S2 E9 - Option C, with School Board Director Joe Mizrahi

This interview was edited for length and clarity. Our guests opinions are their own.

[00:00:00] Joe Mizrahi: For me, the big priority is making sure that, whatever happens, whatever option C or D or E or F, that it's done in a more temperate approach. How are we minimizing student impacts? How do we make those changes if we do deem them necessary in a way that is least impactful and really centering on how to keep families and communities whole?

[00:00:26] Jane Tunks Demel: Hello and welcome back to Seattle Hall Pass, a podcast bringing you news and conversation about Seattle public schools. I'm Jane Tunks Demel.

[00:00:34] Christie Robertson: And I'm Christie Robertson. This is the second episode of our Option C series, inspired by the district's proposed Options A and B to close up to 21 schools. In this series, we're turning to community members for their ideas and solutions on how the district should address the challenges of declining enrollment and a significant budget deficit for the upcoming school year.

[00:00:59] Jane Tunks Demel: Today, we have with us Joe Mizrahi, School Board Director for District 4, which includes Fremont, Queen Anne, Southlake Union, and parts of downtown.

[00:01:08] Christie Robertson: And a friendly reminder that this interview was edited for length and clarity and that all opinions expressed by our guests are their own. 

[00:01:16] Jane Tunks Demel: Thanks so much for being here, Joe. 

[00:01:19] CHAPTER: Joe's Option C

[00:01:19] Christie Robertson: The impetus for contacting you was that we're doing this series called option C. The district had proposed their options A and B with closing 17 and 21 schools. And now the board put a resolution with, I guess, what would be the district's option C. And we just started talking to people about like, what would your option C be? Sarah Clark had an article in the Seattle Times about her option C. And so, we were just wondering if you have an idea of what you'd like to see in an option C.

[00:01:53] Joe Mizrahi: Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think one thing that's interesting, probably from when you started the series, is now we are sort of all in option C land right now because we have effectively taken option A and B off the table. I think, much to most people's relief and excitement, that's not going to happen anymore.

 So I think we're all trying to figure out what the path forward is. I do think that, for me, the big priority is making sure that, whatever happens, whatever option C or D or E or F, that it's done in a more temperate approach. One of the criteria that I don't know if it was as spelled out as it had to be in the 1st version, is to really overlay how are we minimizing student impacts? Obviously, when you close the school, there's going to be massive impacts to the students at the school that's closing. There's going to be impacts to the students at the school that's absorbing. Hopefully, most of those are positive impacts. But beyond that, how you minimize impacts on program, impacts on special education services, impacts on boundary changes, and things like that. I don't know that that was an intentional overlay in the development of option A and B, and that sort of became the thing that I was most critical of in option A and B. So I hope that as we think about the future options, that one of the things that we're really focused on is how do we make those changes if we do deem them necessary in a way that is least impactful and really centering how to keep families and communities whole and how to get people the cleanest glide path.

I do think that a real sort of next 6-month option C that we really have to be focused on, and everyone's been talking about this, is the revenue side of the equation and how we push for money from the state. And I think that we're in a point where we have to get an unprecedented amount, more than we've ever gotten before from the state. And also, at least what I'm hearing from the community, a strong willingness on the part of the community to go fight for that in a unified way. And what we're hearing from the Seattle legislative delegation is a really strong commitment to go fight for that. Now, obviously, Olympia is a squirrelly place. So, if it was run by the Seattle delegation, I think we would all be in a better place for school funding. So they have to go and have that battle with a whole bunch of colleagues that have different views on things. But I think that we're hopefully in a more unified place as a city going down to Olympia and making the case for that.

[00:04:19] Jane Tunks Demel: Joe, since you bring up revenue, in this new plan, will there be any conversation about increasing enrollment? Like you could expand popular programs. Or, this year, there was a lot of waiting lists for options schools that they just didn't move, even though they have physical space in the buildings for those students. Has there been any talk of that? 

[00:04:39] Joe Mizrahi: I think that there has to be. I think that it is a major component, beyond the budgetary question of enrollment. We want to be a desirable district. That is the place you want to be. And we absolutely should be thinking about that.  It's one of the things that I was, in the prior meeting when we were still sort of debating option a and b, why I was pretty strongly pushing for a scaled-back approach, was that we still have this enrollment study out there that we're going to get results from, as far as I've been told, the end of the year. Maybe that's January, whatever. I think, ideally, we're learning a lot from that about what drives enrollment, what drives family choices around enrollment, and what we can do to better serve that. 

 And also when you talk about the budget cuts and consolidation, how you do no harm to that, right? So we're going to be faced with a lot of choices that could push the needle on enrollment. 

 If we get that study back and the thing that people are saying is, "Well, the reason why I opt for a private school is because I want a librarian and a nurse every day". Well, that sort of pushes you in the direction of trying to get to that 85% capacity that the 20 schools were pushing towards. If what they say is, "I really like the programs that we were offering, like dual language, like option, like K8", well, that pushes you sort of away from that, right? So I think that there's a lot to be learned that we just don't know. And one of the most frustrating things about option A and B was that the timing was forcing us to operate in the dark quite a bit around this enrollment study, around the funding from Olympia, around the next CBA, around the levy. I could go on and on. But there was just lots of things that were unknown that we were making this really big decision with a lot of blinders on.

[00:06:18] CHAPTER: 5 school resolution

[00:06:18] Christie Robertson: As this resolution came forward to close five schools and no more than five schools? Were there any other options that the board discussed before bringing that one?

[00:06:27] Joe Mizrahi: It's hard because, as you all know, like, the amount that we can actually talk about because of the open meetings rules, which are very good for transparency, and I'm sure as journalists, you all like it, to be able to have that transparency. But it's also, it's sort of no way to run an organization because we can't all just talk together and kind of hash out different ideas. So it's very challenging to sort of get a beat on where everyone is and what people, how they view this plan. 

But I would say that It was important to me that resolution was clear that we're not talking about closing five schools. We're talking about closing between 0 and 5 schools. And we're really looking at what makes sense from the lowest impact standpoint. 

And the other very important thing to me in the resolution that we passed was that it was not locking us into any future action. You all are at every meeting. You've heard, I think, different board directors express the sort of feeling that, like, look, we have to do 20 at some point. We have to get to this right enrollment number. We have to right-size the district. And I think that's a very valid opinion that I think is coming from a good place. I don't share that. I think that might be, depending on what happens with funding, depending on what happens with a whole bunch of things that might be the case long term. It also might not be the case. And I want to make sure that we and also future boards had enough leeway within whatever resolution we brought forward to sort of make that decision with the facts that we are presented with at whatever moment.

[00:07:53] Jane Tunks Demel: I was looking up the last two BEX levies. And the BEX levy for 2013, they have in the language that was in the voter pamphlet that they wanted to bring 7,000 more seats because they thought that there would be 60,000 students... 

[00:08:09] Joe Mizrahi: Right. Right.

[00:08:10] Jane Tunks Demel: ...in the district. And then in the 2019 levy, it was 2,000 more seats. So they've effectively built 9,000 more seats in the last 12 years. And now, as a result of that, the unintended consequence is that enrollment did not increase, and now we have to right-size the district to make up for that overbuilding.

[00:08:33] Joe Mizrahi: Yeah. I mean, I shared with you all, I think the 1st time we spoke, that I'm not someone who is ideologically opposed to school closures and consolidation and merging school buildings. And I think it's something that districts across the country open schools and close schools on a pretty regular basis.

The analogy I've been using is, so the staff of the union that I work for, we have about 115 people on our staff. If someone told me that we had to get down to 90, that was the, like, right number of staff for us. And they said, but you're broke, and you have to do it in the next year. That's going to be a pretty painful process. 

If they say, hey, you should get down to 90, but do it over the next 10-year span. That's going to be a pretty natural process. You can do that through attrition, through retirements, right? Through not filling positions when they open and getting to that right size. And I think that actually, that could be similarly true for the district. If we say, look, enrollment is not what we thought it was going to be. We need to sort of get to a smaller number, get to this target of 80 to 85 percent enrollment in elementary. That's a very different pathway if you're doing that as part of an emergency budget situation than if you're just trying to do it because it is long-term better for the district. Because you can be on whatever five-year, 10-year plan you want to be in order to do it in the way that is most kind and gentle to family and students.

[00:09:51] Jane Tunks Demel: Yeah, definitely. 

But my point is more that these are all projections, and projections aren't necessarily hard facts. In 2013, they had a projection that there would be 60,000 students. And so now the projection is that enrollment will go down. And so, it's like we're operating, assuming that's fact, that's definitely what's going to happen. So just to make such a huge decision like that, when before the projections have never been correct.

[00:10:21] Joe Mizrahi: Oh, no, I think that's totally a good point. And it's all the more reason to do things in pieces rather than in one big chunk, because, I think even the best demographer would tell you that it's not an art, it's a science, but it's not a perfect science either. Right? It's a science. It's based on lots of assumptions, and things change. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:10:39] Christie Robertson: Yeah. And I mean, now that we're to the point of zero to five schools, given the unreliability of savings from closing schools, historically, it's almost like it's a whole separate issue from the budget at this point. The amount you're going to potentially save from closing zero to five schools compared to the size of the budget deficit. It's exactly what you're saying with trying to get down to a certain number of employees that it's almost a separate mission to right size the schools than to fix the budget. 

[00:11:10] Joe Mizrahi: Yeah, I think it's actually a better way of thinking about this if we actually separate it from a budget exercise. And we say, “this is actually how we provide the best resources in a school and what size the district should be” separate from the budget. Let's solve the budget in a whole bunch of different ways. Then we can tackle it in a way that is not centering financial decisions. I think a lot of the criticisms, that I agreed with, around even what was presented in the 17 to 21 school approach is that it was really driven by real estate, not by academics. It was driven by which buildings made the most sense. And it didn't factor in program as much as I felt and others felt it should have. And I think that's what happens when you develop this plan as purely a budget exercise. But if you do it really as an exercise in what provides the best academic environment for students, I think you're looking at a whole different set of criteria. And I think that's the better set of criteria to look at for sure.

[00:12:06] Jane Tunks Demel: And, Joe, do you feel that's what the district will be doing as they bring forth this new plan?

[00:12:12] Joe Mizrahi: I certainly hope so. The conversations I've been having, I believe that's the case. 

And look, I mean, I think that people should not feel like even the five schools are locked in. We took a similar resolution around 20 schools, and obviously, we're not doing that. So, it is still, at least in my mind, very contingent on the district bringing forward the right plan. 

 One thing that I highlighted in Dr Jones's presentation that, for me, I felt was very important was this idea that they're really looking at this as merging communities, not closing schools and moving people all over the place. And I think that's such, like, a more holistic way to think about it and will give a lot of relief to those families. Because the thing that I heard over and over again was really less about any attachment to a physical building. Obviously, people do have, especially if you're walking distance and you're going to be moved to a school that's not quite walking distance, people have rightfully strong opinions about that. But the thing I heard ten times more than that was really about people staying with their teachers, people staying with their friends, staying with their community. And I think that if we're showing that there's a really strong effort to preserve that, I think that will go a long way.

[00:13:21] Christie Robertson: Although there are cases like for the medically fragile program at Green Lake or the Deaf and Hard of Hearing program at TOPS where there are physical building issues. 

I guess what I'm wondering is the way that the closures are being developed is that first, the proposal for which building might close is given, and then they start listening to community. So they're not aware ahead of time of what particular aspects of that building and that community are special. Like for TOPS K 8 to keep it a K 8 so that there can be enough deaf and hard of hearing kids to make a real community. They seemed very taken aback by every one of those issues that are individual to a community.

 Is there a way to get ahead of that so that you know those things before you make a proposal, or does it have to be this kind of back and forth, push and pull?

[00:14:22] Joe Mizrahi: I think one would hope that that the district knows their own buildings, their own communities well enough that they'd be able to identify those things. But you're right, I mean, that there were issues brought up that it felt like the district did not have good answers for. 

Not to speak on behalf of anyone in the district and what their thinking was, I think that there was a sort of balancing act that they were playing in a lot of cases of like, well, we have ideas for... You brought up the example of the deaf and hard of hearing program at TOPS. So I think that they had ideas about what to do with that and how that would transition away from a K-8 environment. But they didn't want to present this as like a totally locked and loaded plan. They wanted to have community engagement, so felt like we don't want to present everything that we've thought about because then people are going to feel like we've already made every decision.

 My counter to that is like, yeah, but people feel like you don't have any ideas, right? People feel like you haven't thought about the problem at all. And there's a base level of mistrust that if the district takes away a program, people don't have faith, because of history and experience, that program will be replaced with something that is as good or better, and that it will be replaced with that in a timely manner. So it really is imperative that the district show all of its homework on like, "Okay, we thought about this problem. Here's where we're moving things. Here's what we're doing." 

And I thought that, with dual language, the evolution of what they were presenting under the option A or B with how dual language was going to be handled really went through that path.  It started with, like, it felt like they hadn't even thought about that. Or they were just sort of using the hatchet method of, like, “yep, no more dual language.” And then they moved to a place of like, “okay, no, we're going to keep dual language. We're going to expand it to these two schools.”  And then you started to see a plan come together.  

I hope that what they present has all of that laid out with these five schools. One thing I'll say is that where I think it was more challenging for the district is that they were going through an exercise of closing 20 schools. And that was the direction that they felt like they were given from the board. And what I just became increasingly convinced of through the process is that there really is no way to do that big an overhaul without there being massive disruption to program, to student placement, to a whole bunch of other things. And, to your point, what has been developed over years and years, how these buildings are serving the needs of certain communities. My hope is that what they present to us is the five school plan where there is a way to do that, and where you are preserving all those things, and you're able to really dig down and think about those things. And if that means that they say, "Well, the only way that we're able to do that with minimal disruption is two schools or three schools or one school," whatever. I think that's the plan that needs to be brought forward is the one where they've thought out all those impacts on communities before the engagement even begins.

[00:17:13] Jane Tunks Demel: And Joe, so my neighborhood school is Sacajawea, and I know that's very possible it might be on the list of the five. And I know that none of the school board directors or the superintendent, none of them have ever been to the school. Earlier, they were going to bake in some community engagement before they, I guess, came up with a preliminary list. And so I hope that still happens. I don't know how it is for other schools that are on the chopping block, if people have actually been at the schools or if they're just looking at the building conditions and their maps and their numbers on a spreadsheet. I just really hope that there is community engagement at all of these schools or some relationships. But I don't know if by October 21st, that's realistic. He said he's going to release a list the week of October 21st.

[00:18:04] Joe Mizrahi: No, I totally agree. And I think for any plan to have my support, they're going to have to show that they've done all those things and thought about all those impacts. And I'm actually stealing this from a parent who said it to me at one of the schools in my district that was closing, but they said, "This just feels like it's a real estate solution," right? And I think that if people feel like all that was looked at was the age of the building, the condition of the boiler, and the condition of the roof, right? Then that just doesn't feel like it's honoring what makes all these communities different and special.

Now, if they say, “Look, we've looked at all these things, and we've thought about all these things that are unique to this community, but we still have to close, and here's how it's going to work at this other school.” Like, I think that there's a way that this happens in districts where it's never easy, but at least people feel like there has been that process. So I think that that absolutely has to occur. 

[00:18:53] Jane Tunks Demel: Yeah, so hopefully that will happen after they release the names of the schools, because I can tell you it hasn't happened before. 

[00:18:59] Joe Mizrahi: And I do think, you know, it's always challenging with the release of the schools, because you don't want to end up in a situation where you have this like hunger games of communities where people are being pitted against each other and say, "Well, don't close Sacajawea. Close Green Lake." "Why is this on the list and not that on the list?" And I think that most of the public comment that we've gotten, most of the emails we've gotten are really positive. They're really not about it like "Our school is better than this." It's talking about the value that people have and the love that they have for their school communities, right? And that's like where I hope that even as this conversation gets harder that we live in that realm and not pitting schools against each other. So I think that's another challenge of how you release information.

[00:19:38] Jane Tunks Demel: Yeah. And I think even when they're building these new elementary schools or they're expanding the size of them, early on in the process, you can be like, "Hey, we're building John Rogers." And, like, "Oh, we might combine this school or that school with it later down the line." If those communities were engaged together early on in the process, it's like co-creating their new community. It creates excitement. Because I've been to some of these buildings. They are beautiful. And I think people want to be in these buildings. It's just a different way to bring people along.

[00:20:10] CHAPTER: OPMA and board dynamics

[00:20:11] Christie Robertson: Joe, I want to jump back a little bit and talk about school board dynamics. So, you talked about the difficulties caused by OPMA. That's the Open Public Meetings Act that regulates school board interactions. Which really does seem like a very hard problem. But one thing that I've noticed having watched the school board for quite a while, is that what used to happen is that there was debate in public. I think part of what's happening is that there's OPMA and then there's this move toward that the board needs to always present as one body, that they're all in consensus. And so that means that there's way, way less of people expressing different ideas about something in the meeting. So I don't know, what do you think about like... that's one way that directors used to work within OPMA was to express their thoughts in public.

[00:21:13] Joe Mizrahi: Yeah. I mean, look, I think that public debate is healthy, especially because I think that even if we disagree, I've never had any questions about any of my fellow board members motives, why they're doing what they're doing, what their interest is. I think we can all be approaching the same problem of how to improve our school district, how to build confidence in our school district, and how to improve student outcomes, and all still have different opinions about how you get there, especially when you have a tough problem like closures, consolidation, budget gaps, all this stuff. I'm sure these would be a lot more fun, pleasant conversations if we're like, "Oh, my God, we have $100 million surplus this year. What are we going to do with it?" Wouldn't that be great? 

 But yeah, I hope that there's still some of that, that people can watch the meetings and see, "Oh, look, there's sort of a distinction between where Liza is on something and where Brandon is on something and where Joe is on something" and hopefully that is, is visible. I at least can say I've never been told not to hash something out in public. 

But I do think that you know, in some ways, even the structure of the meetings, like when we were getting the presentation of A and B, it felt actually pretty rushed from my standpoint of, like, because of OPMA, I've never gotten to ask these questions. And it felt like we only had time, where I'm like, okay, I'm apologizing. "Okay, one more question." It's like, well, actually, like, this is the actual meat of the meeting. This is the thing that we should be spending 2 hours on. And I do think that it's hard to get to that because we have a bunch of other very, like, procedural stuff to do. And I'm certainly not complaining that our meetings need to be longer but it did feel like that particular discussion in my mind could have gone on for another hour. Because I still left it, as I think many of the members of the community did, with a lot of questions about, Option A and Option B.

[00:22:56] Christie Robertson:  Part of that is that the board recently went from two regular meetings a month to one meeting a month. So there's less time for everything.  Even if you do go for five hours, everybody's just wasted by the end of that. It's really hard to have a really good discussion. 

[00:23:16] Joe Mizrahi: Oh, totally. Yeah. 

[00:23:17] Jane Tunks Demel: I know they're trying to make the role of board director more accessible to a full-time working person. But it ends up maybe short-changing some of the governance of the district, I think, because it just does take time.

[00:23:30] Joe Mizrahi: And the ability for people to actually, as we're talking about, have that debate in the open and actually have the conversation.

 I 

[00:23:39] Christie Robertson: I guess just one last thing I'll bring from my memories of what the school board used to do is: on the agenda, there's a section that says board comments. And it used to be that every board director would give like a two to five-minute (and of course, that takes time), but they could just talk about whatever top issues they were hearing from community. Or it used to be after testimony, so respond to something in testimony. And it's turned int, sometimes Director Rankin gives board comments, but it's not very often that anybody else does.

[00:24:16] Joe Mizrahi: Yeah. That's a good suggestion. I mean, since I've been on the board, that's been the culture, that it isn't really let's go around the dais and everyone give their update on where they're at, but that may be a useful thing. Yeah. I'd be down for that.

[00:24:27] CHAPTER: Progress Monitoring 

[00:24:27] Christie Robertson: I'd like to get your thoughts on that last progress monitoring session, Joe. 

(And I'm just going to interject here and say that for those who don't know, progress monitoring is where the school board looks at the outcomes on the goals and guard rails that they've set. And it looks at what kind of progress has been made toward their goals. And if you want to hear some of what happened at the last progress monitoring session, you can listen to season two, episode eight, where Jasmine, Jane, and I talked some about that.)

[00:25:01] Joe Mizrahi: I'm not sure how many folks saw it because it was in hour 4 and a half of a long meeting, but I actually thought that since I joined the board, it was 1 of the best presentations I've seen. I thought it was really good to have staff up there and to answer questions in part because as a parent in the district, it's good to know there are some really smart, hardworking people who have detailed answers to questions helping run this district. So as a parent of elementary and middle school kids, I was like, okay, wow, this makes me feel confident. 

But I thought that looking at the goals that we've set around literacy and math. I thought it was a very good presentation. I thought that it was really clear. And I also thought that I think everyone on the board has said publicly in some way or another that the goals that we set out were very ambitious and sort of where we need to be, but probably not on the right time horizon and too ambitious to actually hold the district to. But when you look at the actual numbers that they did present, we are moving the needle on both literacy and math with black boys and with students of color more broadly and getting very good outcomes with special education, which I think is pretty impressive. And even though those numbers are small changes, we're talking about 2 percent improvements here, 1 percent improvements there, they're bucking state and national trends. And getting to a point where it's clear that, especially because we are still in this pilot phase where they're doing things at certain schools and focusing on them there and planning to lift it more broadly, we're seeing that some of the strategies that the district is implementing is actually working.

And I think that is a credit both to the hard work that Dr. Jones and the district have been doing, but also to some of the student outcome goals that we've been really focusing on. Even if the goals themselves were too ambitious, that we actually are moving the needle on many of these metrics.

 You look at, like, 3rd grade reading progress monitoring, the student IEP improvement of close to 2% over the last year. You see that the students of color is going up. Now, once again, we're talking about incremental change, 1. 5%. I think when you compare to state and national numbers, I think it's pretty impressive, especially as you're trying to get back to those pre COVID numbers. Same with the student for IEPs. I even on that one had friends in other districts texting me, saying, "Well, that's pretty impressive."

[00:27:19] Christie Robertson: (And now we'll talk about this seventh-grade math goal.)

[00:27:23] Joe Mizrahi: Next on the 7th grade. I think you see similar, once again, you're talking about a more than 1 percent improvement for students of color. Obviously, some negative trend lines, too, so you don't want to only cherry-pick the good. But, the point is, like, I think that that we are definitely seeing progress in some areas. 

I don't think, even if we had a less ambitious goal, I don't think we would have said, "We want a 1 percent improvement in this. We want to be closer to pre-pandemic numbers." So it's not like, I'm standing in front of, like, a mission accomplished banner or anything. But it's to point out that, like, especially in an environment where, and Director Topp, I think, has pointed this out very eloquently where we're saying, "Cut the budget and improve outcomes," that there actually is some positive stories about the strategies that the district has been trying.

If you go to,  where they're comparing the priority schools to the comparison schools. 

[00:28:11] Christie Robertson: (A quick primer on priority versus comparison schools is that the priority schools are a small handful of schools that house a large percentage of the African-American male students in the district and have therefore been targeted for a lot of the most intensive interventions. And so, as a way to see whether the interventions are working, they are comparing those intensively focused on schools, the priority schools, and comparing them to a set of other schools that have similar demographics, similar percentages of free and reduced lunch but that those schools did not get the intensive interventions.)

[00:29:07] Joe Mizrahi: That you see that at the schools that were the priority schools, we're actually seeing positive improvement where you're seeing decline at those comparison schools. So, in theory, if you're able to take the things that we've been doing right at those priority schools and replicate them at the comparison schools, you're going to see, hopefully, improvement, right? 

 So I think this is sort of that point is that some of the strategies that we're doing are working and need to be replicated.

[00:29:31] Christie Robertson: Okay.

[00:29:31] Joe Mizrahi: I think one thing that Director Hersey has been asking, it's a very good question that we don't have an answer to is, “How will 20 schools, 17 schools, even five schools? Show me how that will get us to better outcomes.”

And I think one of the ways to answer that question potentially is to say, “okay, well, we know that having money for this position at this school has improved outcomes. And if we can well resource schools, that means that position can exist.” But the other thing is that if we've identified a good strategy... I know, from my wife's job running an elementary school, that it's very complicated. But I also know that if you say, “Hey, this is a priority position,” there are often things that can move around at a elementary school to say, "Okay, this position isn't moving the numbers forward that we want to move, so we're going to change that job to this." How you staff a school does have some wiggle room if you can identify the position that is vital to changing numbers.

[00:30:21] Christie Robertson: Right. And do you understand the new rules that are being put in place about what kinds of questions can be asked at progress monitoring? And are these the kinds of questions that are allowed to be asked anymore? I was so confused.

(Interjecting here again to fill in that the new rules are about asking strategic questions to the superintendent only, and not asking technical or tactical questions. And not talking directly to the staff. We talk about this more, again, in season two, episode eight, if you want to hear our discussion about that.)

Do you understand the new rules that are being put in place?

[00:31:04] Joe Mizrahi: No, that's why I didn't ask any questions. No, I mean, look, I mean, I think that that I have my own feedback about how that process works, and I'm going to share this with board leadership. I actually think it was actually helpful to have staff up there because, if we have such a limited time, I think it's actually valuable to have people who are content experts. Even if we say we only want them answering strategy questions right now, I think it's important to have content experts up there. And as I said, as a parent in the district, I don't want to just have confidence in my superintendent. I want to have confidence in a whole range of folks who work at the district. And I think that giving some face time to the people who are working on this day in and day out is actually somewhat important. 

But beyond who's up there, I think, yeah, I don't fully understand it. And, but I think that as much as we can stay at a high level and not get into the weeds, I do think there's some value to that in that. Like we are actually, though we're on the board, we are not day-in and day-out education experts. We all have different backgrounds and experiences. So some of us have more expertise than others. But you know, I don't need to get into every detail. What I need to know is do we have district leadership and district staff that are getting to those details, do understand them, and do actually have a plan forward that is well thought out and reasonable.

[00:32:19] Christie Robertson: Yeah, I definitely see that. I think that's one of the things that SOFG Student Outcomes Focused Governance has brought is getting rid of some of the weeds. But I just think sometimes it maybe gets overaggressive, and then some of the good questions that can really help guide district staff get missed.

[00:32:41] Joe Mizrahi: Yeah, I think there's been a lot of conversation recently about student outcomes-focused governance. And, as a new member of the board, I can say that I've seen a lot of value in having a framework. And I've even taken some of it and said, “Oh, this actually works for,” because the organization they work for my day job has a board and I report to that board. And I've looked at and said, "Oh, this is actually interesting because it does help think about what a board needs to be doing day to day." So I think there's a lot of really positive aspects to it. 

But I also think it's like any other framework where over-adherence to anything can hamper you in your decision-making and your processes. And so I think that we need to take it as a guidepost and also feel free to, like, if we're in a moment... and Director Hersey, I think, was an example of this, but he's sort of trying to, like, twist his question into something that makes sense. Like, he should ask his question, and it's good to have the staff there to answer it. Right. 

And the reality is we are representatives of the community. If we have a question, it's likely that the community has that question. So handling it sort of off the record in an email probably is going to just make people feel like they're more in the dark than they were before. 

So, I think that it's good to have a framework. It's good to have a guiding way of doing things that keeps us all on the same page, keeps us out of the weeds, keeps us focused on students. I think all that is incredibly positive. I think over-adherence to anything, including SOFG, can be dangerous.

[00:34:03] Jane Tunks Demel: Well, thank you so much, Joe.

[00:34:04] Joe Mizrahi: Yeah, always fun. Thanks for having me. 

[00:34:06] Christie Robertson: Thanks so much to board director Joe Mizrahi for being with us today to help us understand what's going on with the Seattle School Board and to lend his thoughts on what option C might be for our district.

[00:34:20] Jane Tunks Demel: We'll have more option C's coming up in our next few episodes.

[00:34:24] Christie Robertson: Our show notes are available at seattlehallpass.org (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HaznXHzm1wcVVpQ6GxGQgknt3lL96ERaIlUvDFNCEv0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.m2wpxj47eglf), and you can contact us at hello@seattlehallpass.org. I'm Christie Robertson.

[00:34:34] Jane Tunks Demel: And I'm Jane Tunks Demel. We'll see you next time on Seattle Hall Pass.