One Wednesday after school, Orca K-8 School Head Teacher Donte Felder pulled up a student’s screenplay on an Apple computer in his classroom on the third floor. Students were studying characters and archetypes through the lens of film and plays, but Felder’s progressive teaching style does not include reading a book and then watching the made-for-TV movie.
Rather than study other artists’ work and draft an analysis in the form of a traditional essay, Felder’s students brought their conceptual knowledge to bear and wrote their own screenplays.
The initial lines, typed in the standard screenplay Courier font, described a young girl, pretty and short, entering the scene. The writing style was clean and tight, adverbs and imprecise verbiage excised through the rigorous editing process. It had taken time to get there, Felder said, but the result demonstrates skills learned through an exploration of that student’s view of the world.
Felder’s students created graphic novels examining social themes through art. Across from a line of tables and chairs in the classroom is a box painted in bright colors with a visage in the center that combines the faces of Mahatma Gandhi and Yoda from Star Wars.
Whimsical? Maybe, but the students have to know what Gandhi believed and the nuances of Yoda’s character to draw the connection, Felder said.
Their projects are from the first year of the academies program in Orca’s middle school grades. Students self-select into either the film studies academy or the social justice academy, which determines the kinds of educational activities students will join.
Parents rallied to protect these progressive, alternative and just recently established methods of education Oct. 17 when the district officials held a meeting to discuss truncation, or cutting the school down to serve grades kindergarten through fifth grade. Such a change would spell the end of the two-month-old academies program that Felder, the newly appointed head teacher, had worked with his staff to implement in the 2016–2017 school year, and the Orca community wasn’t having it.
More than 100 parents, teachers, staff and students — some still in pajamas from that day’s Spirit Week activities — showed up to shut down the truncation process in a meeting with Kelly Aramaki, executive director of the district’s Southeast Region.
The meeting took place only two weeks after the district released a letter detailing its declining enrollment in the middle school grades. A large number of students left after fifth grade, causing Orca to operate more as separate schools than a unified kindergarten through eighth-grade program.
But at the meeting, Aramaki didn’t cite dollars-and-cents reasons for closing the middle school. He said the idea came from the “Orca community,” and it could be stopped by the same.
“If there is not community support for truncating Orca to K through 5, we absolutely won’t do that,” Aramaki said.
Large attendance and vehement, vocal opposition to the concept caused Aramaki to confirm that he would not move forward with truncation. “We will not put this forward,” he said to cheers and applause. But the fact that the process had begun at all left questions for parents and teachers who had no idea the truncation letter was coming.
“You know as much about this as I do,” Felder told Real Change Oct. 19, two days after the community meeting.
Enrollment at the Orca middle school grades has declined by half since the 2011–12 school year, falling from 172 students to 86 in the current academic year. The other grades have held steady, fluctuating between 290 and 325 total enrollment over the same time period.
School demographic data suggest that it’s White students, for the most part, who are leaving.
Orca’s 2014–15 fact sheet showed that White students make up 60 percent of the students in the elementary grades. Black students and multiracial students each make up 14 percent of the population, followed by Hispanic students at 7 percent and Asian and Pacific Islander students at 5 percent.
In contrast, the middle school had almost equal number of White and Black students — 36 percent and 34 percent, respectively — and every other category of students of color also increased markedly.
The statistics caused one White parent to exclaim, “White families, we need to get our shit together and support this middle school.”
It’s not just students leaving — Felder described heavy staff turnover, particularly in the middle school. It became apparent when staff introduced themselves at the beginning of the meeting: A handful were in their first months at Orca, others in their first three or four school years.
Questions about the health of the middle school had been bubbling up for some time, leading to a meeting at the end of the 2015–16 school year where parents met with administration to try to fix the problems. After that process, Felder took over as head teacher and implemented the academies program, which was met with approval from the parents, students and teachers that attended Monday night.
Not everyone had walked away from the spring confab happy with the proposed solution. Members of the “Orca community” approached him after that meeting and asked to explore the truncation option, Aramaki said.
“We don’t want to close Orca K-8,” Aramaki said at the recent meeting. “We are just entertaining a conversation about families asking us to talk about possible truncation of Orca into a K-5 school, but we don’t want to do that if there’s not support from the community to do that.”
That confused many parents in the room who were fairly sure that they were the Orca community.
The district’s plan to get more feedback, and the timeline in which it was supposed to happen, also caused dismay.
The final decision would have to be approved by the School Board by its Jan. 4 meeting in order to get the changes through before open enrollment began in mid-February so that aspiring middle school students could choose their new location, said Ashley Davies, director of enrollment and planning at Seattle Public Schools.
Parent feedback would be collected and, if the results favored truncation, a report would be submitted to the Operations Committee on Nov. 17. The matter would then be introduced to the School Board at its Dec. 7 meeting before it could be approved on Jan. 4.
That meant that a survey asking parents for their thoughts on truncation would have to be written, translated into five languages, distributed in the community, collected and analyzed in two weeks.
Parents seized on that, asking how the district intended to get word to immigrant and minority communities in time to make the survey equitable.
They also questioned whether the proposal had been subjected to a racial equity analysis, a process established for significant policies, initiatives, programs, instructional practices and budget issues in the schools.
It had not, nor had the cost of truncating Orca been determined, Aramaki confirmed via email.
Just past 7:30 p.m. Oct. 17, Aramaki called the meeting to a close and the parents began filing out, jubilant in their success.
Maria Kolby-Wolfe, the parent of a seventh-grader in Orca’s social justice academy, said that her child comes back from school “on fire” with the love of learning, something she had not seen from him before.
His class is currently studying the Second Amendment and issues flaring up over guns in society. That makes for lively dinner table conversation, and Kolby-Wolfe wouldn’t have it any other way. That’s why people feel the need to protect this school and see where it can go now that it’s been stabilized, she said.
“It speaks to the love people have here,” she said.