Seattle Planned to Close Up to 21 Public Schools — Here’s How We Stopped Them

From coast to coast, school districts are proposing closures, as pandemic-era funds have long since dried up and gentrification has driven families out of increasingly unaffordable neighborhoods. Yet in a time when budget cuts threaten public education nationwide, Seattle organizers have shown that communities can fight back — and win.

After initially proposing in spring to close up to 21 schools — and, under immense pressure, reducing that number to four — Seattle Public Schools (SPS) announced in late November that it was canceling all plans to close schools. Superintendent Brent Jones admitted he “no longer saw a pathway for this approach,” and emphasized the district’s commitment to the “needs and well-being of our students, families, and community.”

But make no mistake: this decision wasn’t handed down from above. It was won through a relentless, grassroots campaign by parents, caregivers, educators, students and community members who refused to let our children bear the brunt of budget shortfalls.

The district claimed it needed to close schools because of its nearly $100 million budget shortfall. They clearly hadn’t learned the lesson from the last disastrous round of school closures. In 2009, SPS hastily closed five schools — despite the massive outcry from communities — just as a surge of enrollment entered the district. Back then, the district was forced to spend $48 million reopening schools — three of which had just been closed. This year, Seattle Public Schools projected a loss of 600 students, only to see enrollment rise by 206, and yet they were still planning to charge ahead with school closures. The district’s inability to learn from its own history only strengthened our resolve to stop this from happening again.

As frustrating as the district’s lack of appreciation for the costly impact of previous rounds of school closures was, the real outrage is the fact that schools in a city as wealthy as Seattle have such a massive budget shortfall. Seattle is home to 11 billionaires and 54,200 millionaires. Washington State has the second most regressive tax system in the nation, with the wealthiest 1 percent of earners paying only 3 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the lowest 20 percent of earners pay a crushing 17.8 percent. Our schools are being starved while billionaires like Jeff Bezos launch themselves into space — a contradiction that fueled our rebellion.

This fight offers important lessons for others across the country facing the devastating impacts of school closures. Here’s how we won — and what comes next.

The Movement Erupts

In 2013, When Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel imposed his disastrous neoliberal policy by closing 49 elementary schools , it was called “unprecedented in number for a major urban center” by the Chicago Tribune. In a city with around 600 schools at the time, it meant that the closures impacted about 8 percent of Chicago’s schools. As harmful as that was, it pales in comparison to Seattle, where the proposal to close 21 schools out of 104 total schools represented an astounding 20 percent of the district. By percentage, this would have been one of the largest school closures in U.S. history.

Parents organized their school communities, supported each other and demanded clear answers from the district.

This fall, the district named the specific schools and threw their communities into turmoil. But parents refused to let their schools be sacrificed to budget cuts without a fight. Their relentless activism — rallies at schools, community meetings and passionate testimony at school board hearings — forced the district to scale back the proposal from 21 closures to four schools: Stevens, Sacajawea, Sanislo and North Beach.

At that point, parents from Stevens, Sacajawea Sanislo and North Beach took the lead in the fight. They organized their school communities, supported each other and demanded clear answers from the district. At every school board meeting, their voices were loud and clear about the devastating impact school closures would have on their community. As one parent, Tim Sullivan, the PTA vice president at Stevens Elementary School, told The Seattle Times, “It’s been a roller coaster all fall. I think one of our strongest points of complaints was that we don’t understand what problem this solves or how it makes enough of a difference to be worth all of this disruption.”

Students also quickly sprang into action, joining their parents at rallies, writing letters to the school district and testifying at school board meetings. As the Seattle Student Union wrote in their statement on the school closures:

Many students who form friendships and bonds in their school that will help them throughout their entire life will lose those key relationships because closing schools will disperse students to different schools. The school closures will be especially difficult for the kids that have the most mental health challenges and hardships in their life, losing key relationships with counselors and teachers that are vital for these students’ wellbeing.

Instead of closing schools, we demand the school district join us to build a major campaign directed at state lawmakers to fund our schools by taxing the rich. Show us you care about our futures, by demanding the money from the state that it will take to build the schools we deserve.

This point was driven home by numerous students at schools that the district had slated for closure. “I have been here since kindergarten, and I made lots of my friends that I know today here,” Edwynn Louks, a fourth grader, told The Seattle Times. “I don’t want to lose all of that. Sacajawea is my home. I love it. It’s a great community. I love all the teachers here. I don’t want it to close.”

Organized Parents Built a Citywide Movement

But this fight didn’t remain isolated to individual schools. All Together for Seattle Schools (ATSS) connected parents, caregivers and community members from across Seattle to amplify their resistance.

As Erin MacDougall, co-chair of All Together for Seattle Schools, put it: “The last year of the district’s efforts to close up to 21 schools without authentically involving families and school communities was a tumultuous and stressful time for parents, caregivers, students and educators. Instead of being pitted against each other, hundreds of parents and caregivers from all corners of the city worked together to show the district how damaging its proposal was.”

ATSS helped neutralize divide-and-conquer tactics that sought to pit schools against each other, and organized parents to recognize that an injury to one school was an injury to all.

A powerful town hall forum at Franklin High School that drew a couple hundred people together to oppose the school closure plan.

All Together for Seattle Schools didn’t just mobilize protests — they educated the public. Alex Wakeman Rouse, the other co-chair of ATSS, told me, “Through our coalition-building efforts, parents and caregivers listened, learned, and educated others on the key issues, dug into the data on student impact and supposed cost savings, and elevated the stories of the families most impacted by the district’s proposals.”

This strategic, citywide unity showed the district that the closures were not just a concern for a few schools, but a threat to the fabric of the entire community.

Educators Rise Up

Educators played a crucial role in this fight. The Seattle Education Association (SEA) — the union representing Seattle’s teachers — voted in September “to advise a NO on the plan” to close up to 21 schools. The Seattle Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (SCORE) — a group within SEA committed to racial equity, fully funded schools and social justice — took the fight further. As Alaina McCallum from SCORE explained to me:

During union elections last April, SCORE put out a voter’s guide of nine candidates who would fight school cuts and closures; all nine candidates won, which signaled educator’s desire to take action against closures. The coalition building that SCORE had been doing for several years helped bring together students, parents and community members … SPS was not prepared to hold up against the pressure of the community.

SCORE made sure the public had accessible information. They created flyers with frequently asked questions debunking the district’s claims that closures would save money. Through social media, they kept the community updated on the history of past closures, the district’s plans and the importance of collective action.

A Powerful Citywide Forum Showed Multiracial Unity

As the movement grew, the need to gather community to collectively strategize became undeniable. This culminated in a pivotal moment: a powerful town hall forum at Franklin High School that drew a couple hundred people together to oppose the school closure plan. Organized by the Seattle NAACP Youth Council, Seattle Student Union, SCORE, ATSS, The People’s Big 5 and Black Lives Matter At School, the forum gave people a space to voice their concerns, share information, demand action and chart a way forward for the movement.

At the forum, we dismantled the district’s attempt to rewrite history and brought the assembled media, two school board members and even state representatives face-to-face with the truth. Seattle Public Schools claimed closures would save money, but we reminded everyone of the disastrous outcomes of past closures; including the lesson from 2007, when the district closed several schools, only to lose 20 percent of the students from those schools, costing millions in lost per-pupil funding.

Seattle Public Schools still faces a $94 million budget deficit. But instead of closing schools, the district must now focus on systemic solutions.

Rita Green, education chair at Seattle King County NAACP, spoke about helping to lead the struggle to save Seattle’s Rainier Beach High School that was initially on the list of schools to be closed in 2008. Green, an alum of Rainier Beach, explained to the audience the dramatic turnaround the school experienced after the movement successfully removed the school from the closure list — including a significant increase in enrollment and graduation rates. Beach even received national recognition for its impressive gains and is an ongoing testament to the foolishness of closing schools and the wisdom of supporting and investing in struggling programs.

The forum wasn’t only about organizing to stop the school closures but also about envisioning what fully funded, equitable schools could be. Oliver Miska, an organizer with The People’s Big 5 — a campaign to fully fund schools by fixing the inequitable tax system — drew applause when he said, “We need new progressive revenue. We need a progressive income tax, we need a wealth tax, we need a payroll tax.” Alex Wakeman Rouse added, “Imagine if all the parents who were fundraising joined us to urge the state to fully fund the schools!”

Nathan Hale High School student Leo Falit-Baiamonte spoke of a fight for mental health funding in Seattle schools — a fight the students believed they had won; however, the city has yet to deliver on its promise. Falit-Baiamonte explained, “At the Seattle Student Union we’ve been trying to fight for increased mental health money. And that passed in November of last year, but Mayor [Bruce] Harrell only implemented $10 million of the $20 million … and we are trying again to get the full $20 million.”

One of the most important aspects of the forum was that it demonstrated multiracial opposition to the closures. A narrative was being advanced that only wealthier white parents opposed the closures. While some of those parents may have been first to spring into action — often because they had more time and access to the system — our multiracial panel of parents, students and educators shattered that narrative and showed that closures weren’t about equity, they were about austerity. Our argument — that austerity amidst the boundless wealth in Seattle was a cruel absurdity — proved persuasive. The solidarity of parents, students and educators — across race, neighborhood and background — was critical in turning the tide and forcing the district to reconsider.

The Fight Ahead

Mothballing a school isn’t just closing a brick-and-mortar edifice. It’s hanging a closed sign on the hopes of a community. It’s disrupting the relationships that our most vulnerable students rely on. We can’t close our way to quality schools. We can’t close our way to equity. We can’t close our way to justice. We can’t close our way to excellence. We can’t close our way to joy. We can’t even close our way to a balanced budget.

Closing schools sends a message that communities are disposable, but investing in them says they matter.

That’s why we are celebrating this victory for Seattle’s students — but we also know the fight isn’t over. Seattle Public Schools still faces a $94 million budget deficit. But instead of closing schools, the district must now focus on systemic solutions, including lobbying the state for fair funding. “With the school closure plan in the rear view mirror for now,” MacDougall told me, “we are putting all of our energy working with other school communities across Washington on the Billion Dollar Bake Sale, a statewide advocacy campaign to urge state lawmakers to prioritize fully funding K-12 schools this legislative session.”

In addition, the coalition that came together to organize the citywide town hall didn’t dissolve when we won the school closure struggle. Instead, we’ve evolved into a new coalition called Fund Washington Schools.

We will keep fighting to ensure that every school remains a lifeline for its community. Our message to those across the country facing school closures: organize fiercely, speak the unvarnished truth, and link arms to form an unbreakable chain.

In the richest nation the world has ever known, there is more than enough money to keep your schools open — the question is, will there be enough political will? Too often, our wealth is squandered on luxury for billionaires while children go without counselors, nurses, books.

Seattle’s victory shows us this: when we fight together, we don’t just resist — we win.