The marchers came up the street, their banners and signs wafting in a light snow as they chanted a slogan incorporating the words that helped elect President Barack Obama.
"Save our schools -- yes, we can!" the 200 parents, teachers and students shouted Sunday as they walked along 23rd Ave. in Seattle's Central District.
Their choice of words was deliberate. On Thursday, the Seattle School Board is scheduled to vote on a plan to close or completely change the use of nine schools, five of which serve largely low-income children of color -- two in the city's traditionally African-American Central District.
That includes closing T.T. Minor Elementary, where the march started on its way to a rally at Garfield Community Center, and replacing Meany Middle School with an immigrant student center and alternative high school, both of which would move from their current sites. Beacon Hill's African-American Academy would cease to exist and, in West Seattle, a K-8 program would take over Cooper Elementary, forcing students to find other schools.
The district says it must make the changes to help fill a $25 million budget shortfall. But many parents who marched Sunday called the plan inequitable and racist -- something they won't stand for, they say, now that they have elected an African-American president who is calling for accountability and vision at all levels.
"Common sense would have told them to at least put one white school in there," said Ricky Malone, a retired principal of the African-American Academy, a K-8 program developed for young Blacks. "This is the most racist closure Seattle has ever had."
The plan put forward by school superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson calls for the 17-year-old academy to cede a school built for it eight years ago to students of Van Asselt Elementary, which would close. If the board approves the plan, rally organizers with a citywide coalition called Educators, Students and Parents for a Better Vision said Sunday that they and the NAACP will sue the district for discrimination.
It's a claim that Goodloe-Johnson, who is African-American, has heard once before. Prior to leaving her previous superintendent post in Charleston, S.C., a school board constituent filed a federal civil rights complaint alleging that her district financially favored a primarily white magnet school over a Black one.
Parents make a similar allegation at T.T. Minor Elementary, where the district's stated reasons for the closure don't add up, say Bonnie Wilson and Katie Joannes.
The district says operating small schools costs too much and that T.T. Minor's poor building condition, low test scores, and low enrollment were the reasons it ended up on the closure list. But Wilson says the school met its academic progress goals last year. There are also two smaller elementary buildings in the district's central cluster, Joannes says, that are in worse shape: Montlake and McGilvra.
The difference, she says, is that their students are from primarily white, affluent families.
It's clear, Joannes says, that "they [are] focusing on African-American and low-income populations, maybe because they thought we wouldn't have the time or energy to stand up against them, whereas Montlake has been on the closure list before and somehow it's off the list by the next morning."
David Tucker, spokersperson for Seattle Public Schools, says the district's closure committee applied the criteria equally to all schools, but the central core has an excess of capacity that must be addressed. "They did look at Montlake," he says, but "eventually decided that T.T. Minor was the best option" -- for uncited reasons.
In addition to administrative and other cuts it's making, the district says the closures will save $3.6 million in the upcoming 2009-10 school year and $16.2 million over the next five years. But, based on the district's experience with a previous round of school closures in 2006, parents with ESP Vision say those numbers don't add up, either.
After the 2006 closures, about 20 percent of the students left the district entirely, either by moving or choosing a private school. If the same percentage holds true with the 3,733 who are expected to change schools this time, according to analysis done by Lowell Elementary parent Meg Diaz, that could mean about 750 students would leave the district, taking with them nearly $6,000 per chield in state funding.
That, Diaz says, would cost the district $4.3 million a year -- more than the annual $3.6 million the district intends to save.
Tucker says that ESP's figures are inflated: they reflect schools that closed on the district's borders, where non-Seattle students often came and went, boosting annual attrition rates. "We wouldn't be able to draw a correlation [with the school closures] unless we spoke with the parents that departed," he says.
Other school supporters say the district has a $30 million rainy-day fund that it could easily use to fill the gap. Or it could cut more of its administrative costs, which are relatively high, they say, compared to other districts around the state: including a $264,000-a-year superintendent's salary that parents say tops the governor's pay.
"If you were ever going to use a rainy day fund, it would be now," says James Bible, president of the Seattle-King County NAACP, who points out that, while parents and students may lose schools for lack of funding, the city is planning a new $200 million jail.
"It's deeply disappointing that the city is building a jail while the school district is closing schools," Bible says. "Eliminating opportunity while building jails is inconsistent with the idea of creating a society in which we're all being treated equally."