Steve Sundquist
Running for School Board District 6
What have you done or what would you do to ensure that adequate financial controls are in place at the district? How do you plan to ensure that the information you receive about financial issues and other SPS issues from SPS staff is accurate?
The Board has taken a number of steps to ensure that adequate financial controls are in place, and as Board President I have had an important role to play in ensuring that the changes we desired were implemented.
First, the Audit & Finance Committee now meets twice a month rather than once, to ensure that it has sufficient time to review the district's financials and to ensure that the district is completing follow-ups from prior audits. We have also added two community volunteers with strong skills in accounting and finance to this committee.
Additionally, we have strengthened the internal audit function – when planned hiring is complete this fall there will be three professionals on this staff rather than only one as before. We have also strengthened our board office staff, and added oversight work sessions of the board on a fixed rotation that is driven by the board office. Accounting and Finance will be on the most frequent rotation, so the full board will have regular opportunities to review the processes, staff and financial controls of the Finance team.
Also noteworthy is the partnership we have established with the Seattle Elections and Ethics Commission, which will provide both education to our staff and a whistleblower hotline capability for staff who wish to confidentially report concerns or suspicions of wrongdoing. The Ethics Commission has a long tradition of independence and thorough research, and this capability should be very helpful in overcoming past employee fears and concerns about intimidation and retaliation. I am confident that collectively these changes will substantially improve the quality of the district's financial system, and the board's oversight of it.
How will you shield children in the classroom from the impact of district budget cuts?
The Board has taken many steps over the past few budget cycles to minimize the impact of state budget cuts on our classrooms. We are implementing the New Student Assignment Plan, which when coupled with the associated reduction in transportation needs, will be substantially less costly to operate. Additionally, we have "tiered" school start times, further reducing the number of buses we must operate. We have made deep cuts to staffing at the Central Office, laying off over 90 staff members for this upcoming school year. We have successfully negotiated furlough days for both central-office staff and school-based staff, while largely avoiding an impact on scheduled classroom instructional days. We have instituted multiple hiring freezes at the Central Office over multiple budget cycles, and have made adjustments to the pacing of the District's strategic plan to save money. We have also carefully drawn down financial reserves, although not to unsafe levels.
As the cumulative effect of these cuts have grown, they are of course getting harder to make without impacting our students. With the Legislature contemplating a fall special session that might result in additional mandated cuts before the winter holidays, I am strongly advocating that Seattle voters support the City's Families and Education Levy, and that we all urge our legislators to minimize further cuts to public education budgets going forward.
Do you support keeping Susan Enfield on as Superintendent? Should Seattle conduct a national search for a superintendent? Why or why not on both questions.
This is not an appropriate question for me to directly answer at this time, as the Board deliberately offered her a contract through June 30, 2012 to de-politicize this decision by ensuring that it could be made after the election. In the meantime, we are creating a process under Director DeBell's leadership to obtain input from the community on the skills and traits the public wishes to see in the next Superintendent. The Board will also conduct a performance evaluation of Dr. Enfield this fall so that the key inputs are ready for the next board to make this decision in January.
I will say that I believe Dr. Enfield has done a good job in a very difficult situation, and she has stabilized the district at a particularly challenging time. She is not playing a traditional interim ‘care-taker' role, but rather has offered strong leadership and educational vision for our school-based and centrally-based educators, and has also demonstrated managerial competence and courageous decisiveness on the district's budget challenges.
How do you plan to reach out to parents who feel frustrated or unheard with the school board or SPS administration? What new ideas do you have about public engagement, particular with SPS parents?
I work very hard to be accessible to the public through my twice-monthly community meetings, as well as through PTA meetings, meetings requested by school groups, e-mail, and the media. One of the areas I have pushed hard is to get Dr. Enfield out into the community more than her predecessor, so that she can hear first-hand the issues that parents and other community members have with Seattle Public Schools. She has been receiving generally high marks for these appearances, and it has been noticed that she is generally perceived to be listening effectively.
I will also push for more use of surveys by the district, whether online or through more traditional means. Properly designed, surveys enable the district and Board to hear from more citizens, and given how busy both parents and the smaller number of SPS staff leaders are, to obtain feedback on a wider array of topics.
In recent months I have also reached out to community members who can help me with Spanish language interpretation at various meetings, enabling me to communicate effectively with a growing but insufficiently heard community in our schools.
What is your opinion on the Teach for America teachers coming into SPS? Are there enough qualified teachers applying for SPS positions?
I support Teach for America coming to Seattle Public Schools. My primary reasons are that TFA has traditionally been more successful than SPS in recruiting teachers of color, and also that I believe Principals should have as broad a teacher applicant pool as possible to choose from. In voting to support TFA, I have also worked to ensure that these candidates would not be considered until "Phase 3" hiring, when all internally-displaced teachers within the district have been accommodated.
Clearly one of the challenges of my policy approach on TFA is that there are many traditionally certificated teacher candidates available in the marketplace today. However, Teach for America candidates are certificated as well, just through an alternative means, and our state's Professional Educator Standards Board has voted unanimously to certify them if they meet the relevant criteria and complete the required processes. I believe Principals and site-based hiring teams, as experienced professional educators, are the appropriate people to determine which candidate will be the best fit for their opening.
Many of our schools have needed re-building, retrofitting and repair. What can be done to ensure that capital funds are used appropriately in the future to this end?
We do indeed have many demands on our capital funds. I spoke above about the improvements in our governance processes that are improving our financial controls, ensuring that the money we target to this purpose is used appropriately. I also support the work of our BEX Oversight Committee, which consists of experienced professionals from our area who oversee the major capital budget initiatives of the district.
Additionally, I worked hard in our 2011/12 budget development process to ensure that we retained more of our district maintenance staff than was originally proposed. This was accomplished by moving a number of people onto our district Capital Budget from our Operating Budget, which will require them to work on more significant retrofitting efforts than has historically been the case. Finally, as Board President I am working closely with our Operations Committee to ensure that we have appropriate planning and project selection processes in place for our continuing and proposed BTA and BEX revenue streams.
What changes (if any) do you think are needed in the district's new student assignment plan?
The biggest challenge we have faced with the New Student Assignment Plan has been accuracy in enrollment forecasting, particularly when coupled with a difficult budgetary environment. The financial constraints mean that the district has to work very hard to minimize operating costs as well as capital costs, which implies a need to be very accurate in matching district enrollment capacity with demand all across the city. This has proved difficult, as demonstrated by crowding in some schools and significant wait lists.
In response to this challenge, I have pushed hard to increase the citizen involvement in the district's forecasting efforts through the Demographic Task Force; have advocated for more partnering with the City of Seattle, which is happening; and have championed greater support for the district's demographer through high-quality, experienced consulting services.
These changes will likely bring us recommendations later this fall for additional capacity. We will then need to ensure a strong public engagement program to determine whether these new schools should be attendance area- or option-schools. If we decide to make them attendance area schools, we will have to propose new attendance area boundaries in each of the affected geographies. This process should also entail a strong public engagement program to ensure that the resulting maps better conform to how our neighborhood communities define themselves.
What do you think is the district's number one problem and how would you try to solve it?
The district's top problem is that the academic achievement of our students falls short of our collective potential, and we have substantial and unacceptable education gaps among some groups of students. This is demonstrated by our high dropout rate, our scores on state-mandated accountability exams, and high rates of remedial work among some of our college-bound students.
I continue to advocate for systemic changes in our school system that increase access, accountability, and academic rigor, and for a more service-oriented approach to our community that encourages greater family involvement. Examples from my first term include implementation of the New Student Assignment Plan; aligned (but not standardized) curriculum across our schools to ensure a rigorous "floor" for all students; a district- and school-based improvement framework that includes scorecards to improve community understanding and drive resource allocation within the district; and ground-breaking new contracts with our principals and teachers that incorporate evaluation systems that include student results, as well as increasing mentorship and career ladder opportunities for staff.
Given the continuing budget challenges and our need to improve the quality of instruction at all of our schools, I will be focusing my greatest near-term energy on the successful implementation of our principal and teacher contracts.
