SEATTLE — For years, Seattle Public Schools often pointed to Rainier View Elementary School when it wanted to show how it was improving academic outcomes for Black and brown students or to highlight good school leadership.
But that’s only part of the story, according to nearly two dozen current and former staff members and parents who spoke to The Seattle Times about their experiences under the school’s principal Anitra Jones. They said they tried to alert the school district over several years to the stressful environment, where high staff turnover was the norm and evaluations were weaponized to keep teachers in check. Academic performance suffered as children were bullied, admonished for minor infractions, and denied legally required special education services, they said.
Jones did not respond to several requests for comment, including an email detailing allegations made by some teachers and parents.
Now, an independent review has found that while Seattle Public Schools appears to have followed its internal policies when responding to the complaints, those policies may be inadequate to address complex leadership challenges like those at Rainier View.
For example, parents and staff members who desperately wanted help reached out to multiple departments in SPS. But because SPS didn’t have a point person paying attention to the breadth of issues emerging from Rainier View, the district could have missed the full picture, according to the review.
Parents who already felt that SPS had neglected their concerns for too long were disappointed the review focused only on SPS’ policies and did not look into their complaints about Jones’ leadership. The report noted that “the review is not a personnel investigation or an investigation of family and educator concerns,” but a “high-level analysis” of the district’s response.
“That has nothing to do with whether something happened or somebody was hurt or a kid was not given proper attention,” said Hala Mana’o, who was president of the school’s PTSA last school year.
Staff turnover
Jones, who had led the 200-student elementary since 2011, was transferred to the district’s central administrative office in April amid the complaints about her leadership.
One of the major complaints at Rainier View was that working conditions under Jones led teachers to quit in droves.
According to data from the Seattle Education Association, 37% of its members who worked at the school in the 2022-23 school year resigned. Another member returned home after maternity leave because she couldn’t get accommodations as a nursing mother, according to the union. Several other names that appeared on the staff roster in 2022-23 were not on staff the following school year, possibly because they got jobs elsewhere in the district. (SPS said last month that it was still reviewing staffing data at Rainier View, but said the district wide teacher turnover rate in 2023-2024 was 8.3%.)
That turnover forced the school to rely on new teachers and substitutes and often pulled regular staff members from their core jobs to fill in as classroom substitutes, some teachers and parents said. Others said the staffing inconsistency led the school’s academics to slip and resulted in, at times, chaotic classroom environments, where students who needed assistance with behavioral challenges didn’t always get it.
Last year, just shy of 40% of Rainier View students met Washington’s English language arts standards, according to the state’s report card. That’s down from 76.6% in the 2014-15 school year, or even 53.7 % in 2017-18. Only 25.8% met standards in science, and 28.8% in math in spring 2023. Those numbers are also lower. Sixty-one percent of Rainier View students met state standards in math and 65.8% did so in science in the 2017-18 academic year.
“When [turnover] happens year after year after year, it’s bad for the kids,” said Elaine Dondoyano, who worked at Rainier View from 2011 to 2019. “They don’t have the consistency. They have to build trusting relationships all the way from ground zero, which is hard.”
While Jones didn’t comment for this article, in a labor hearing this spring she described herself as a collaborative individual, whose approach to work was open, purposeful and solution-oriented.
She painted the reasons for staff turnover at the school as individual decisions, not caused by systemic problems. One by one, she described various reasons teachers had left: Illnesses. A death. Relocation of a spouse. Being assaulted by a student.
Jones said her and the hiring team’s goal was “to retain high-performing teachers, high-quality teachers of the Rainier View community. That’s our intention every year.”
Several current and former parents who spoke with The Seattle Times did not want to use their names because they were concerned that their children, who still attended the school or another in the district, would be punished. Several educators said the same thing: They were afraid they’d be denied promotions, transfers, references or the chance to work as substitutes in the district, or face other forms of retribution.
Leadership style
Jones’ supporters say she is driven, focused on academics and pushes those around her to do their best.
“I can say that she was a no-nonsense type of person, and I believe that it was just because she believed in the kids so much that she wasn’t going to give room for them to feel like they couldn’t accomplish the things they wanted to accomplish,” said Belinda Scarberry, a former Rainier View parent. “Maybe that could be viewed wrong. I don’t know.”
Tom Ly, who worked as an English language learner teacher at Rainier View for about three years in the mid-2010s, said he knows Jones to be fair and focused on academics.
“I was saddened and appalled” by the allegations, said Ly. “She is the best principal I have worked with.”
Indeed, in 2018, Jones was one of 33 educators across the country honored with a Milken Educator Award, which highlighted her efforts to build a “culture of excellence.”
Some supporters argue that Jones’ reputation is being tarnished by a group of disgruntled parents and teachers, many of whom are not Black and are newcomers to the area. They question whether Jones is the subject of the complaints because she’s a Black woman in a profession that’s still largely white.
Chanin Kelly-Rae, a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant who has worked with Jones and other school leaders in Southeast Seattle, said she’s seen a Black female principal pushed out before by a white or white-aligned coalition or one made up of parents and their children’s teachers.
“What I see happening at Rainier View is much of the same,” she said.
Natasha Green, who is Black and whose daughter was a fifth grader at Rainier View this spring, said she initially placed a higher level of trust in Jones precisely because Jones is a Black woman.
But Green said she often found her child in tears at the end of the school day because she’d been sent to the principal’s office for hours, after reportedly having an outburst in class. Green’s daughter developed anxiety, her school work suffered and she started peeling the skin from her hand. The child had also been forcibly removed from a piece of playground equipment by an aide at the school, Green said.
“Everything has declined since she went there,” said Green. “Sometimes I would go pick her up, [and] she’s crying, asking me to go back to her old school.”
Teachers told a similar story. Kayla Seamster said Jones “berated” her during a postevaluation conference after she spoke about working conditions under Jones’ leadership at a March 6 School Board meeting. It was a 180-degree turn from a previous meeting where she got a “shout-out” for her work, Seamster said.
“At the end of the meeting, I was crying,” said Seamster, who went on medical leave because of work-related anxiety and has filed a retaliation complaint against the district. “I left feeling so defeated, so discouraged, so scared, so at risk for this career that I loved.”
Dondoyano said that after becoming a union representative her once satisfactory performance reviews suddenly became a problem. She was scored basic or unsatisfactory in nine of 12 areas, she said.
Poor evaluations become part of a teacher’s formal record and can be seen by other principals, so Dondoyano said teachers were afraid to question Jones.
“It’s one of the strongest intimidating factors she had over teachers,” Dondoyano said. She kept her head down, worked through the end of the year and left.
Jones “is very smart,” Dondoyano, said. “However, with time, her authority became control, and the control became almost like strangulation.”
District oversight
Concerns about Jones surfaced in staff exit interviews — one called the environment at the school “incredibly toxic” and described a “culture of fear.”
There were also formal complaints: The school’s PTSA had sent concerns to the district, state and federal officials, including a 2023 civil rights complaint. Among other concerns, the PTSA alleged that students and families whose first language was not English did not receive communication in their home languages and that students who needed special education services often did not get them.
The group and individual parents also filed complaints with the state’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, which substantiated some claims that special education students were improperly removed from their classrooms for disciplinary infractions.
The district responded at times, but did not always follow through, parents said.
When the PTSA filed the discrimination claim last year, the group was told an outside investigator would respond, and that certain aspects of the complaint would be forwarded to other departments. But former PTSA members said by the time they started to air their grievances publicly this year, they had not heard from employees in those departments.
The district has said it addressed some of the concerns raised at a March 6 School Board meeting and that its special education and office of student civil rights departments had made efforts to address some of the claims this past year. And it said it was looking into staff turnover.
In a July 11 response to The Seattle Times the district said the staffing analysis was “ongoing” and it was not ready to share the results.
“One important finding that is already apparent is that the majority of separations that occurred were not self-reported as being related to work environment,” the district said in a follow up statement.
Some of the allegations about retaliation against staff are wrapped up in several unfair labor practices cases the Seattle Education Association filed against the district, which include charges of “unlawful union interference and retaliation” by Jones. A decision could come in the fall, at the earliest. The district’s lawyers have denied the claims in legal filings.
Faced with mounting pressure this spring, SPS hired Puget Sound Educational Service District at the cost of $10,520 in May to review the district’s response to issues at the school. The goal, according to the contract, was to support the district’s “understanding of the process SPS implemented, and how closely it aligns with customary and best practices.”
The reviewer, Sarita Siqueiros Thornburg, PSESD’s executive director of strategy, evaluation and learning, said the district largely appeared to have done so, but there were key areas it could improve.
The report, completed in June, recommended mediation in particularly thorny cases like Rainier View; training for leaders on how to handle complaints; a “triage” system, with a designated team leader, to handle cases where there are multiple complaints against an individual principal; and an update to the district’s website to make it easier for families to file complaints. It also recommended stronger guidelines on how to respond to parents and keep them informed.
After The Seattle Times asked about the report this summer, SPS said it was planning a new meeting this month to give an update on its review, the findings from PSESD’s report and the school’s future.
Jones is still on temporary assignment in the central office, assisting with research on multitiered systems of support for students, said Bev Redmond, the district’s chief of staff and spokesperson.
Jo Lute-Ervin, a longtime SPS principal who briefly stepped in this spring to replace Jones, will return temporarily. A new permanent principal has not been named, Redmond said.
“We are certainly leaning in and taking a look at those opportunities to strengthen our processes,” Redmond said. “We will certainly see — and compare and contrast — what our current practice is versus the suggestions that came from Puget Sound.”
The district later said it agreed with the recommendation that “students, families and staff need clear and trustworthy ways to address their concerns, including those related to staff members.”
Parents seek answers
Meanwhile, some parents couldn’t wait for the district to respond.
Mashala Hall, a former Rainier View office assistant and parent, said she was looking forward to working with Jones when she joined the staff in the 2022-23 school year.
But she soon found herself battling the principal on two fronts: to get work accommodations for her hearing disability and assistance for her son who needed special education support to help him in math and reading. The instructional assistant who was supposed to work with her son was often subbing in other classes, she said.
She felt both of her children — who were 9 and 10 at the time — became targets for minor infractions. When her daughter was being bullied, Jones’ response was to take the girl out of class without chastising the other children involved, Hall said. The final straw came when her daughter was taken to the principal’s office for putting on the hood of her jacket indoors while lining up to go outside, where it was raining.
The situation escalated to the point where police were called, and her sobbing daughter begged her not to send her back to the school, according to Hall.
“You know how hard it is to hear your child tell you that — ‘I can’t take this anymore’?” she said. “I knew right then and there my daughter was not going to be able to last another day in that school.”
