New Seattle superintendent settles in to face challenges

SEATTLE — Young Will Feldmann is looking forward to kindergarten in the fall. "I would like to make new friends in school," he said when we met him and his mother at a park in the Queen Anne neighborhood. 

"Main thing that I've heard is that class sizes are pretty large, and so that's one concern we've had," said Kristie Feldmann.

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​It's one of the many challenges new Seattle School Superintendent Denise Juneau is beginning to tackle. She's looking for help from the next building levy, scheduled for next year.

"You know we have a levy coming up to hopefully in February, to really look at facilities. You know there's been an influx of students, our enrollment is growing," she said in an interview.

The Seattle schools will ride a budget roller coaster over the next two years. The fallout from the McCleary school funding lawsuit means a $50 million surplus this year, then a $45 million deficit.

"It goes away and so in two years we're looking at a huge dip and there's going to be a huge hole. There's going to be some significant need and some hard decisions coming up," Juneau said. "That could be looking at employees, that could be looking at programs and services that our families are used to seeing."

And that can make it tougher for her to address the district's most persistent failure. 

"The problem lies in the opportunity gap and the gap between races."

Cox Media Group