Seattle Public Schools
Mission
Seattle Public Schools is committed to eliminating opportunity gaps to ensure access and provide excellence in education for every student.
Vision
Every Seattle Public Schools’ student receives a high-quality, world-class education and graduates prepared for college, career, and community.
Seattle Excellence
Seattle Excellence, Seattle Public Schools five year strategic plan, is guided by four priorities and is laser focused on supporting Students of Color who are furthest away from educational justice, beginning with African American boys and teens.
The strategic plan is not about changing students. The work is about changing broken systems and undoing legacies of racism in public education. By actively becoming an anti-racist educational system – and ensuring students furthest away from educational justice thrive – conditions in Seattle Public Schools will improve for all.
Student Outcomes Focused Governance
The Seattle School Board is responsible for ensuring that the district is achieving the community’s vision for Seattle students while adhering to the community’s values of safe, anti-racist, high-quality learning environments.
Under Student Outcomes Focused Governance (SOFG), the School Board sets goals for student outcomes, based on the community’s vision for the district, and guardrails, based on the community’s values for how the vision will be achieved.
The SOFG Goals and Guardrails, adopted by the board on August 25, 2021 and revised October 26, 2022*, are aligned with Seattle Excellence and the Targeted Universalism theory of action laid out in the strategic plan.
The goals and guardrails make the strategic plan more focused, actionable, and provide clear metrics for accountability for the board to monitor student outcomes rather than adult inputs. It is in this manner that the board works, continuously, to create the conditions for superintendent, administrator, teacher and ultimately, student success.
Continuous School Improvement Plans
The Continuous School Improvement Plan (CSIP) is a product of collaborative inquiry around a comprehensive needs assessment led by school leaders and school staff in collaboration with SPS district staff. The CSIP provides an overview of district and school priority areas, student outcome goals, measures, strategies, activities and connected resource allocations.
CSIPs will remain accessible for review online through the SPS website and in hard copy at each building. Each school’s Building Leadership Team will conduct ongoing progress reviews, adjust practices and strategies, and update annual goals in response to CSIP implementation and impact on student outcomes by each year.
The CSIP also serves as the school-wide improvement plan for Title I schools.