I’m a graduate of Seattle Public Schools and the parent of a current student.
I was also a founding member of the United States Digital Service in the Obama White House (the USDS has since been renamed and restructured under President Donald Trump). A large part of our work was helping federal agencies identify and fix organizational issues that blocked effective policy implementation.
Over the past six months, I’ve been working with a group of parents on a deep dive into SPS’s finances. We’ve analyzed multiple decades of data, going all the way back to Joseph Olchefske, who succeeded John Stanford as superintendent in 1998.
The message I want to share is this: Seattle must choose a superintendent who will actively redesign an organization that has, for decades, struggled to ensure spending matches the budget developed by the School Board and the senior staff.
This isn’t just about finding someone with the right values. The new superintendent must restructure staff at multiple levels, while also rebuilding talent, trust and cohesion within the bureaucracy. Without fixing this, even the best vision will fail — because the money won’t go where it’s supposed to.
Let me ground this in data.
Since Olchefske’s departure in 2003, we’ve seen a steady erosion of transparency in the district’s budgeting process. Each successive superintendent has removed more information from what is presented to the board. Today, 31% of the district’s operating budget — about $383 million annually — is spent on staffing that isn’t described in the budget documents the board is asked to approve.
In 2002, the board and the public could see how many FTEs and how much funding was assigned to each department. Now, we only see school staffing through “Weighted Staffing Standards.” Details for other departments are gone.
And what happens when something isn’t visible? It avoids cuts.
While the part that remains visible — school-based staffing: teachers, principals, counselors, transportation — gets examined year after year, the opaque 31% escapes scrutiny.
Though much of that 31% does go to critical staff (e.g., custodians, nurses, therapists), other things slip through the cracks.
Here’s just one example: From 2012-2024, the “HR activity” category overspent its budget by an average of $2 million annually. Worse, since 2019, the HR activity budget was reduced by $1.3 million but actual spending in this category increased by $2.6 million. By 2023-2024, HR activity overspending reached $4.1 million — nearly the amount of projected savings from the four-school closure proposal.
Although the district has determined that much of the recent HR overspend resulted from a spending classification mismatch between budgeting and spending, it still means that for years, our budget reductions had no discernible impact. Did we cut staff or not? By how much and where?
The financial chain of control — from the board-approved budget, to the superintendent, to senior leadership, down to the departments — is broken.
Restoring this chain will require difficult decisions — including restructuring departments and, likely, terminations. Without it, we risk continuing painful cuts to classrooms without knowing if there are multimillion-dollar inefficiencies in non-student-facing departments.
The skill set needed to fix this is different from the skill set needed to build a new vision. In some organizations, during executive turnover, a fixed-term interim leader is hired with a clear mandate: Get the house in order so that a long-term leader can succeed without being burdened by the politics of internal reshuffling.
Is that an option for SPS? Could we hire a restructuring-focused interim superintendent for one year with two clear goals. Ensure that:
● Actual spending matches the approved budget.
● The number of full-time equivalents and dollars allocated to every department are fully known and transparent in budgeting.
Then, and only then, resume the search for a long-term, visionary leader.
While interim superintendent Fred Podesta has a track record of finding savings (e.g., in transportation and maintenance), there’s a clear conflict of interest in asking him to oversee restructuring that affects future peers. An interim focused on restructuring must come from outside the system.
If this is not feasible, we should prioritize hiring a restructuring-oriented superintendent. That is the more urgent need right now. Given Seattle’s track record with superintendent tenure, any hire might effectively be fixed-term anyway.
