School changes ultimately useless?

A commenter at the Seattle Public Schools community blog provided a link to a very interesting presentation that suggests that the Superintendent’s proposed closures and program relocations don’t make any meaningful change to existing capacity imbalances, and the costs will be unacceptably high.

The presentation is based on the plan as it was a few days ago, and does not reflect some of the changes made in today’s announcements, but much of it still applies. Dick Lilly had an editorial yesterday on Crosscut that made many of the same points.

An interesting note: over 20% of Southeast cluster students would be forced to move, and the costs of these changes would make changes to this cluster a net loss for the District.

It would be nice to see an updated version of these stats to reflect the status quo after today’s announcements.