sometimes, however, inconsistencies between counselors are also to blame for schedule confusion.

“They told me I could wait and see if any spots in a Family Health class opened up second semester,” says senior Allyson McGaughey. “But if none did, then it would be too late to take it online.” McGaughey would then be unable to graduate.

Meanwhile, senior Zorah Fung was willing to take health online so that she could take Photography, but her counselor wouldn’t switch her schedule, though several sophomores were allowed into the class.

“He was really adamant about me taking health at school,” she says, “even with a Photo spot open.”

The feeling of many seniors who have been denied health is that the school should be more helpful in getting seniors their graduation requirements, rather than giving so many classes over to freshmen, who still have four years to take the class.

Seniors are being forced to put in extra work through Running Start if they want to be assured of their own graduation.

“I don’t see why they can’t put me in one of those classes,” says Muñoz. “I know I’m really intimidating and all, but I think freshmen can handle having a class with me.”

For those who haven’t heard, the company’s November Thanksgiving advertisements included a small inset with the words “Happy Eid al-Adha,” a reference to the Muslim holiday that fell on November 27, the day after Thanksgiving. Naturally, what with Americans being the generally sensitive and understanding people that we are, the Best Buy website comments section overflowed with customers threatening to never shop at the store again.

“This Country has always been traditionally a Christian Nation & if I have anything to do with it, it always will be,” wrote one commenter. “I am offended that crazies can’t just shut up & let me have my holiday.” This hilariously ignorant statement was one of the tamer ones. Most of those who left messages treated the harmless advertisement as a personal attack by Best Buy on the good Christian families of America. America, that country that was founded by people fleeing other countries because of religious intoler—you know, just forget it.

Best Buy is a privately owned business, and as such has every right to acknowledge religious holidays. In years past, it has eschewed advertisements aimed specifically towards any religion or holiday, though the stores admittedly use Christmas imagery and music in their stores. However, after the incident, a spokeswoman for the company corrected the misconception that “‘Merry Christmas’ is off-limits, but ‘Happy Eid’ is okay,” saying that “in addition to Happy Eid, you will see greetings of Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa, and Feliz Navidad in various Best Buy communications during the holiday season.” Yet the haters are still not satisfied.

So-called scandals like this only prove that our nation is nowhere near being free of intolerance. The xenophobia is only growing now that those who are used to being in power see that minorities are becoming more accepted. In the process, they lose sight of issues that are worth arguing about, and make huge hypocrites of themselves. This is why people campaign to overturn domestic partner benefit acts while claiming to abide by a constitution that promises equality for everyone. It’s why groups of Republicans are advocating “purity tests” for candidates while attempting to diversify to gain votes.

As America becomes less and less dominated by just one group of people, everyone begins to imagine takeover by whatever they fear the most. The ex-Best Buy shoppers fear other religions, and the purity test Republicans fear the dissolution of their party. These disgruntled people are raising hell about things that are not actually a real danger to them, and are managing to offend others with their ignorance. It’s kind of like Stephen Colbert if he was actually being serious. Just take a look at another comment from the Best Buy forum:

“This PC crap has get [sic] to stop! We are in AMERICA, which like it or not was founded on Christianity. It is in our Constitution … Although I am not a ‘bible thumper,’ if you don’t like it move to another country. Quit trying to change us rather than adapt yourselves.”

America has got to stop this ridiculous nitpicking. It is pathetic that people spend their time complaining that others are represented equally when there are much bigger problems facing our country. If half the effort that’s put into whining about stuff like this perceived “war on Christmas” was put into helping the homeless or improving our public school systems, we could actually accomplish something in this nation. Maybe we should try it for a change.

In a school board meeting in early October, Seattle Schools parent and former business analyst Meg Diaz presented a study showing that Seattle Public Schools spends much more on central administration than is represented in the school board-approved budget. Although the totals of the budget presented to the board and the budget approved by the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) are the same, the former provides $15.3 million for central administration while the latter allots $45.1 million for what was supposedly the same category.

Diaz is not unfamiliar to the Seattle Schools budget, having published a study earlier this year on the decision to close certain schools.

“I looked at it and I thought it’s just not possible the central administration is running at $15 million,” she said in an interview to King 5. “It seems mathematically unlikely.”

She was right. The $30 million difference in what was presented to the public and the actual spending was achieved by adjusting the budget for “teaching support.” Most of the difference is spent on teaching supervision ($24.9 million), which comes to one third the cost of the actual teaching support being supervised. This “supervision of instruction” is the fastest growing part of the district’s budget, increasing by 129 percent since the 2004–2005 school year.

There has also been significant growth in other areas, including supervision of transportation (even though the district has been cutting back on provided transportation for several years), supervision of nutrition services, and Human Resources, all of which were moved to the “teaching support” category without explanation.

SSD is in a sticky situation. Class size is increasing due to teacher layoffs, which in turn are becoming more common as budgets tighten. Enrollment is dropping, already down 5.1 percent in the past eight years. Despite this, Seattle’s number of full-time administrative employees has grown by 17.4 percent in that time. To compare, Diaz’s report shows that Tacoma has managed to cut their administration in accordance with their declining enrollment, and that several other districts have actually managed to decrease their administrative spending while increasing enrollment and number of classroom teachers. According to a 2003 audit of the district’s spending, administrative staff is determined by a formula based on enrollment. It would logically follow that Seattle’s dropping enrollment would mean a decreased administrative staff, but that has not been the case.

SSD is the least efficient school district in Washington state, with only about 100 students per central administrator, and the problem is nothing new. State auditors have been questioning the excessive spending for years, and the district has always justified the expenses by claiming that its demographics are “unlike any other district reviewed … in terms of scale and complexity.” Decoded, this means that the district claimed that a more diverse and lower-income student body requires more administration.

However, Diaz’s study indicates that Seattle is actually not that different from other districts. According to figures from the 2008–2009 school year, Seattle has similar “diversity” numbers to many other school districts, and anywhere from five to 20 percent less students on free and reduced lunch than districts such as Tacoma and Federal Way.

“I heard versions of this argument a dozen times,” says former school board member and Crosscut.com editor Dick Lilly. “It was clear to me even in those days that the argument was wrong on the facts, particularly with regard to ELL [English Language Learners] populations.”

The bizarre justification for the administrative budget has led many to question the financial decisions the district has made over the past several years. Websites such as Seattle Public Schools Community Blog that discuss problems with the school system have already been common for several years, with parents and students alike lamenting the downfall of public education. In light of Diaz’s report, however, these sites have become focused on whether or not the district is truly committed to providing students with quality education.

According to a recent report by the National Counsel on Teacher Quality, the starting salary for full-time teachers in Seattle Public Schools is anywhere from $43,000 to $50,000 dollars a year. Adding one new teacher on the district payroll would use approximately .002 percent of the 24.9 million “supervision of instruction” budget. Hiring a new teacher for the same salary that the highest paid teacher at Garfield earns would take .003 percent. When one considers the losses schools have had to their teaching staff and programs, it’s difficult not to wonder whether district money could be put to better use.