Every mother likes to brag, but Bonnie Wilson has more than one reason to point out her three children.
Her fifth-grader, Diallo, is a chess champion who plays the piano and trumpet, and has twice "popped off" the charts in his annual test scores on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, Wilson says.
Her third-grader, Zubrei, is a year ahead in math skills and reads at a sixth-grade level. Her youngest, Umoya, is a second-grade Montessori student.
All three currently attend T.T. Minor Elementary, a school in Seattle's Central District that is one of five the school board voted in January to close, along with moving or eliminating eight other programs. This fall, Wilson says, that means her three children will have go to two different schools farther away, in the process losing not only T.T. Minor's accelerated programs and unique student activities, but the very culture of the school's racially diverse neighborhood.
It's a move, Wilson says, that doesn't add up -- one reason that she and three of her relatives are challenging the school board's decision in a legal appeal. It's one of four appeals filed earlier this month in King County Superior Court by a total of 10 parents from the affected schools who say they and their children got the bum's rush in the school district's drive to fill a $25 million shortfall.
Regardless of the deficit, Wilson and other parents say in their appeals, the district has to follow state law, but did not in its school closure proceedings.
Under the state's school closure statute, RCW 28A.335.020, attorneys for the Wilsons and other parents argue in their appeals, a school board can't start a school closure process without having a closure policy in place beforehand. But, after the school board authorized starting the closure process last October, it then adopted a new closure policy in November.
The board was required to take a new vote to start the closing process or follow the old rules, which specified that public hearings be advertised in newspaper ads that either weren't taken out at all or too late, the appeals say. And six of the hearings, the parents argue, were scheduled at the same time on just two nights, preventing parents with children in more than one school from speaking at more than one hearing.
In addition, attorney Shakespear Feyissa states in the Wilson appeal, the school district's final report "is silent regarding how the school closure will adversely affect the minority students at the school," 84 percent of whom are children of color, with 79 percent coming from low-income families.
"I think we have arguments supported by the evidence that the school district rushed into this decision to meet their budget goal," says Feyissa, who calls the 90-day window in which the district acted "theater." "It is really disappointing to see that the school district did not consider any alternative ways to raise money and used this drastic decision [of] closing schools."
District officials could have turned for support to area corporations, Feyissa says; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, announced earlier this month that it's giving the district $7.2 million.
Wilson says the district's $30 million rainy-day fund should be tapped instead of closing a school like T.T. Minor, which district officials characterize as lagging. But Wilson says the closure makes no sense. The school isn't behind under the No Child Left Behind Act, yet other Seattle schools that are on the federal law's lowest rung, or Step 5, she says, will remain open when T.T. Minor is closed and her students are sent out of the Central District to Lowell Elementary on Capitol Hill.
"It's disparate treatment," Wilson says, that's "racist on its very face."
Nora Wheat, a parent whose son goes to the Central District's Nova alternative high school, which is slated to move to the Meany Middle School building this fall, says she filed an appeal with four other parents to hold the district accountable for its procedural failings.
"Everyone wants the district to save money and for schools to run efficiently," Wheat says, "but communities don't need to be broken apart to support that and the district doesn't have to lie and break the law to meet those goals."
Seattle Public Schools spokesperson David Tucker said he could not comment on pending litigation. But, "We are prepared to fully defend the closure action as having been lawful and in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations," he said.
"This is a David and Goliath situation, and Goliath's stomping around thinking we're going to get with this," Wilson says. "But David is going to do the very best for what's right for our students."