by Hailey Karcher

In October 2023, Dunlap Elementary School in South Seattle learned that they would have to let go of two of their classroom teachers due to less-than-predicted student enrollment. This had an outsized cascading effect on many students in the school, with split grade classes created, teachers shuffled to different classrooms, and students rearranged to account for this staff reduction. These disruptions happened, of course, after the tone-setting, norm-creating month of September had already passed; students, teachers, and administrators would have to reboot, altering everyone’s expectations for that year.