Written by by Denisa R. Superville at seattletimes.com
For years, Seattle Public Schools often pointed to Rainier View Elementary School when it wanted to show how it was improving academic outcomes for Black and brown students or to highlight good school leadership.
But that’s only part of the story, according to nearly two dozen current and former staff members and parents who spoke to The Seattle Times about their experiences under the school’s principal Anitra Jones. They said they tried to alert the school district over several years to the stressful environment, where high staff turnover was the norm and evaluations were weaponized to keep teachers in check. Academic performance suffered as children were bullied, admonished for minor infractions, and denied legally required special education services, they said.
Jones did not respond to several requests for comment, including an email detailing allegations made by some teachers and parents.
Now, an independent review has found that while Seattle Public Schools appears to have followed its internal policies when responding to the complaints, those policies may be inadequate to address complex leadership challenges like those at Rainier View.
For example, parents and staff members who desperately wanted help reached out to multiple departments in SPS. But because SPS didn’t have a point person paying attention to the breadth of issues emerging from Rainier View, the district could have missed the full picture, according to the review.
Parents who already felt that SPS had neglected their concerns for too long were disappointed the review focused only on SPS’ policies and did not look into their complaints about Jones’ leadership. The report noted that “the review is not a personnel investigation or an investigation of family and educator concerns,” but a “high-level analysis” of the district’s response.
“That has nothing to do with whether something happened or somebody was hurt or a kid was not given proper attention,” said Hala Mana’o, who was president of the school’s PTSA last school year.
Staff turnover
Jones, who had led the 200-student elementary since 2011, was transferred to the district’s central administrative office in April amid the complaints about her leadership.
One of the major complaints at Rainier View was that working conditions under Jones led teachers to quit in droves.
According to data from the Seattle Education Association, 37% of its members who worked at the school in the 2022-23 school year resigned. Another member returned home after maternity leave because she couldn’t get accommodations as a nursing mother, according to the union. Several other names that appeared on the staff roster in 2022-23 were not on staff the following school year, possibly because they got jobs elsewhere in the district. (SPS said last month that it was still reviewing staffing data at Rainier View, but said the district wide teacher turnover rate in 2023-2024 was 8.3%.)
That turnover forced the school to rely on new teachers and substitutes and often pulled regular staff members from their core jobs to fill in as classroom substitutes, some teachers and parents said. Others said the staffing inconsistency led the school’s academics to slip and resulted in, at times, chaotic classroom environments, where students who needed assistance with behavioral challenges didn’t always get it.
Last year, just shy of 40% of Rainier View students met Washington’s English language arts standards, according to the state’s report card. That’s down from 76.6% in the 2014-15 school year, or even 53.7 % in 2017-18. Only 25.8% met standards in science, and 28.8% in math in spring 2023. Those numbers are also lower. Sixty-one percent of Rainier View students met state standards in math and 65.8% did so in science in the 2017-18 academic year.