Someone at this Strauss town hall just asserted that schools in North Seattle are "at max capacity" as their concern around adding more housing, and I'd like to send that one over to @thebethocracy.bsky.social for a fact check.
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The two elementary schools in Maple Leaf are way smaller than they were 10+ years ago when my oldest started kindergarten. Olympic View has been steadily shrinking that entire time.
And if I understand correctly (I was way less active when my daughters were in Middle School), JAMS size peaked sometimes in the past few years and is smaller today than it was when my kids started there 5 years ago.
It's perception. There is plenty of PHYSICAL room in our buildings, but we are not hiring enough teachers (to save pennies), making teacher to student ratios bananas, especially at the middle school level.
North Seattle operating at something like 75% capacity (tbf you only want buildings at 90% or bad stuff happens like sped programs being shuffled around with normal year to year variation.)
Here's an old map to visualize by area. Blue circles represent building capacity, the smaller orange circles inside them represent April 2024 enrollment. This is just elementary, I'd have to pull new data for middle/high, and I don't have access to my school account currently.
(the colors of the attendance areas represent building condition scores from I think a 2021 report. Red=bad Green=good. The grey ones generally have new buildings now/in process.)
Lincoln is pretty full (1700), but it’s probably the only school in the whole district that is. Ballard/Roosevelt both 1500ish, have room for a few hundred more. Giant class sizes, though.
Okay, here are the high school numbers. Kids in City Council District 6 are zoned for either Ingraham, Ballard, or Lincoln. The Center School is also in this area, and is an option high school. In Seattle, the two high schools over capacity are Lincoln and West Seattle.
And yeah I've heard the high schools have crazy ratios too, I'm just less familiar with their building capacities to say whether it's crowding manufactured by SPS choices or an actual issue of space.
I'm really tired of the arguments that schools or transit is too small to handle more housing. Building housing takes time and in that time we could also scale up our schools. It's not a theoretical econ class with "all else held constant". Cities are meant to grow.
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SPS has been building lots of physical capacity, much faster than Seattle’s zoning has allowed for more housing, especially near schools.