Can new superintendent Shuldiner the burden of Seattle Public Schools?

Ben Shuldiner has officially taken the reins of Seattle Public Schools and he has big plans for Washington state’s largest public school district.

Shuldiner has been an educator for more than 25 years, most recently serving as superintendent of the Lansing School District in Central Michigan. Before that, he was a classroom teacher, high school principal and founder (he actually founded the school), education professor, consultant, and a member of the New York City Board of Education.

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He arrives in Seattle amid challenging times for the district. Seattle Public Schools continues to grapple with a massive deficit, and widespread distrust among families after officials considered a proposal last year to close over 20 schools.

Shuldiner is also walking into unprecedented unease about federal immigration enforcement near schools as well as concerns about school safety. Such concerns are heightened following the recent shooting deaths of two Rainier Beach High School students at a bus stop near campus. This also comes two years after a 17-year-old Garfield High School student was shot and killed on that campus. The shooter remains at large.

RELATED: 'Mourn today, act tomorrow.' New Seattle Schools superintendent emphasizes safety following fatal shooting near South Shore

As he prepared to move from Lansing to his new home in Seattle, Shuldiner sat down with KUOW’s Soundside to talk about how he’ll tackle these challenges.

On ICE concerns in school communities

New district guidance directs all school employees to alert their principal and safety and security staff if they observe or receive reports of ICE nearby. From there, the safety and security team and the principal can meet to determine how to respond.

RELATED: 'If you hear something, say something.' After ICE scare, Seattle Public Schools updates guidance

It comes after unconfirmed reports of ICE activity last month led four schools in south Seattle to shelter in place for several hours. Although no district staff saw ICE near any of those schools that day, the incident rattled Seattle school communities.

RELATED: After unconfirmed ICE reports prompt sheltering in place, Seattle schools pledges ‘more centralized decision-making’

“This is a lot. It is something that we have not dealt with in America in a long time in terms of this just overriding fear and anxiety,” he said. “So I want anybody listening to this to know that I hear you, I understand, and we’re going to do our absolute best to try to make sure that everybody is as safe as possible.”

Accomplishing that comes down to planning, professional development, and “really making sure that principals have all the tools at their disposal,” Shuldiner said.

Shuldiner plans to draw from his experiences in Lansing, where district officials had “really thought out plans,” he said, and even brought in immigration rights advocates and lawyers to train principals on how they should respond in different situations. The training also walked principals through things like the difference between judicial and administrative warrants.

“There’s a lot of things that we can do as a district to make sure that our families, our staff, the whole community kind of knows how to handle it,” Shuldiner said.

On filling the district’s budget gap

The district is once again facing a massive budget deficit. This year, it’s projected at between $87 million and $100 million.

Shuldiner said he’s already reviewed the budget “line by line,” and has met weekly with district finance leaders since the school board hired him. But it’s going to take him some time to formulate a more concrete plan.

As of right now, though, Shuldiner is focused on “redundancies.” The district’s organizational chart, for example, is “all over the place,” Shuldiner said, with the same roles and responsibilities sometimes appearing in multiple departments.

“You can imagine how a district of this size has these silos, where sometimes you’re spending the same money on the same thing in different departments,” Shuldiner said. “And if we bring everybody together, we can save quite a bit of money.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean wholesale firings or layoffs — or at least that’s Shuldiner’s hope.

Instead, he thinks the district can find ways to save money by reorganizing when there are vacancies and retirements. Those positions may not be filled, and duties may be redistributed among the remaining employees.

Shuldiner also made clear that cuts would likely be focused on administrative roles, rather than in school buildings.

“It’s more important for us to support the people in the classroom than for us to be supporting the people in the central office,” he said.

Shuldiner also wants to explore different ways to secure additional funding, such as grants. And he wants to focus on areas where the district is spending more money than it gets from the state and other funding sources, including transportation, special education, and “contracts outside of our teachers.”

On school closures

Perhaps the biggest Seattle Public Schools controversy in recent years was the proposal to shutter nearly two dozen schools, as part of an effort to address the district’s structural budget deficit.

District officials later cut down the closure list to four elementary schools — a plan they later ditched entirely, after it became clear it didn’t have enough support from the community or school board.

RELATED: Seattle Public Schools drops contentions closure plan following months of waffling and backlash

Asked whether he’d revisit this idea as he works to fill the district’s deficit, Shuldiner didn’t rule it out.

“Look, everything’s on the table, and I would be a terrible superintendent if I didn’t say everything was on the table,” he said. “But what I can say to the community is that these kinds of decisions are not going to be made in a vacuum.”

Shuldiner said many of the district’s schools are 100 years old and he’s not sure he wants kids learning in those buildings — especially when the district also has some “brand new cathedrals to education.”

“Why wouldn’t we want to figure out what’s best for kids in terms of getting them into the best environment with the best learning, the best resources?” Shuldiner asked.

If he did consider school closures, Shuldiner pledged to approach the situation differently than Seattle officials did the last time around.

“One of the concerns that I heard most often about the school closures was like, ‘Well, here’s a list of schools. Now what?’” he said. “I would never do that. That’s crazy.”

In Lansing, Shuldiner said the district shut down four schools in two years, and “the community was part of it.”

“We took schools and we merged them,” he said. “One had a building that had central air and was relatively new. Another one was a building that didn’t have a great roof and didn’t have air conditioning, and they were so close to each other that merging them was great.”

On the Seahawks

Shuldiner isn’t a Hawks fan, but he will be cheering for them this weekend, as the franchise vies for its second Super Bowl ring. Most of the year, Shuldiner, a native New Yorker, “sadly” roots for the New York Jets. (His words.)

But Shuldiner hopes admitting this sends a message to Seattle about the kind of person — and superintendent — he is.

“I’m always going to be transparent, I am always going to be truthful and honest: I am a Jets fan, which is painful,” Shuldiner said. “It’s painful to admit, but that just shows you how loyal I am as a human being.”