*Editor’s note: Seattle Public Library leadership have published a rebuttal to this article on their blog, disputing several of the claims. Some of the disputes of fact that leadership had with the three library workers and one security officer interviewed boiled down to differences of interpretation, but in other cases staff accounts conveyed factual errors or incomplete information we have since sought to rectify with corrections and clarifications now contained in the piece and noted at the bottom.

The revisions are the culmination of a long journey that began in 2018, when an article in the South Seattle Emerald revealed that the library imposed an unusually high number of bans, or “exclusions,” on its patrons, disproportionately Black and brown youth as well as the homeless and mentally ill. Well before the rollout, rank-and-file library staff were softening the enforcement of existing rules and working to change the culture in anticipation of the new codes, now called the Community Use Agreement, or “CUA.” 

Some library workers were shocked when Walton, a former Port Orchard police officer, took over and began issuing guidance that felt to them eerily similar to the old rules of conduct the library spent the better part of a decade overhauling. 

“We were thinking everything should be nicer with this new policy,” said a library worker, who requested anonymity. “I feel like we’re actually excluding people more.” 

One of Walton’s first acts on the job was to retrain library security. Library staff had been working with security to develop a more compassionate approach to homeless people sleeping in or outside of branches. Security was encouraged to do wellness checks instead of asking them to leave.

When Walton came on, she had security start sweeping the areas around the Central Library nightly, staff say. Library spokesperson Laura Gentry said the homeless encampment removals were not initiated by Walton.

“Ms. Walton never directed Security Officers to conduct nightly sweeps around the Central Library,” Gentry wrote. “In response to documented incidents of damage to Library property after hours and complaints by nearby residents that there was illegal and dangerous activity occurring around the Central Library after hours, Administrative Services director Rob Gannon asked Library Security Officers to conduct emphasis patrols at night for a few weeks in September 2025 to observe and gather data. They did not observe any dangerous activities. Security Officers stopped those patrols in late September 2025.”

Walton reportedly proposed adding floodlights and hostile architecture to prevent homeless people from sleeping outside the branch — though this proposal never came to fruition. Library staff also contend that Walton is pushing security officers to document minor infractions to justify longer suspensions, riling some librarians, who have generally shifted to imposing shorter bans. Gentry disputed that claim.

In one case, a suspended patron used a library computer under a fake name and left without incident. The man was originally suspended for rolling over a security guard’s foot with his wheelchair after being told not to smoke near a library entrance. Walton logged it in the system as “other crime: identity theft” and extended his suspension by a month. Library workers say that using an alias to skirt a ban isn’t serious, much less criminal, and that they originally logged it under an existing violation category called “Return under active suspension,” but Walton escalated it.

After publication of this article, Gentry said that this patron has repeatedly assaulted two security staff and injured one, earning them a two-year suspension, and that violating the suspension was a serious safety concern in this case.

Library staff says Walton is imposing suspensions of several months on people who act out nonviolently while in a behavioral crisis. They’re calling these bans unnecessarily harsh, arguing that long suspensions exclude people living on the streets from one of the few public spaces available to them.

“For some of our patrons, a month or two or three is a very long time,” a library worker said. “Most of these people don’t mean us harm. They are ill and may not know what they are saying. There has to be another way.”

Some library staff say they also feel pressured to call 911 more often. In a January Q&A about updates to the library’s 911 guidelines, a staff member said that the new guidelines seemed to be a reversal of course. When the staffer started, they were told that the library was moving away from calling the police, and emphasized their concerns, particularly for communities in South Seattle who have had negative experiences with the police. 

Walton likened library staffers’ reluctance to call the police to a “domestic violence mentality,” where library workers “feel responsible to protect [their] perpetrator because they had a bad childhood.” During the Q&A, library staff said she told them that security and other staff did not call 911 because their coworkers “didn’t like police.”

Another library worker, who also requested anonymity, said their reticence stemmed from real-world experience, citing an incident a few years ago where security called the police about a man who threw a metal can. Officers arrived and tackled him in the middle of the library.

“The minute we call, we surrender any sense of control and de-escalation,” the library worker said. “They didn’t listen to anyone.”

Moreover, calling 911 can mean a steep penalty for the patron: a one-year suspension. A security guard said that Walton added a new category to the library’s incident-reporting system titled “Police called for assistance.” If library staff call 911 on a patron, they can be barred from all Seattle libraries for a year if police for a year, with the decision out of library staff’s hands at that point.

Gentry explained that a one-year suspension occurs automatically if police apply trespass charges, but in other cases the library team would have the discretion to log the incident as they deem appropriate in accordance with the CUA.

“When Library staff call 911 for SPD assistance to resolve an incident with a patron, SPD typically issues the patron a one-year trespass and it then becomes a crime for the patron to return to the Library during that one-year period,” library leadership wrote on their blog, following publication of this article. “When SPD issues a one-year trespass, the Library issues a corresponding one-year suspension. This was a recent adjustment made to reduce confusion between trespass vs. suspension lengths, which were previously out of alignment.”

The security guard gave an hypothetical example where a situation with a patron is escalated and they are asked to leave for the day, but they refuse, so the library staff call 911. Ultimately, the person leaves before police arrive, the call is canceled, and the incident is resolved peacefully. That person could still be banned for a full year, the guard said.

In a written statement, Rob Gannon, the library’s director of administrative services, denied that the new guidelines would result in more 911 calls, pointing out that the criteria for calling the police are stricter than in the 2023 update. He also cited language added to the document less than two weeks after the call, giving staff discretion to call 911. It now states: “The Library trusts staff to determine when calling 911 is appropriate. The vast majority of Community Use Agreement violations can be appropriately handled by Library staff and Security Officers without calling 911.”

But library staff say it’s not so much what’s in the CUA or the 911 guidelines, but rather that they’re being made to feel like calling 911 is their best or only option in many cases. They contend that the CUA wasn’t rolled out with adequate training. One library worker said they were given an online training lasting 30 minutes, while managers were trained for three to four hours on the new policies.

“We also don’t get routine de-escalation training, so we aren’t investing in any strategies that would help prevent having to call the cops,” they said, adding that de-escalation training is only available on request and not mandatory.

While the freshly updated 911 guidelines state that the library “trusts” staff to make the call, library workers are hearing mixed messages. The language in the guidelines was also updated to say that staff are “required to” call in specific circumstances and to “err on the side of caution.” Library staff said they couldn’t get a straight answer from Walton on whether this would mean they would face discipline if they didn’t. 

A SPL spokesperson said the department overhauled its incident reporting system shortly after hiring Walton, noting a 2024 ransomware attack that shut down the system, leading to skewed 911 call data for 2024 and early 2025. In 2023, SPL logged 215 calls, compared to 127 for 2025. However, the number of calls recorded from August to December was greater in 2025 than in 2023, which seems to indicate an upward trend after the enforcement surge that coincided with the Walton hire — or at least a more concerted effort to document the calls.

Library spokesperson Laura Gentry said the uptick in calls in late 2025 stemmed from a change in reporting procedures that logs patron calls, not just staff calls: “We did a deep dive analysis of the Q4 2025 incident reports involving 911, and the uptick appears to be related to additional data gathering of 911 calls made by patrons themselves for various reasons, something we did not capture in 2023.”

Some library staff question the selection of Walton, an outside hire and former police officer, over the other finalist, who has worked at the library for nearly two decades and supports the direction that the CUA represents. They wonder if she’s the right fit for the library’s culture. Despite transitioning to civilian life, Walton appears to have had a hard time shedding her identity as a cop. Library workers bristle at her use of words like “perp” to describe patrons in behavioral crisis. Once, when referring to police responses, she reportedly said: “We’re on the call. We’re here to win.”

Gannon declined to comment on why Walton was chosen, but wrote that she is a “compassionate, diligent, conscientious, human-centered leader, with a deep commitment to the values that are the foundation of the Community Use Agreement and of the Library’s mission.” 

Similarly, a library spokesperson defended Walton’s conduct and said she was acting in accordance with policy and with the full confidence of departmental leaders.

Another potential red flag is Walton’s presence on the Kitsap County Brady List, a list of officers who have potential credibility issues that must be disclosed to defense attorneys during a trial if they give testimony. Gannon called these allegations “unsubstantiated,” but the Kitsap County prosecutor’s office provided The Urbanist with a 2019 disciplinary report, showing that Walton was found to have lied to her supervisor.

“[Walton] is the 100% wrong person to be at any position [in the library],” a library worker said. “It just shows how privatized, bureaucratic, and undemocratic the organization has become.”

Corrections and clarifications: The original version incorrectly stated that all 911 calls would result in a one-year suspension. This is only true in cases where the Seattle Police Department applies a “trespass” charge, which library spokespeople say is only applied in certain circumstances, such as when patrons are causing safety issues or violating suspensions. Additionally, we clarified that Seattle Public Libraries applied new reporting procedures in late 2025 that may have been responsible for the spike in the 911 calls in the data and emphasized that the ransomware outage appears to be responsible for the low baseline for suspensions in 2024. We also clarified that Gentry said Walton did not initiate encampment sweeps outside Central Library and that the identity theft suspension case had involved a patron who the library says injured a security officer in an assault. We regret the errors and omissions.

The post Seattle Library Workers Raise Alarm About Security Crackdown Hitting Homeless People first appeared on The Urbanist.

The district has been and continues to face major problems that have been exacerbated by upheavals in leadership, funding issues, and frankly, just not listening to parents. 

The Seattle School Board saw two members leave in the middle of their terms in 2024. The new directors who replaced them came in with a huge learning curve ahead of them. The two are Sarah Clark and Joe Mizrahi; both have chosen to run and try to retain those seats in the November election. Overall, the majority of the Board is up – 4 out of 7 seats will be on the ballot. 

Leadership – the Superintendent 

In 2022, Superintendent Denise Juneau resigned and the Board appointed long-time senior leader, Brent Jones, as interim. The Board then decided that they did not want to do a search and then summarily installed Jones without any vetting from the public. Even so, Jones was a known quantity and certainly knew the district well. 

Last year, Superintendent Jones and senior staff made an ill-advised move to submit a plan to the Board to close 20 schools, all of them either K-8s or Option Schools. That plan landed with a thud and was the tipping point for some on the Board who seemed to want to exit Jones. The complaint was that he and senior staff were not giving complete information that some on the Board asked for repeatedly and it reached a boiling point in spring 2024. 

Jones first said he would finish his contract which ended in July 2025. Soon after, Jones said he had a medical issue and left the district. The Board then appointed Fred Podesta, Chief of Operations, as the interim superintendent and now acting superintendent, as they launched a superintendent search. Podesta is not interested in the superintendent job as a permanent position. 

To note, the Board was NOT following the timeline for most national superintendent searches which generally go from September to December with a pick coming in the spring. Meaning, the Board came in near the end of the regular timeline which means they might be getting all the candidates rejected by other districts. 

Where are we now? In September, the Board narrowed its search down to eight candidates via the search firm HYA (Hazard Young & Associates). In executive session, the board voted to narrow the field down to two in October and expected to announce the name of their finalist shortly. 

So if you follow the bouncing ball, that means that SPS will have a new superintendent and, after the November elections, there could be up to four new people on the Board. 

That’s a lot of churn at the top. 

Funding Issues 

In short, the district is spending more than it is taking in. The Alliance for Education paid for a group – Education Resource Strategies (ERS) – to come in and do a deep dive on what ERS called “Aligning Resources to Strategy and Need.” Here’s the best topline summary from the report: 

• Imagine a family thought they’d need $10,000 from savings to cover their budget. 
• But thanks to $3,600 in surprises (like winning a small lottery prize or canceling a vacation), they only needed $6,400.
• They still spent more than they earned, but not as much as expected and they still needed to spend $6,400 out of their savings to make ends meet. 

The district’s Operating budget is $1.23 billion dollars. 

The State funds around 63%, local taxes (meaning, levies) fund 15.9%, federal dollars are around 6.5% (which is largely to support Title One schools which serve low-income students as well as dollars for Special Education and homeless students), other revenue is 6.1% (mostly from school/facilities rentals or gifts and donations), 4.9% other resources and fund balance 4.2%. 

Students drive state funding. For a long time, the enrollment in Seattle Public Schools (SPS) was about 50,000. But SPS has been steadily losing students over the last five years. The pandemic may be part of that as well as housing costs but it also appears that Seattle parents are voting with their feet. The district has lost about 1,500 students over that time period. October 1 is the official state head count date and it appears that SPS will have lost another 300 students and will now drop down to just under 49,000 students. 

About 73% of the spending is on teaching and learning which includes teachers, nurses, librarians, counselors, textbooks, and student supplies. To note, the State only funds about four nurses for 49,000 students. Clearly, that is not enough so SPS has to fund additional nurses. This is an example of where the district is not getting enough funding from the State. 

Where is there problematic spending in SPS? The ERS report showed that SPS spends much more in Special Education costs and transportation than peer districts.

On Special Education, in 2022-23, SPS spent $92.5 million. In 2023-24, it was $108.5 million and this school year, it is projected to spend nearly $121 million. 

Of course, children with disabilities need supports. No one is arguing against that. However, there is one school board candidate, Janis White, who is an expert in Special Education and she questions the number of students that the district sends out of district for services. Each of these student services can cost upwards of $500,000 to $1 million. Some of these students are ones who need a residential facility to meet their needs but White wonders if the district has tried hard enough to find local services for many others. 

On the transportation side, the district spent about $68 million in 2022-2023, $50 million in 2023-2024 and this year it is projected to be nearly $60 million. The district is using two vendors in trying to cut those costs. One oddity not seen in other districts, is the level of use of private cars (taxi/Uber/Lyft) to transport homeless and other students. 

In an effort to close the widening budget gap, the district did two major things. One, they drained the “Rainy Day” fund. That’s the emergency fund the district uses if it faces an unexpected financial hardship, like if a building burns down. Two, they borrowed money from the Capital fund. Normally districts cannot use Capital funds for General Education spending. However, there is a clause in state law that allows districts to do this for a couple of years, but the money must be paid back with interest. 

The district has not replenished either fund and it’s unclear how they will do that. So the budget woes continue. 

Safety 

There have been two fatal shootings at two different Seattle high schools in the last three years. In the case of the 2022 Ingraham High School shooting that occurred in the school, a 15-year old boy pleaded guilty. 

The 2024 shooting at Garfield High School, where a student was killed trying to break up a fight just outside the building, still has not been solved. There have been multiple drive-by shooting attempts at Garfield, as well.

SPS has created a list of safety actions they propose and the City has shown willingness to help. But the biggest idea is bringing back a Seattle Police officer to the high schools with a pilot program starting at Garfield. 

Former Garfield High principal Ted Howard rightly points out that none of the current student body has ever had a police officer at school and that the MOU between the district and SPD will have strict parameters.

If you listen to students – and 1,000 walked out of their schools just weeks ago over safety issues – they want to feel safe. And yet the Board punted, yet again, on this issue of SPD in SPS at the last Board meeting. 

Student Outcome Focused Governance

SOFG – No, not a new detergent but a governance system that is being enacted in SPS. SOFG stands for Student Outcome Focused Governance. Sounds good, right? But in this case, the devil IS very much in the details. 

More than a decade ago, the Seattle School Board was often called out for “micromanaging” the superintendent. Micromanaging would be an exaggeration of what their job really is, which is oversight of the district on behalf of the public. 

Several years ago, a local consulting firm was hired by the Board. One of the firm’s recommendations was to find and use a new governance system but how SOFG came to SPS is something of a mystery. Mind you, the Board gave no public notice about changing governance. They did not say anything until they had picked SOFG. 

Basically, SOFG says that boards should ONLY work in the policy area, leaving all the operational decisions to the superintendent. How has that played out? 

• The Board changed their notification policy so that the superintendent only has to report spending over $1 million to them (versus the previous $250,000) and that doesn’t have to be an immediate notification, just a quarterly one. 
• The Board went from two legislative meetings a month to one. Nearly every Board committee has been dissolved including Operations, a key committee. 
• The Board has done two things with the Board meeting agenda. Nearly every item now is Intro/Action, meaning they introduce the item AND vote on it at a single meeting. 
• The other thing they did was to move most items to the Consent Agenda. With that move, the Board now votes on multiple items with just a single vote. So now, most items have zero Board discussion. 
• The Board is supposed to stop in the meeting of their sole monthly meeting and do “self-reflection” on how they are following SOFG. It is a jarring thing to watch especially for the members of the public who have to sit there twiddling their thumbs as the directors basically navel gaze. 
• At first, it appeared to be a system for the Board to work under. Then, the Board wants the superintendent and senior staff to use it and it appeared that senior staff balked at that idea. There is yet another report from the same consultant firm saying all the things that need to be done for SOFG to be fully implemented and that includes hiring more Central Office staff. 
• Under SOFG, directors can’t even go to a school without an appointment. 

So what would be the reason we vote for school directors if they are not providing oversight and listening to parents? That is unclear. 

To note, SOFG is not cheap. There is coaching, conferences, membership costs, etc. 

Bureaucratic culture

When the district suffered a financial scandal back in 2003, a local consulting firm, Moss Adams, did a complete sweep of every department at headquarters. The resulting report was amazing, complete with high/medium/low in terms of urgency and high/medium/low costs to fix for each issue raised. 

But Moss Adams ended the report by noting that a building of people working siloed from each other in their respective areas is unlikely to produce good results. They said: 

“If you do not change the culture of a bureaucracy, you change nothing.” 

My hope is that a new superintendent will recognize the major shifts that need to happen for Seattle Public Schools to be a successful district and a new Board will help enact that. 

So, what can I tell you that is good about SPS? 

• First, the Board elected itself one of the best Board presidents ever in Director Gina Topp. Calm, firm, unflappable. She knows how to run a meeting. Will she be able to get the entire Board to vote in unison for a new superintendent? 
• Great schools. Don’t listen to naysayers – SPS has great neighborhood schools, Option Schools, and dual-language schools. SPS has expanded CTE (Career, Technical Education, formerly vocational education) in all directions to have offerings more students want. 
• To the district’s credit, they have not lost a levy since the late ‘90s which is a huge vote from Seattle which, after San Francisco, has the smallest child population for a major city in the country. This ability to pass levies easily is not seen in other major districts in the country. 
• Beyond that, PTAs are among the largest grant supporters in SPS. Parents really step up to help including, in some areas, forming groups to support schools with low PTA numbers. 

The post Op-Ed: The Issues Facing Seattle Public Schools (and Incoming School Board Directors) first appeared on The Urbanist.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, Seattle Police Department (SPD) Chief Shon Barnes, and interim SPS Superintendent Fred Podesta all supported the “Student Enforcement Officer (SEO)” plan to return police inside Garfield, as did Garfield’s principal, Tarance Hart. However, the motion failed in a 5-2 vote.

The proposal would have amended a moratorium on police officers in schools passed by the school board in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. A yes vote would have allowed Garfield to enter into an agreement with SPD for a limited pilot. 

Directors Liza Rankin and Brandon Hersey, the only two board members serving during the 2020 vote, were also the only two votes in favor of the new proposal. 

The vote had been delayed from the board’s September meeting after School Board Director Joe Mizrahi asked for an extension to complete an amendment to the proposal. 

Mizrahi’s amendment clarified that SPD officers have access to school buildings in the case of emergencies and other approved circumstances. The amendment also clarified that SEOs are meant to respond to external threats but not act in a disciplinary capacity toward students and that an internal complaint process would be set up in the school. Finally, it stipulated that the pilot wouldn’t be extended beyond one year or expanded to more schools until the superintendent presented the board with an analysis of effectiveness, budget impacts, and alternatives to armed officers inside schools. 

“These amendments are intended to be responsive to the community concerns and also clarify our values as a board,” Mizrahi said.

The amendment passed unanimously, but after further discussion, the proposal as a whole still failed.

Community objections and confusion

During public comment, several community members spoke against the new SEO program. Makena Gadient, a special education teacher, pointed out that the SEO would be armed, bringing a gun into the school. Gadient said the SEO wouldn’t have access to students’ Individualized Education Programs or be trained in the Crisis Prevention Institute’s non-violent restraint training. 

“I don’t know why we’re moving backwards,” Gadient said.

Also giving public comment were two parents of former Garfield students who were against bringing a SEO back to the school. Amanda Thornwell spoke about the harm the former officer at Garfield did to her son when he was a student there, pressuring him not to speak to the press about a hazing incident he’d witnessed. Elijah Smith brought up the school to prison pipeline and the issues her son had with Garfield staff. 

“This interest of bringing police into the schools is not going to solve the problem,” Smith said.

“The district keeps asking forgiveness rather than for permission,” said Oliver Miska, who works in education policy.

Miska shared documents obtained through a public disclosure request with The Urbanist, which included a “final approved deck” of slides prepared by the Seattle Mayor’s Office for a presentation to the city council on the Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy, on the ballot this November. Sent by Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington on March 10, one slide in the deck said that the levy would add 15 full-time equivalents (FTEs) as Student Resource Officer (SRO) type presences in or around schools.

The slide was also shared with Councilmember Martiza Rivera, who chairs the select committee on the levy. 

Later emails showed the slide being deleted from the final deck by April 29. 

“We have no evidence of whether or not [the proposal has] been removed, whether or not it’s been included. [It] just speaks to the lack of transparency from the Mayor’s office,” Miska said.

Prior to the 2020 moratorium, police officers only served in five of Seattle’s schools (Garfield being the only high school), so introducing 15 officers into schools would represent a major expansion rather than a return to the pre-2020 status quo. 

“Our office has been in conversation with Seattle Public Schools about reintroducing a school resource officer program since August 2024, and Mayor Harrell has been consistent about his support for this approach and wanting to co-create a new program with communities,” Callie Craighead, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office, told The Urbanist. 

“Assuming the levy renewal is passed by the voters, any spending allocations would be decided in the FEPP Levy Implementation and Evaluation Plan, which will be submitted to Council in early 2026,” Craighead continued. “So while we made estimates about what a reintroduction of this program could look like, any spending allocations wouldn’t be decided until the I&E plan.”

Contentious decision

Alicia Spanswick, the Garfield Parent Teacher Student Association safety lead, explained that the new proposal uses the term SEO instead of SRO on purpose. 

“We’re trying to build a brand new program that is completely different from the traditional SRO model and what we had in Seattle before the moratorium,” Spanswick told The Urbanist.

Spanswick spoke of the benefits she thought a new SEO program might bring to Garfield, including a direct line to police dispatch, better emergency preparedness, a deterrent effect, and the opportunity to build positive relationships between law enforcement and kids.

Spanswick said she was disappointed the proposal didn’t pass but blamed a lack of trust and transparency on the part of SPS rather than the board. 

“Whether it’s intentional obfuscation on the part of the district or if it’s laziness, I don’t know,” Spanswick said. 

The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between SPS and SPD is a chief point of both confusion and contention. A draft MOU was attached to the proposal, and parents and community members were concerned that it didn’t reflect input into the MOU provided by the community. 

Spanswick pointed out that there is a line in the draft MOU that would allow SEOs to investigate criminal activity on school grounds, which she called a slippery slope. She’d prefer to see other police officers brought in to do any kind of criminal investigation. 

The MOU also has two references to SEOs being able to take law enforcement action when there is significant risk to property, not just harm to others. 

“No one’s asking for police intervention because of property damage,” Spanswick said. “We’re not asking for police intervention to stop students from doing these sort of normal, if naughty, teenage behaviors. We’re trying to prevent neighborhood violence from typically adults or much older teenagers from bleeding onto the campus.” 

“[The MOU] looks exactly like something that’s in alignment with a model policy recommending SRO positions. The problem is, I think what’s been missing with this whole conversation is what we want at Garfield is not a traditional SRO,” Director Liza Rankin told The Urbanist. “We want a designated officer who can coordinate with the school and the police department, who knows our students and knows our school policies.”

Pressure on the board

During the board’s discussion before the vote, school board directors expressed frustration with the process and a lack of trust in the district, the City of Seattle, and even one another. 

“This has just been a mess,” Hersey said. “It’s been a complete mess in terms of sorting how do we provide a school and community with the opportunity to help their students and their staff and anybody who is associated with the Garfield community feel safe.” 

“I think what the situation represents is when you start from a place of lies, deceit, hiding things, not being authentic, this is where we end up,” Director Michelle Sarju said.

Had the board passed the Garfield pilot proposal, they wouldn’t have been given the opportunity to vote on a final MOU between SPD and SPD. That MOU would instead need to be approved and signed by Podesta on behalf of the district. 

“I also want to be really clear that the disproportionate discipline and the culture that we have in our buildings, this MOU with an officer on one campus is not the tipping point of where there are problems,” Rankin said. “We have an underlying culture of being punitive and discriminatory towards children with or without the police.”

Podesta said the language in the MOU needed to be fleshed out to be completely clear that student behavioral issues are to be handled by SPS staff.

“The intention behind the memorandum of understanding, I think we have agreement with SPD on, is the only time an SEO would offer any services like a regular patrol officer would do, is in a circumstance where we would have called 911,” Podesta told the board.

Podesta also said the district hadn’t been spending much time working on the MOU before the board meeting since they didn’t know which way the vote would go.

“The superintendent shouldn’t sign an MOU that conflicts with our policies,” Rankin told The Urbanist. “[Other school board directors] were really nervous and worried that whatever agreement was ultimately reached wouldn’t honor our direction.”

During the board meeting, Sarju, whose term ends this year, spoke of her distrust of the district. 

“I always have cared about Black kids, and I’m going to go out caring about Black kids,” Sarju said. “My colleagues know I talk about Black kids all the time, because until y’all correct the disparities once and for all, we are not standing on equal ground. Too much data that says having a police officer in a school creates more disproportionality, not less.”

“The lies and deceit for me are the line in the sand,” Sarju continued.

“I really struggled with my vote,” Rankin told The Urbanist, “and I can completely understand why colleagues just didn’t feel comfortable voting yes because it was so convoluted, and I also voted yes because we have to have these conversations and figure out how we all work together as a whole city.”

A political decision

“I’m hoping that from this point forward, we can stop the political wrangling and put kids first,” Sarju said before the vote. “This should not be about winning an election or not. This should be about what’s best for kids.”

But the issue of bringing officers inside schools is one that mayoral candidates have been asked on the campaign trail. At a recent debate at Seattle University moderated by KOMO’s Chris Daniels, Seattle University student Diego Borromeo, and professor Joni Balter, both Harrell and Katie Wilson, the frontrunner in the mayor’s race, were asked if they support having an SEO at Garfield.

“If the students want it, and I believe 70% of students want it, if the principal wants it, I know he wants it, then we think that this would be a good relationship,” Harrell said. “So yes. However, I’m very willing to go, certainly not a gun and badge, an unarmed response. I want these kids safe.”

The recent poll of Garfield students did not have a question specifically asking if students wanted a police officer inside the school. Because only 32.2% of total Garfield students responded to the poll, with no demographic information about respondents available, it is difficult to draw definite conclusions from the poll about how students feel about the proposal. 

In addition, the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) contract requires on-duty police officers to be armed.

“The research does not support the notion that armed officers in schools lead to increased safety, and that it may actually be harmful, especially for minority students,” Wilson said. “So that gives me pause. At the same time, and it’s very important, obviously, what students feel, what parents feel, what administrators feel, and so I think there needs to be, and I understand that there is, a conversation going on about that.”

If the FEPP levy passes in November, the city council will hammer out a more detailed spending plan for the levy’s safety investments later next year. How the Council and the Mayor’s Office proceed will also depend on election results.

However, the ultimate decision as to whether to implement an SEO program in Seattle schools, starting with a limited pilot at Garfield, is in the school board’s hands. Four of the seven school board seats are up for election in November, with Hersey and Sarju not seeking reelection.

“We’re going to have to regroup and figure it out,” Rankin said. “But I think the most important thing, no matter what, is that it’s not about different people’s political benefit. We have got to hear and support the Garfield community.”

The post Seattle School Board Rejects Bringing Police Officer Back to Garfield first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Union Bay Natural Area (UBNA) is 74 acres of public open space with miles of trails and shoreline habitat. Located between the University of Washington light rail station and U Village, it’s a breathtaking natural environment, owned by the State of Washington but managed by the University of Washington (UW). 

The University says all the right things about the natural area. The UBNA management plan calls for an “overarching goal” to “increase the area’s service to the public,” noting that “an expansion of the trail system would increase the site’s value and its utilization by the public.” The Campus Master Plan sets one goal for the adjacent intramural field area: “Improve pedestrian environment and universal access.” UW’s sustainability plan and active transportation goals also point toward opening UBNA to the public.

On paper, it’s an inspiring vision: a vast area of wetlands and trails serving students, families, commuters, and wildlife. Too bad it’s fiction.

Instead of welcoming people, UW walls the public out. From the U Village bus stop, you don’t find inviting trails — you find a mile-long, unbroken fence. Try walking around it, and you’re pushed against five- and seven-lane roads ending at giant parking lots marked “NO PEDESTRIAN OR CYCLIST ACCESS.” 

In other words, bring a car, or stay out. 

Community groups proposed a modest, no-cost solution: open a gate at the bus stop across from the U Village QFC and build a trail along Ravenna Creek, ending at an existing pedestrian bridge. The path is not only aligned with UW guiding documents, but the UBNA Management Plan specifically recommends building a public trail on decommissioned Douglas Road, which is where most of this trail would go. The end result would be both beautiful and practical — ideal for commuters and recreation. 

The Center for Urban Horticulture and UW Farm, both in UBNA, have missions rooted in sustainability and public engagement. Robert Swan, a UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences Instructor, noted the opportunities the trail would bring for students.

“UW students are some of the most active, passionate, and hard working volunteers out there,” Swan said. “This pathway provides a rare chance to benefit everyone and everything involved – improving equitable access, creating green spaces for people and wildlife, and allowing UW students to improve their community while helping build it all.”

To gauge public support, the project was featured at the U District Street Fair, where it was a top choice with 758 public votes. To get things on track we proposed that the trail could be built without UW funds. We could model the project on the UBNA Yesler Swamp boardwalk project that was completed in 2016. Built with community funds, the project is an elevated set of boardwalks that are adjacent to Laurelhurst, in a location only accessible by car. 

After the street fair, U District Advocates met with UW representatives to request permission to design the trail. Unlike the Yesler Swamp boardwalk project, this project would be a simpler wood chip trail and would be accessible to the active commuters and public transit users that UW guiding documents claim to support. It all seemed like a no-brainer — let a neighborhood group pay so UW can achieve the specific vision they’ve laid out in their own guiding documents. 

UW’s response? No. 

Their facilities department said the fence’s purpose is to keep people out. They said the quiet part out loud: they don’t want more pedestrians, transit riders, or cyclists in UBNA. They want the area prioritized for maintenance trucks, with parking lots as buffers that keep out the homeless and transit users. Forget equity. Forget sustainability. Forget the state law requiring UW to manage UBNA for recreation, habitat, and education. 

This isn’t just hypocrisy — it’s a power play. The UBNA is supposed to serve the public. Instead, UW treats it like its own fenced backyard, a dumping ground for trucks and gear. When the community offers a project that costs UW nothing and fulfills their own promises, they slam the door.

Meanwhile, faculty and students who value public engagement are baffled. The UW Farm, the Center for Urban Horticulture, and instructors who teach sustainability all want this trail. They see it as hands-on work that benefits both students and the community. But the facilities bureaucracy’s priority is keeping the public out of public land. 

Here’s the bottom line: Union Bay doesn’t belong to UW. It belongs to the people of Washington. State law recognizes it as a wildlife habitat and mandates it be managed for education, habitat, and recreation. UW’s “access” through the Center for Urban Horticulture in Laurelhurst doesn’t meet that mandate, nor their own commitments to sustainability and accessibility. 

If UW won’t honor its promises, the state can step in — tying future funding to the trail’s approval, or even transferring UBNA to Seattle or King County Parks, where public land is managed for the public. 

This is a rare chance to get it right: a low-cost, high-impact win for equity, sustainability, and public health. UW’s leaders need to treat their guiding documents as more than rhetoric. 

For now, we’re asking for something simple: let us walk through the gate. 

To take action and support this proposal, visit the Union Bay Nature Trail website.

The post Op-Ed: UW’s Union Bay Hypocrisy: Public Land, Private Fence first appeared on The Urbanist.

Board director Joe Mizrahi asked for the extra time, saying he’s working on an amendment to bridge the gap between those who want a police officer back on Garfield campus and those who would feel unsafe with a police officer in the school. 

Mizrahi didn’t give any further details about his proposed compromise. 

Garfield was the only high school in the district to have an SEO before the school board adopted a moratorium on using SPD officers inside schools in 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests. The board’s resolution called for replacing police officers in schools with other services and mentorship opportunities.

The Urbanist previously reported that school board director Liza Rankin said one of the primary concerns about having police officers on school campuses was the requirement that they carry firearms. The Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) contract requires on-duty officers to be armed. 

The vote on the Garfield SEO pilot would not otherwise change the moratorium. Eventually, the school board could return the power to make decisions about police officers in all schools to the district superintendent. 

Rankin is one of only two current board members who was serving in 2020 and voted in favor of the moratorium.

Mizrahi was appointed to the school board in April 2024, and is currently running to retain the seat. In addition to wanting to find a compromise, he’s concerned there is still confusion around the school board moratorium. At times, SPD has appeared to interpret the moratorium to go beyond an end to the SEO program and mean police officers cannot go inside school buildings unless someone has called 911. 

“This sense that the moratorium was somehow barring police officers from interacting with school buildings like normal human beings, as you said, is very problematic to me,” Mizrahi said. “I wanted to have language that would make it clear that the moratorium was never intended to do that and nor should it be read that way going forward.” 

Change of course

Originally, the district suggested lifting this moratorium in order to enable the Garfield pilot this year, but board members objected to this during their August meeting. Certain members expressed the desire to be responsive to Garfield’s needs, while taking the necessary time to think through a system-wide change and conduct community engagement. 

“I think that the concerns in the rationale and the concerns around the positionality of SPD in this agreement are completely warranted by [the] community,” board director Brandon Hersey said. “Does that mean that we shouldn’t do it? No, that’s not what I’m saying. But I do think that that is just another example for me [of] why it’s so critical that we decouple the situation that is occurring at Garfield and the support that we can potentially provide for that community from a full-throated approach to this, full stop, within our system.”

At that time, Rankin also expressed confusion as to why the SEO needed to be inside the Garfield building when the majority of safety threats are coming from outside. 

“[The purpose of police officers] is not to police students. It’s not to handle discipline issues in buildings,” Rankin said. “It’s to protect from threats coming into the community.”

Rylan Springer, a recent Garfield graduate who spoke at a rally before last week’s school board meeting, agreed with Rankin. Springer said she had asked a few weeks ago for a school resource officer at Garfield outside of the building, with community control over said officer. 

Having an SEO remain outside the building at Garfield would be one potential compromise to the pilot. Another possibility would be to have a community resource officer in the school instead of a sworn officer. A community resource officer doesn’t have to be armed, but would still allow SPD to have a presence at the school.

Arron Murphy-Paine, father to Amarr Murphy-Paine, who was shot and killed in Garfield’s parking lot in June of 2024, spoke at a rally before the most recent school board meeting. 

“I do like what I see: us standing here together, letting them know that the community needs to be a part of those decisions that are made by the police department, by the City of Seattle, by Seattle Public Schools and the school board,” Murphy-Paine said.  

Another issue is deciding how to evaluate the Garfield pilot program. As of the end of August, there didn’t appear to be a specific plan as to how to measure its success, even if the board voted to approve it. 

“We haven’t completely thought through how we’re going to measure the pilot, how at the end of the year we can know whether it’s successful and we want to renew, so again, the policy recommendation is broad,” said SPS Accountability Officer Ted Howard.

Howard said he thought it would take the district “a while” to figure this out.

The school district has planned to implement many new safety measures this school year, including hiring more safety and security experts wearing recognizable uniforms, replacing the security fleet, installing a new suite of automated tools to help manage school security cameras, trying a new visitor management system and better emergency notifications, and installing security vestibules that allow two-part entry.

The district is also engaging in a new pilot of weapon detection systems.

School board members brought up that with so many new safety measures being implemented during the same school year, it might be difficult to determine which ones are effective, especially if a new SEO pilot is also added to the mix.  

Mizrahi asked if the district has baseline metrics, for example, for how many violent incidents occurred in the last school year. 

Howard responded that while the district collected data last year, they don’t think it’s reliable because the recording system is difficult to use, hence why they’re replacing it. “The numbers seem suspiciously low,” Howard said.

If last year’s numbers are already low, it is less likely the year-long pilot would show any improvement to those numbers.

School board director Michelle Sarju insisted that the district utilize professional researchers to collect and analyze data about the efficacy of Garfield’s SEO pilot program.

“Back this up with effective research because at the end of this, what we want to know is, is this beneficial for students? At the end of the day, our job at a public school district is students,” Sarju said. “Does this really bring safe, emotional, physical, safety and security to the building, to the surrounding area? But most of all, our students, and particularly those who have been disproportionately affected by policing in schools, right? It is a school to prison pipeline. I’m not arguing with nobody about that.” 

Delays abound amidst concerns

Podesta implied that the board’s decision to delay Garfield’s SEO pilot further might harm the district’s relationship with SPD. However, both SPD and the district have been responsible for their share of the delays around bringing SEOs back into Seattle schools. 

Rankin and district staff exchanged several emails in summer of 2024, in which Rankin appeared to be trying to gain clarity about the board’s role and set expectations for what work she expected the district to do in order to prepare for any kind of return of SEOs. 

Hersey noted at August’s meeting that there had been a very recent, last-minute offer of a meeting with SPD Chief Shon Barnes, even though the district had been talking about the possibility of a new SEO program for a long time. 

The Urbanist also obtained an email written by Kerry Keefe, SPD’s Director of Program Development, who served as Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s director of public safety until spring 2024.

In the email, sent in mid-February of this year, Keefe wrote to various members of SPD and City Hall that SPS had been given a copy of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with SPD in December of 2024. She received a review of the MOU draft from SPS two months later in which the district had neither accepted all edits nor made notes on any open issues in order to move along the collaboration.

“Not sure where to go with this,” Keefe wrote.

The district has been discussing the proposed MOU with SPD with the Garfield community this summer. 

Principal Hart urged the school board to limit any further delays on the pilot.

“In order to have an adequate time to do a full pilot and to really engage students and look at the data, having a longer period of time to do to do that and to get that resource on campus as soon as possible is something that I think I’m definitely in favor of, and I think that that’s what we need at Garfield,” Hart said.

Board directors discussed the possibility of holding a special meeting before October 8 to make their final vote on the question. 

Meanwhile, the Seattle Student Union continues to oppose the return of police officers to SPS. 

Leo Falit-Baiamonte, a student at Nathan Hale High School, said that several school board members, as well as Harrell, are saying that a survey taken by Garfield students shows support for a police officer at the school. But, Falit-Baiamonte pointed out, only 32% of the student body responded to the poll. Meanwhile, no demographic data is provided for who responded and who did not.

A recent newsletter from Garfield’s Parent-Teacher-Student Association (PTSA) appeared to challenge the Seattle Student Union, writing that while the group is “entitled to their perspective, their statements should not be taken as representing the views of Garfield students, staff, or families.”

Falit-Baiamonte said many students from Garfield’s PTSA reached out to the Seattle Student Union saying that the PTSA was not representing them.

“Students at Garfield have been working at us, and your students across SPS are speaking out because there are many issues this raises down the line,” Falit-Baiamonte said. “How will data be collected to make sure if this is successful or not? What will prevent this from going to other schools? And also fear that if it does go to other schools […] how will they protect us from the Trump administration?”

Falit-Baiamonte expressed concern that SPOG has endorsed Rachel Savage, a supporter of President Donald Trump, in a current Seattle City Council race and that SPD “attacked pro trans protesters and also have assisted at the Northwest Detention Center.”

Next steps

The SPS school board will vote on whether to allow the Garfield SEO pilot at their meeting on October 8. Mizrahi told The Urbanist more details about his amendment will be available about a week before that meeting. 

Come November, voters will be deciding whether to pass the Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy. While the City has agreed to pay for the first year of the Garfield SEO pilot, the FEPP levy could potentially fund future years, as well as any SEO pilots at other schools.

If the FEPP levy passes, the Seattle City Council will begin discussing a spending plan for the levy dollars in the first half of next year. With the makeup of next year’s city council currently up in the air, and primary results that suggest two positions might go to more progressive candidates, it’s difficult to predict whether the council will allocate money from the levy to SPD. They could instead allocate money to other safety measures, such as gun violence prevention programs, mentoring and skill building programs, and more support for student mental health.

Falit-Baiamonte said the Seattle Student Union will be taking a great interest in these discussions.

“First of all, having police officers part of the FEPP levy is an exact failure for what the FEPP levy is supposed to do. It’s about promise. It’s about what can students be. And putting that money towards discipline is the opposite of what that should be,” Falit-Baiamonte said. “This is money from people’s property taxes that’s supposed to go to our underserved schools, our underfunded schools that need a lot more funding. Instead, that money is going to go to police officers.”

The post Seattle School Board Considers Returning Police to Garfield High first appeared on The Urbanist.

Rinck’s Amendment 34 would have restored eight separate “Neighborhood Centers” that had been dropped from consideration earlier in the plan’s development. Neighborhood centers are areas of increased housing capacity and expanded commercial zoning that are intended to foster more walkability and community amenities. Drawing the boundaries within Broadview, South Wedgwood, Loyal Heights, Gasworks, Nickerson, Roanoke, Seward Park, and Alki would have set the stage for zoning changes early next year. Those zoning changes are what finally clears the way for builders to start moving larger projects forward.

Amendment 34 was ultimately rejected, amid concerns that adding the centers back to the plan would require additional environmental review that could open the city up to a legal challenge. Instead, the council will consider the eight neighborhood centers next year as part of the annual process to update the Comprehensive Plan.

School Board Directors Joe Mizrahi and Liza Rankin and Board President Gina Topp had signed onto the letter ahead of last week’s board meeting, with Directors Evan Briggs and Sarah Clark adding their names during the meeting to comply with open meetings requirements. With that, a majority of the seven-member Seattle School Board went on record in favor of Amendment 34, albeit not acting officially as the school board as a body. SPS posted the letter to the board’s website.

Seattle’s school district faces significant challenges in the years ahead stemming from a long-term structural deficit, tied to declining enrollment and insufficient state support for public schools. After Superintendent Brent Jones put forward a proposal last fall to close up to two dozen schools around the district, community opposition was swift and fervent. Ultimately, Jones reduced the list to four schools before withdrawing it altogether. Jones has since retired, with the search for a new Superintendent now dragging on longer than expected.

“Councilmember Rinck’s amendments would help address our enrollment and budget challenges by adding more mixed-use, family-friendly housing near existing schools and transit,” the letter states. “These changes are needed and urgent. Many of these proposed neighborhood centers have significant overlap with school buildings that are currently under-enrolled and even schools that were considered for closure last year. Building more affordable homes near schools strengthens neighborhoods, reduces displacement, and will be a big step in ensuring every child in Seattle can attend a well-funded school close to home.”

“Seattle Public Schools has faced a 15% enrollment decline over the past decade. This decline leads to significant impacts to staffing, programming, services and school budgets,” the letter continues. “The District’s 2025 Enrollment Study […] confirmed that this decline is directly linked to housing affordability and family displacement. The study also found that neighborhoods with greater housing density and affordability have seen far less enrollment loss. Conversely low-density neighborhoods with rising housing costs have experienced the steepest enrollment declines.”

Mizrahi, who was appointed to the school board early last year and faces an election to be retained this fall, has emerged as a consistent voice for increasing housing capacity to sustain local schools, and earlier this summer testified in favor of capping King County’s school impact fees for multifamily development.

Perhaps nowhere are the tensions between land use and school policy more on display than in Alki, where Seattle Public Schools has almost completed construction on a brand new elementary school building that will boost the capacity at the site to more than 500 students, compared to 370 at the previous school building. While Seattle voters have consistently approved school construction levies, paving the way for school rebuilds like this one, it’s the Seattle Public Schools operating budget that is feeling the financial crunch.

When SPS put forward two potential lists of schools being considered for closure last year, nearby Lafayette Elementary was included on one of those lists. Located in the Admiral neighborhood, Lafayette is one of the most walkable schools in the neighborhood, and sits directly in the middle of an area where the city is focusing more housing growth in the One Seattle plan. But if that school were to close, many of the families would instead need to commute to Alki or to an even more remote school, Pathfinder near Delridge Way.

More students living closer to Alki could help sustain the entire neighborhood’s school ecosystem, but only if the City of Seattle allows that to happen. As it stands, Alki could end up being not a neighborhood school, but a destination for long commutes from elsewhere in West Seattle.

Nonetheless, the idea of allowing additional housing in Alki has met significant opposition within the neighborhood, including from the Alki Community Council, becoming a particular flashpoint among the eight proposed neighborhood center additions.

District 1 Councilmember Rob Saka, who has focused attention on Alki during his term by prioritizing the area for traffic calming infrastructure ahead of more dangerous corridors elsewhere in the district, came out strongly opposed to the idea of an Alki Neighborhood Center late last week. An amendment Saka put forward to pull the center from consideration in 2026 ultimately failed, meaning it will remain on the Comprehensive Plan docket.

In speaking in favor of his amendment, Saka railed against the proposed Neighborhood Center, citing “very very limited” access to transit — a fact that likely won’t change much without additional housing density. The current Route 50, which connects Alki with Alaska Junction, SoDo, and Southeast Seattle, runs every 20 minutes throughout most of the day, but is a very circuitous route that isn’t competitive with driving. He also brought up “environmental risk” as a reason why Alki is not a good fit for a neighborhood center.

“Alki sits directly on Puget Sound’s shoreline, making it one of the city’s most vulnerable areas to sea level rise, storm surge, and erosion” Saka said. “Encouraging new growth in this high-risk area conflicts directly conflicts with the Comprehensive Plan’s climate resilience principles.”

Apart from the technical case against an Alki Neighborhood Center, Saka painted advocates for additional housing in the area as not being from the neighborhood, suggesting that only neighborhood residents should get to weigh in on whether growth in the area makes sense.

“We’ve heard the term NIMBY, not in my backyard YIMBY, yes in my backyard. I think as part of these specific conversations there’s a new term, maybe: YITBY, yes in their backyard,” Saka said. “It’s easy for some people — some people not from a community — to say something is best for them, and if that thing is implemented, they’re completely unaccountable, and they don’t have to manage the day-to-day as a direct result of that.”

Seattle’s school district, on the other hand, does have to manage the day-to-day reality of a severe school funding crisis. As the city council takes a closer look at the additional neighborhood centers in 2026, including at Alki, they’ll likely want to afford significant weight to the school board directors tasked with finding a way out of that crisis.

The post School Board Directors Are Begging Seattle to Allow More Housing first appeared on The Urbanist.

Ultimately, the Council achieved that minimum requirement on Tuesday, but some councilmembers pushed for a broader discussion of reducing fees, rather than simply rebalancing them. Councilmembers passed a set of amendments that fully exempted affordable housing projects and capped the per-unit fees on multifamily buildings at $5,000.

The amount of funding that the County’s school impact fees can provide is likely small, since they are tied to one-time housing permits and dependent on builder interest. Once fees and other building costs get so high that they jeopardize project financials and scare off investors, homebuilders simply don’t build.

Unincorporated areas, where the County Council has jurisdiction and 10% of the county population resides, has seen scant building activity in recent years. Over the last decade, builders have produced about 300 multifamily units and 2,300 single family homes in unincorporated King County, according to County staff.

Within cities, especially King County’s largest, housing activity is much more robust. Seattle has added more than 70,000 homes since 2017. Seattle does not have impact fees for schools or transportation, though the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability requirement does work much like an impact fee for affordable housing.

Opponents worry impact fees are a NIMBY tool

Some housing advocates have pushed to rein in impact fees because they view them as a backdoor mechanism to obstruct housing, allowing not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) activists a potent tool to block housing while appearing to have a noble cause. Federal Way has been the poster child for excessive impact fees; it levies a $20,086 impact fee on each new apartment constructed within its borders, while charging much less for each new single family home. The new state law going into effect will force Federal Way to revise that practice, it would appear.

For example, Federal Way famously imposed impact fees of $20,086 per units on multifamily units, while levying much lower fees on new single family homes. Pretty clearly seemed intent on reducing apartment development. www.theurbanist.org/2019/05/21/o…

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— The Urbanist (@theurbanist.org) August 26, 2025 at 2:38 PM

Amy Enbysk, press secretary for King County Executive Shannon Braddock, said the Executive’s goal was to comply while maintaining the funding source for local school districts.

“This Ordinance was drafted in response to legislation recently passed by the State (SB5258), which requires counties to change how impact fees are calculated, with the goal that smaller residences would have a lower impact fee than larger residences,” Enbysk said.

As the proposal advanced, Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda pushed for a broader analysis of the impact on builders, addressing the risk of blocking housing construction. Ultimately, Mosqueda viewed the proposal as falling short of the mark and she proposed three amendments intended to reduce that risk.

“When the proposal was presented in the Land Use Committee in July, I was concerned that there was no analysis of how the impact fee proposal would impact the feasibility of badly-needed housing in the County. My concern was that, without proper calibration, fees could actually disincentivize the building of more family sized multifamily units in particular,” Mosqueda wrote in her newsletter. “This is especially concerning given that school districts are reporting decreased enrollment as families are being pushed out of our communities due to a lack of affordable and family-sized units across the region. When there aren’t enough options for families to live in our communities, they leave (often leaving the state altogether), and schools suffer along with our community as a whole.”

Some housing advocates are worried impact fees would stunt homebuilding and are ill-timed. @cmtmosqueda.bsky.social has proposed guardrails: -Amendment 2: caps fees on family-sized units -Amendment 3: exempts affordable housing projects -Amendment 4: expands reqs around housing impacts analysis

— The Urbanist (@theurbanist.org) August 26, 2025 at 1:42 PM

Mosqueda’s amendments garnered support from organized labor and builders, including LIUNA, Seattle Building Trades, MLK Labor, Housing Development Consortium, McCullough Hill Leary, School Board Members, Habitat for Humanity, and the White Center CDA.

County caps impact fees at $5,000 per unit

State lawmakers’ goal with SB 5258 appears to have been preventing undue burdens on multifamily builders. Some jurisdiction heap more impact fees on apartments than single family homes, or apply the same fees to small efficiencies, microhousing, or backyard cottages as units many times larger.

On the other hand, Mosqueda pointed to scarcity of multi-bedroom apartments as another policy issue worthy of addressing. As a result, she pushed an amendment capping fees on multi-bedroom multifamily units.

Councilmember Rod Dembowski proposed to expand that $5,000 cap to all multifamily units. Mosqueda and most of her colleagues backed that change. One exception was Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who argued for a fuller analysis and engagement process with school officials before advancing a cap on fees. Balducci ultimately voted for the underlying bill.

With the fee restructure and cap and affordable housing exemption, Dembowski argued the legislation marked one of the rare times in his 12 years on the County Council that they were lessening obstacles to permitting housing rather than adding them.

“The high cost of housing is driven in part by the high cost to build it. Excessive impact fees, many approaching $20,000 per unit, unreasonably increase housing costs and reduce access. I have raised these concerns for years, and so was happy to join with Councilmember Mosqueda to address this issue by revising the impact fee formula,” Dembowski said in a statement. “The new formula strikes a reasonable balance that ensures new development helps cover the cost of new schools, while recognizing that fees cannot be so burdensome that housing is not accessible and affordable. This bold action sends a strong signal that King County is serious about taking action to implement the recommendations in the Regional Affordable Housing Task Force Report and cut the cost to build new homes.” 

Through her spokesperson, Braddock declined to back the amendments outright, indicating the Executive Office would evaluate them caps and exemptions in partnership with school districts and builders.

“We look forward to working with both schools and housing providers through the evaluation process, including reviewing caps and exemptions,” Enbysk said.

School districts face varied problems

Unincorporated areas largely fall in eastern King County in exurban districts like Councilmember Sarah Perry’s District 3 and Councilmember Reagan Dunn’s District 9. Washington State’s growth management framework would encourage tapping the brakes on growth in these exurban areas. However, some unincorporated urban areas also exist, such as White Center in Mosqueda’s District 8 and Skyway in Council Chair Girmay Zahilay’s District 2.

The problems facing school districts also vary across King County. Some suburban school districts are overcapacity, having failed to expand enough to serve their local growth spurt. On the other hand, some urban school districts like Seattle Public Schools is under-enrolled, as family sizes have shrank since postwar peaks and a growing number of parents have placed their kids in private schools.

“Snoqualmie Valley School District is 35% overcapacity. North Shore, which I share with Councilmember Dembowski, is overcapacity and expected to be significantly overcapacity,” Perry said. “But that is not true for Seattle. That is not true for other school districts.”

Time will tell whether the impact fee legislation can be any help for schools grappling with too much enrollment, whether by slowing down growth or raking in fees or some combination of the two. Impact fees can only be used to expand school facilities, not to pay for maintenance or operations in existing schools.

Balducci offered the opinion that impact fee legislation was too around the margins to swing the calculus much either way for either builders or school district administrators.

“I also understand that the impacts are probably fairly minimal on both sides of the aisle,” Balducci said Tuesday. “The schools lose a minimal amount of fees . […] And the cut to the cost of funding housing are minimal. I mean, I think we’re talking about a few thousand dollars for a construction project that’s going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Going forward, Balducci suggested an approach where impact fees are deployed in school districts that are significantly overcapacity, while other areas perhaps avoid them.

“I would absolutely support a coordinated approach going forward, to try to find a way to strike this balance between impact fees that support school districts — not like the ones in my district — like the ones in Councilmember Perry’s district, that are bursting at the seams,” Balducci said. “They’re the ones that really need to build. They already have more kids than they can then they can support. And so if we incentivize more kids coming there, that’s not the answer to their particular problem.”

The post King County Restructures School Impact Fees to Comply with State Law first appeared on The Urbanist.

The girl in front of you drives an electric vehicle, which her family bought because it emits less carbon. The boy behind you has been carpooling consistently since sophomore year. You, like many others, drive to school by yourself in a standard gas car.

Parking passes are issued first-come-first-served, and seniors get first priority. There is no consideration for who is contributing less to traffic jams, air pollution, or parking lot crowding. The EV driver pays the same as the carpooler who pays the same as you. 

What if we could incentivize students to reduce emissions and congestion by carpooling?

King County has a goal to reduce county-wide carbon emissions 50% by 2030 from a 2007 baseline. Their Strategic Climate Action Plan calls for reducing car trips to lower transportation emissions. Sustainability policies adopted by the Issaquah, Bellevue, and Lake Washington school districts reinforce these carbon reduction goals, opening the door for student-focused strategies.

When it comes to environmentally-friendly forms of transportation, nothing beats walking, biking, or riding an e-scooter. Taking public transportation also reduces one’s emissions. Many students who live close to school, have access to safe biking infrastructure, or live near a bus route are already walking, biking, and using transit. But what about the students who aren’t? 

Students who do have to drive should consider carpooling to cut their emissions and reduce traffic congestion. But right now most schools offer no incentives for students to carpool. 

Fifteen high schools in King County sent us data on their current parking fees and carpooling incentives. Only three have carpooling incentives: Issaquah, Redmond, and Interlake high schools. 

Issaquah High School prioritizes carpooling in their permitting process by allowing students to register multiple vehicles under one permit, and students can split the $140 fee amongst those in their carpool. 

At Redmond High School carpools are assigned a designated stall in their carpool lot and the permit fee is half-price. Two cars can be registered per permit, so two students are able to switch off driving responsibilities throughout the year. 

At Interlake High School, students who are in a three-person or larger carpool are given priority in securing a $100 permit. This means that students who carpool will be given a permit until they run out of available spaces. Students who do not carpool are placed in a lottery to have the chance to get a permit. 

The other twelve schools we collected data from do not offer any incentives to carpool. Instead students are charged a flat rate ranging anywhere from $50, like at North Creek High School, up to $140, like at Gibson Ek and Liberty high schools. Choice schools, like Tesla STEM and International Community School, do not even charge students a fee to park. 

Issaquah, Redmond, and Interlake high schools show that carpooling can be incentivized — something other schools could adopt to align with climate goals. 

Recommended policy changes: 

• Cut parking permit fees in half for verified carpoolers.
• Give carpoolers priority in receiving parking permits before solo drivers.
• Increase fees for single-occupant vehicles to reflect their higher per-person environmental impact.

If 25% of student drivers began carpooling, the environmental impact would be significant. For example, Juanita High School has an average of 300 student drivers, so that would be 75 students carpooling. Assuming each carpool is just two students that would reduce the number of cars by 37 each day. If each car emits 3.5 pounds of CO₂ daily on a four-mile round trip, this shift would cut 130 pounds of climate pollution every school day. Over a 180-day school year, that amounts to almost 11 metric tons of CO₂ avoided. That’s equivalent to avoiding 17 flights between Seattle and New York! 

If 25% of students at our fifteen surveyed high schools made this change it would prevent 171 metric tons of carbon emissions. There are 83 high schools in King County. Imagine how much we could reduce our emissions if just a quarter of student drivers carpooled to school.

How students commute to school matters.

The post Op-Ed: Students Advocate for Carpooling Incentives at High School Parking Lots first appeared on The Urbanist.

Last week school board director and former school board president Liza Rankin wrote a memo to her colleagues proposing a major new round of austerity for the Seattle Public Schools (SPS). The proposal appears to revive a plan to close numerous public schools, as well as what she calls “strategic abandonment” of district functions.

Rankin’s proposal comes at a key turning point for SPS. The district is hiring a new superintendent, developing a new strategic plan, and voters are filling four of the seven seats on the school board in the November election. The memo is likely an attempt to influence those processes.

Like many other districts across the state, SPS faces ongoing budget deficits. Seattle voters, and many state legislators, prefer to solve it with a wealth tax. But Rankin’s memo envisions a lasting round of austerity that would come at the expense of Seattle’s students.

Seattle residents have shown their main priority for schools is improved academic rigor, not further austerity. Rebuilding public trust is also a priority. Some felt blindsided by the 2024 proposal to close 21 schools, which the district walked back after outcry. 

In her recent memo, Rankin rules out increasing enrollment and raising new revenue as addressing the district’s financial issues. Instead, she appears to double down on the unpopular idea of a mass school closure — though she does shroud the idea in vague, sanitized management speak — think: “right-sizing.” (Rankin declined to answer emailed questions about her July 30 memo.)

Closures were never going to bring fiscal stability

Austerity is not new to Seattle Public Schools. District leaders have engaged in several rounds of budget cuts since the end of federal stimulus funding in 2022. Support staff and school administrators have been cut, along with some central office personnel. Class sizes have risen, especially in middle and high schools.

There’s no doubt SPS faces a deficit, as do many other districts across the state. The reason is not overspending or underenrollment. The cause is the state’s ongoing failure to amply fund our public schools as the state constitution requires. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal has said schools are underfunded statewide by $4 billion per year.

Yet the actual size of SPS’s deficit has come under fire in recent independent analysis. SPS routinely projects an annual deficit of about $100 million. Community members have argued that the actual deficit size is likely less than $100 million, and found evidence that the district has failed to examine nearly $400 million in “district office” spending.

After having eliminated its fiscal committee earlier this decade (with Rankin’s support), limiting the board’s ability to monitor and even simply understand district spending, the school board recently announced the creation of an ad hoc budget committee. This committee will be chaired by board member Sarah Clark and includes Rankin and fellow board director Joe Mizrahi as members. The committee “is charged with making recommendations to the Board on budget development timeline, building trust in the budgeting process for Board and community, and scope of potential additional analysis of district finances.” It will help delve into these larger questions about the true state of SPS finances and its deficit.

SPS officials also began proposing permanent closures of schools. District leaders made it clear these were not proposed to save money or because of declining enrollment. SPS administrator Fred Podesta, who now serves as the district’s interim superintendent, said in early 2023 that closing schools is “a good strategy whether you have money problems or not.” In May 2024, Rankin herself acknowledged in a KUOW podcast that closing schools might not save money.

Mass school closures in other cities created a host of problems for students and schools without bringing the promised savings. Students whose schools closed had lower test scores, lower graduation rates, and higher dropout rates. Closures worsen enrollment declines, and fail to provide long term savings.

In Seattle, closing 21 schools would have saved only $30 million of a projected $100 million deficit – and that’s without including the cost to the district of lost enrollment from families who leave after their student’s school is closed. It would also have caused families to have to travel significantly longer distances to get their children to school, often beyond what is easy for kids to walk or bike. Since the proposal did not come with additional bus service, the result would have been more cars on the roads – especially near schools, undermining the city’s Safe Routes to Schools work.

In October 2024, SPS leaders proposed closing only four schools, which would have saved less than $1.5 million total. That plan was also abandoned in the face of opposition.

School enrollment fell in the early years of the 2020s. But that decline has leveled off since then, and began a slow rise in 2024. Enrollment remains higher now than it was during the 2000s, when SPS operated its current number of schools. Seattle’s overall population has continued to boom, passing the 800,000 mark, suggesting continued enrollment growth is possible.

A recent survey showed that the number of families choosing to enroll their kids in SPS dropped significantly between 2012 and 2023. The main reasons given by families were concerns about educational quality and changes to curriculum, suggesting SPS could win these families back.

Seattleites strongly opposed school closures. Thousands of people signed open letters against the closures, and hundreds of people showed up at mass rallies against the closures that were held in fall 2024. Polling commissioned in October 2024 by the Northwest Progressive Institute found voters were opposed to closures by a 2-1 margin (54% against closures, 27% for them).

Rankin was a strong supporter of those school closure plans. In 2023, Rankin argued for consolidating schools. When Superintendent Brent Jones cut the list of schools to be closed from 21 to 4 in early October 2024, Rankin told the Seattle Times “the district needs to close more than five schools over time.” In April 2025, she told the Times “It seems fiscally irresponsible to me to maintain the level of capacity that we have.” Rankin’s memo then is just the latest step in her effort to justify a mass school closure, despite public opposition.

“Right-sizing” and “strategic abandonment”

Rankin’s memo does not focus on ways to grow enrollment or bring new resources to SPS. Instead, it focuses on ways to make cuts, with a particular emphasis on what she calls “right-sizing” – another term for closing schools.

She lays out how a new closure process ought to unfold:

“The Superintendent’s process for right-sizing should differentiate between school effectiveness, facility quality/condition, and facility affordability, and should carefully distinguish between a building, a school community, and a program, when recommending moves/changes. A sizeable community committee with representative voices is essential.”

While this provides more detail than the vague justifications given for the 2024 closures, this still envisions a potentially sizable closure process in which schools with low test scores are closed, rather than given additional resources. This would repeat Chicago’s devastating school closure experience. It also lets the district off the hook for failing to address student learning needs, instead blaming the students and families whose schools they close for lacking “effectiveness.”

Although having a “sizable community committee with representative voices” is a good idea for any major district proposal, it does not reduce the harmful impacts to students, families, and communities of a mass school closure. When the public opposed closures in 2024, they were not asking for a different process. They were opposing the closures themselves.

A new round of school closures is just one of the possible aspects of Rankin’s wider austerity plan. Her memo also suggests SPS cease other programs and services as part of what Rankin terms a process of strategic abandonment: “Strategic abandonment is essential. It’s just as important to get clear about what the school system will stop doing as it is to get clear about what it will start doing or continue.” 

Rankin does not provide details of what SPS would abandon, but other school districts around the country have stopped offering arts, music, athletics, libraries, and other core services as part of their own “strategic abandonment” plans. The only specific thing her memo proposes could be abandoned are school buildings.

Undermining the push for a wealth tax

Rankin’s proposals amount to waving the white flag in the battle to fix Washington State’s upside down tax code and pass a wealth tax to fund public education. As she wrote in her memo, “We are out of options and cannot afford magical thinking – no imaginary new funds, new taxes, grants, no sudden increase of student enrollment.”

But there are significant new funds and new taxes on the horizon, particularly a wealth tax. Rankin’s austerity plan could, if implemented, undermine the effort to pass a wealth tax at the state level – an effort that showed increased strength in the 2025 legislative session — though it ultimately came up short.

The “wealth tax” is a common name for a financial intangibles tax. In the 2025 session, the entire State Senate Democratic caucus proposed a financial intangibles tax that would have generated $4 billion per year for public schools. According to the caucus, the proposed revenue source would be “a tax of $10 on every $1,000 of assessed value of certain financial assets (stocks, bonds, exchange-traded funds, and mutual funds) held by individuals with more than $50 million of these assets, paid by about 4,300 wealthy individuals.” 

Senate Democrats’ proposal also had strong support among many House Democrats. But it lacked support from Governor Bob Ferguson, and failed to pass the legislature in the 2025 session. Supporters vowed to continue the effort in future years.

The wealth tax does have very strong support from the public. An October 2024 poll by the Seattle Times found 66% of voters support a wealth tax. The same poll also found that 65% of voters want to spend at least $3 billion a year in additional funding for public schools, which the Senate Democrats’ wealth tax would have achieved. 

Opponents of taxing the rich and big corporations often call instead for governments to cut spending. In Seattle, Council President Sara Nelson, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, and the Seattle Times Editorial Board often call for sweeping spending cuts to city services as an alternative to City Hall passing new progressive revenue measures.

If SPS and other school districts across the state embrace austerity plans, closing schools and scaling back services, this could reduce pressure on legislators to pass a wealth tax. Tax averse Democratic and Republican legislators, as well as corporate lobbyists and wealthy individuals, could point to “right-sizing” and “strategic abandonment” at public schools as viable alternatives to a wealth tax. In my own experience, legislators from both parties are often eager to find alternatives to raising taxes for public education.

Rather than give up the fight for a wealth tax and embrace austerity in our public schools, Seattle’s elected leaders ought to double down on the wealth tax and other progressive revenues in the legislature – especially as the impact of Trump’s economic policies further erodes funding for schools and other public services.

Conclusion

Rankin’s memo and the sweeping austerity that it floats ought to become a central topic of discussion and debate during the hiring of a new superintendent, as well as in the fall school board election campaigns. Candidates should be asked whether they would support or oppose a new school closure effort or “strategic abandonment” of district programs and services.

Rather than embrace austerity, SPS should let the new ad hoc budget committee do its work, and make financial decisions based on the community’s stated priorities, which do not include closing schools. And all of us, including school board directors, ought to turn up the pressure on Olympia to amply fund our public schools with a wealth tax.

The post Op-Ed: Closing Seattle Schools Is Still a Bad Idea first appeared on The Urbanist.

But now, five years later, we’re still fighting for the same things: real safety for students — not more police in our schools. And the fight is urgent — because city leaders want to start by bringing cops back to Garfield High School.

People need to know the story of Mi’Chance Dunlap-Gittens, a Garfield student who should still be here. Mi’Chance was a senior who wanted to be a lawyer. He was out with a friend on the night of January 27, 2017, when plainclothes detectives sprang from the back of an unmarked van on a dark Des Moines street.

Not knowing who they were, Mi’Chance ran — and they shot him in the back of the head. He was just a kid. The officers were looking for someone else but mistook Mi’Chance for the person they were after.

Let’s be clear: the research overwhelmingly shows police don’t make schools safer. 

Data shows that Black students made up just 15% of the U.S. student body in 2015–2016, but they accounted for 31% of school arrests. 

A study by the Justice Policy Institute found that schools with police have five times more arrests for “disorderly conduct” — things that shouldn’t even involve the criminal system. 

A Public Administration Review study found that while school resource officers (SROs) slightly reduce some forms of violence, they do not prevent gun-related incidents. Instead, SROs negative impact leads to more suspensions, expulsions, police referrals, and arrests — especially for Black students and students with disabilities. 

We don’t need more cops in schools. We need more care.

Across Washington, we’ve seen students—especially Black, brown, disabled, and neurodivergent students — criminalized for being kids. The ACLU of Washington released a report that detailed the abuses of cops in schools: A 15-year-old was charged with felony assault for spraying fart spray in school. A high school student was referred by school police to the prosecuting attorney on suspected charges of assault in the fourth degree after the student poured chocolate milk on another student in the school lunchroom. A 12-year-old with disabilities was pinned to the ground and charged with felony assault for spitting.

If our leaders truly cared about student safety, they’d focus on what’s proven to work: more mental health counselors, safe spaces for students to take a break, and more funding for Black-led community groups, like Community Passageways and Choose 180.

Too many schools are making the opposite choice. A 2019 ACLU report found that 1.7 million children in the U.S. attend a school where there is a police officer, but no counselor — and 14 million attend a school without a counselor, nurse, psychologist, or social worker, yet still have a cop.

Having studied this research after the tragic shooting at Ingraham High School, the Seattle Student Union led the fight to win $20 million from the City Council to help keep our schools safe by funding mental health counselors in every Seattle public high school. That was a huge victory, showing what’s possible when students organize and speak up.

But Mayor Harrell delayed the funding, and the City Council later cut it to $12.5 million. Many schools still don’t have the mental health support we need. At Nathan Hale, there’s only one part-time counselor, and they’re overwhelmed. At The Center School, where over 70% of students are LGBTQ+, there’s no counselor at all.

“It hurt,” Ingraham senior Cici Kennedy told KUOW, “It just kind of felt like we were devaluing mental health support in general and not giving it the attention that it should be given in terms of money. It’s just not enough.” 

We demand real student voice in these decisions. Too often, adults cherry-pick students who agree with them instead of listening to the majority of us. We’ve been calling for a citywide student policy roundtable so students have a real seat at the table.

The truth is, we don’t go to school to be watched, criminalized and punished. We go to school to learn, grow and build a future. We need our city and the school district to keep its promise: invest in counselors, not cops.

As we continue this struggle, we’ll be launching a student survey to gather more perspectives across Seattle. If you care about real safety—not just the illusion of it — join us. Together, we can build schools where every student feels safe, supported, and free to thrive.

Russell McQuarrie-Means and Miles Hagopian contributed to this article. McQuarrie-Means and Miles Hagopian are local public school students and activists, along with fellow authors Leo Falit-Baiamonte, Liya Bogale, and Fatra Hussein.

The post Op-Ed: Seattle Leaders, Keep Your Promise — Keep Cops Out of Schools first appeared on The Urbanist.