Anger over Seattle’s decision to close its schools for gifted and talented students has grown, as newly discovered footage showed shocking behavior by the board that made the decision.
Last month’s announcement that Highly Capable Cohort (HCC) schools would close because they have too many white and Asian students angered parents who say bright but disadvantaged children of all races will now suffer.
Kiley Riffell, whose two daughters attend HCC’s Cascadia Elementary, said: ‘SPS is eliminating all HC programming and replacing it with empty promises, zero plan and zero funding. It saddens me to see so many families leaving the public school system, but I can’t blame them.’
Eric Feeny told Fox13, “Until you have a better system, don’t offer a fake system or a half-baked solution.”
Sobbing parents begged Seattle not to close its gifted and talented programs amid criticism that they contained too many white and Asian students, newly discovered images show.
Parents became even angrier when school board President Zachary DeWolf used the emotional audience to recite a poem for his mother.
Teachers will now be forced to manage classes of 30 mixed-ability children at a time, without additional resources or funding. HCC schools, which target the top two percent of students, are now being phased out and will disappear completely by 2024.
And newly discovered footage of the board behind the decision showed behavior that will worry parents even more, with two of the most vocal ringleaders since disgraced by bullying allegations.
During the January 2020 meeting, a high-achieving Black mother and technology leader named Sara Jones, who thrived after attending an HCC, cried as she begged the board to keep the schools.
“It breaks my heart that boys and girls like me don’t have the opportunity that I had,” he told the board, in remarks first reported by the strange seattler.
Other parents of all ethnicities made similar pleas, only to be rudely interrupted by former board member Zachary DeWolf after their allotted time ran out.
Both he and his colleague Chandra Hampson, the district’s former principal, were accused of racist bullying and ignoring parents’ concerns.
But DeWolf was happy to waste time on a very personal whim: forcing distraught audience members to listen to a poem he wanted to read to commemorate his birthday.
He said: “And lastly, today is my birthday and I want to dedicate it, particularly my mom calls me, every birthday very early when I’m still sleeping, so I’m going to read a poem.”
DeWolf then read a effusive poem about the love between a father and son. Despite his emphasis on “fairness” and kindness, he and his colleague Chandra Hampson were later accused of racist harassment against two black board members.
Accusations of racism were dismissed by an investigation, but accusations of bullying were confirmed. DeWolf has since left the board, but the changes he helped push for will now change the lives of thousands of Seattle schoolchildren.
Hampson sparked even more fury by claiming that black parents who wanted to keep HCC schools were “tokenizing” their own children within the largely white and Asian student body.
When the school board decided to end the program, then-vice president Chandra Hampson sharply criticized parents of minority students who asked the board to keep the program “tokenized.”
According to data from Seattle Public Schools, of highly capable students in the 2022-23 school year, 52 percent were white, 16 percent were Asian and 3.4 percent were Black.
The new system means that teachers will now have to develop up to 30 individual learning plans for each student based on their academic abilities.
It comes despite growing anger from parents of the few black and Hispanic children already in the gifted program.
“It’s not going to help those kids to just cut the program wholesale,” parent Sirin Parmar told Fox13 Seattle this week. ‘We weren’t serving enough of them. You don’t help by cutting the program.
“What we should do is identify more children from underrepresented groups who are not receiving fair compensation in testing and do more to address it and provide these services to more children across the city.”
Garfield High School is one of the Seattle public schools that will be forced to close its gifted and talented program.
According to data from Seattle Public Schools, of highly capable students in the 2022-23 school year, 52 percent were white, 16 percent were Asian and 3.4 percent were Black (file photo).
The move irritated parents who accused DeWolf of focusing on the meeting instead of listening to their comments.
The situation was later exacerbated by principal Chandra Hampson after she claimed that complaining minority parents were being “tokenized.”
Amid the fury, it was also revealed that Hampson and DeWolf were previously accused of racism.
The pair were found to have violated the policy against harassment, intimidation and bullying over their treatment of two black employees who were working on an anti-racism plan.
DeWolf told the Seattle Times that he “strongly disagreed” with the allegations, while Hampson admitted there had been some tensions but denied violating the anti-harassment policy.
Currently, three elementary schools, five middle schools, and three high schools are highly capable cohort schools; all of them will be phased out by the 2027-28 school year.
The gifted and talented program has been replaced by the Highly Capable Neighborhood School Model, which requires teachers to create individualized learning programs for all of their students.
According to Seattle Public Schools, the new model will be “more inclusive, equitable and culturally sensitive.”
Critics say that is false, as insufficient resources are being devoted to ensuring that students of all abilities receive the best teaching possible.