From coast to coast, school districts are proposing closures, as pandemic-era funds have long since dried up and gentrification has driven families out of increasingly unaffordable neighborhoods. Yet in a time when budget cuts threaten public education nationwide, Seattle organizers have shown that communities can fight back — and win.

After initially proposing in spring to close up to 21 schools — and, under immense pressure, reducing that number to four — Seattle Public Schools (SPS) announced in late November that it was canceling all plans to close schools. Superintendent Brent Jones admitted he “no longer saw a pathway for this approach,” and emphasized the district’s commitment to the “needs and well-being of our students, families, and community.”

But make no mistake: this decision wasn’t handed down from above. It was won through a relentless, grassroots campaign by parents, caregivers, educators, students and community members who refused to let our children bear the brunt of budget shortfalls.

The district claimed it needed to close schools because of its nearly $100 million budget shortfall. They clearly hadn’t learned the lesson from the last disastrous round of school closures. In 2009, SPS hastily closed five schools — despite the massive outcry from communities — just as a surge of enrollment entered the district. Back then, the district was forced to spend $48 million reopening schools — three of which had just been closed. This year, Seattle Public Schools projected a loss of 600 students, only to see enrollment rise by 206, and yet they were still planning to charge ahead with school closures. The district’s inability to learn from its own history only strengthened our resolve to stop this from happening again.

As frustrating as the district’s lack of appreciation for the costly impact of previous rounds of school closures was, the real outrage is the fact that schools in a city as wealthy as Seattle have such a massive budget shortfall. Seattle is home to 11 billionaires and 54,200 millionaires. Washington State has the second most regressive tax system in the nation, with the wealthiest 1 percent of earners paying only 3 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the lowest 20 percent of earners pay a crushing 17.8 percent. Our schools are being starved while billionaires like Jeff Bezos launch themselves into space — a contradiction that fueled our rebellion.

This fight offers important lessons for others across the country facing the devastating impacts of school closures. Here’s how we won — and what comes next.

In 2013, When Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel imposed his disastrous neoliberal policy by closing 49 elementary schools , it was called “unprecedented in number for a major urban center” by the Chicago Tribune. In a city with around 600 schools at the time, it meant that the closures impacted about 8 percent of Chicago’s schools. As harmful as that was, it pales in comparison to Seattle, where the proposal to close 21 schools out of 104 total schools represented an astounding 20 percent of the district. By percentage, this would have been one of the largest school closures in U.S. history.

Parents organized their school communities, supported each other and demanded clear answers from the district.

This fall, the district named the specific schools and threw their communities into turmoil. But parents refused to let their schools be sacrificed to budget cuts without a fight. Their relentless activism — rallies at schools, community meetings and passionate testimony at school board hearings — forced the district to scale back the proposal from 21 closures to four schools: Stevens, Sacajawea, Sanislo and North Beach.

At that point, parents from Stevens, Sacajawea Sanislo and North Beach took the lead in the fight. They organized their school communities, supported each other and demanded clear answers from the district. At every school board meeting, their voices were loud and clear about the devastating impact school closures would have on their community. As one parent, Tim Sullivan, the PTA vice president at Stevens Elementary School, told The Seattle Times, “It’s been a roller coaster all fall. I think one of our strongest points of complaints was that we don’t understand what problem this solves or how it makes enough of a difference to........

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