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Long-form interviews and conversations from Mason County, Washington. Host Jeff Slakey sits down with local leaders, legislators, small business owners, and community voices for unhurried conversations about what's shaping the Hood Canal region — government, education, healthcare, the outdoors, and the people making a difference.
New episodes drop throughout the week. For daily local headlines, subscribe to KMAS Morning News with Jeff Slakey.
Well, time for me to check in here at the Shelton School District with Superintendent Wyeth Jessee. Wyeth, how you doing? Great, Jeff. Saw you the other day at two wonderful schools for first grade kind of literacy and writing and it was, it was awesome.
It was awesome. The students shined. It was really cool to see how excited they were to share not only the poems that they had written, but then also share how they're able to comprehend and read stories back to me.
And then, of course, the fun of us reading to them. And both schools, I went to Bordeaux and Evergreen, and both, both of the classrooms were fantastic. You had a lot of great folks that came and participated in that to kind of really show off some good first grade skills.
Lots to say here, you know, up front, again, it's the kids. Right. And having, they wrote letters as part of their, we call them writing units for one month.
You know, they've been working on how do you, you know, put a narrative piece together that is inviting, but also a little bit persuasive to it, right? And it's first grade. And first grade, correct. That's right.
That's right. And not to Santa, by the way. No.
No, it's to the community. Or the tooth fairy. So, but it is them writing out to community people, you know, community leaders, pulling them in, you know, like you and I were talking about the mayor was there and he was super excited about it just as one example, right.
And business leaders, so on. So super cool to just see the kids say, you know, what their teachers obviously did a lot of hard work, get the kids, right. Bring in the people and then they can showcase your skills.
It's just hard to explain to the community, like, Hey, this is what's going on. Unless that's your mom and dad or your guardian. It's like about how much amazing reading and writing abilities these first graders had.
And I don't know about you, but did you hear quite a few adults were like, I had never had those kinds of skills at first grade. Yeah. And they were working on a whole host of different things.
You're right on kind of persuasive letter writing skills. That was never part of the curriculum when I was in first grade. And I think that, you know, you have the sign out front of the district office about the increased percentages of the reading scores and all the scores that are falling into line there.
And so by the time these first graders now two years from now, it will only exponentially get better. And I think that's from what I see, you know, on the school board meetings and talking with staff and people around the district, that's kind of the trajectory. It's a lot of behind the scenes.
It's a lot of building the foundation versus, you know, adding the planner boxes and things like that. If I can use a house metaphor. Great.
It is spring. So you can bring most certainly plants and flowers into a conversation, but I yeah, no, that's a, I can't emphasize for the listeners for this is to really understand that this is a culmination of work by the staff here in the Shelton school district. You know, our teachers, our para educators, everyone, the office staff, everybody's had a part in this because this is building out amazing instruction for every student who walks through the classroom.
And the Shelton school district is not the same Shelton school district that we had five years ago, 10 or 15 years ago. And again, many people who were there went through Shelton, the Shelton school district, SHS grads are like, yeah, this is way better. I can see it.
And you're right. It's first grade. And we're doing that earlier.
Our high school teachers actually love this thing because they're like, wait till they get to you because they really want to have the access and opportunity for when these kids graduate. This is the future of Shelton. Sure.
We are crafting the future of Shelton and the other first graders. Right. And so you got six, got a six year old sitting there or a seven year old.
And if they can read a book and they can write, they have the power to learn anything. They're, they're in their own seat to again, learn the things, the mechanisms we want, you know, and whether that's putting together something as an engineer or that is simply knowing how to run a business or how to actually work as a team to accomplish something for this community. That is what the skills are, but you got to read and write.
And they obviously were engaging about you, but the groups of kids I was with was also super engaging. So I just want to really, it is teacher appreciation week. I want to take a special nod to thank our teachers.
They work super hard. You know, we've done a really good job of working together to put together this literacy instruction for these kids. It is a system here.
It is literally pre-K all the way through 12th grade. We are literacy is one of our four focus areas. But we also know that it is foundational.
So thanks for all also the community members that came out, saw us more events this fall. Yeah, no, no, that there's just more events and to showcase all the great things that are going on in Perkins and our kids demonstrate and all their superpowers. And now you know, we're many years now since COVID and kind of the pause on the volunteering and the coming into the classrooms and things like that.
So if it has been a while that you have had a son or daughter that have gone through the district, or it's been a while since you've been in school, it's a great opportunity to get in and see how different things are when it comes to learning now as compared to like you said, five, 10 years ago, things like that even further back. So pretty cool stuff. Legislature wrapped up, lots of things happening out of the ledge.
And I don't know what all you have seen from the budgets that have been signed. But it sounds like there's some potentially big impacts in different districts, and maybe impacting even some of the Shelton ways that they look at things. Man, public education is a tough spot right now.
Yeah, financially. And so the costs are just exceeding the revenue. And so out of this, we'll see what the governor has.
I don't know. I feel like I'm a little bit behind maybe by 24 hours on, you know, the state legislature, there were days presented it to the governor to sign. I don't know where it's exactly at.
I haven't seen anything. Again, as far as it may, I don't know if it's been signed or not. But I know he's got budgets.
And there's, he has, you know, like a few weeks after the end of session to get through them all. Yep. And sign them.
Yep. Yep. So I don't know.
Timeline wise. Yeah, hopefully any day now, right? Like, so the things that were put in there, nothing, nothing good for the Shelton school district. There's no money, there's nothing coming to us.
It didn't cover the expenses. I mean, I, you know, I think I've heard, I think I've said this before to you and for our listeners, you know, just on our operating expenses, our utilities. Yeah.
That means like garbage, water, sewer, power, those expenses for the last three years are $4 million over what the state provides us for those expenses. So, okay. $4 million.
Let's break that down again. So they say that a school district, your size with this many students, here's the, here's the formula and this is what you should get. But after inflation and all that, those numbers have not risen to the inflation pace.
Is that what you're saying here to the tune of $4 million? Yeah. That's exactly right. And so, you know, again, I, I keep saying as well as like, whatever you see your increases happening at home are the same increases that are happening for businesses and also for the Shelton school district.
And so by those increases going up and the revenue provided by the state does not match that we have to contract, we have to not be able to do other things, right? Because you have to pay the power bill and I got to pay the water and sewer, right? Those are automatically things that I have to pay for. And when they run almost to a million dollars over per year or over, I'm sorry, over a million dollars per year, then you run into where, okay, so where does that money come from? And what I would want the community and understand is, yeah, I mean, I got people coming to me. I want what happened to the librarian or the library tech or what happened to this after school program? Or I thought we were going to be able to, you know, have additional paraeducators here.
It's those things go away, you know, because I got, we got to pay the money. It's got to cut somewhere to, to pay those expenses. And so that's, that's exactly, it's not just us.
I mean, you can go to any other district. I think for your own kids, district, same deal. I know that superintendent, you know, I know I hear him.
I talked to all those people, everybody, everybody across the state, it's not just a Shelton issue. So I'm not trying to cry for the Shelton school district, but I am an advocate for the Shelton school district. That's why I went to stock, talk to the state ledge.
I think a lot of people want to, I just don't think there's the money they're facing their own need to budget cuts, right? The revenue is not coming in. The taxes aren't as high. Things are more expensive.
That's just what it is. And so revenue doesn't match expenses. Where are the cuts? That's just an automatic thing that every the state government's doing.
We're a public school district. We are part of the state. And so we are also facing those, those same cuts.
How does that work? When, when, you know, a lot of the main people who talk about this, they go, well, you know, this, the state's paramount duty is education. It's line one, word one of the constitution. And we went through the McCleary thing and whatever fixes or non fixes came about that, at least something happened.
But it doesn't seem like it's ever been enough, especially for districts, rural districts, especially. Oh, so much to say here. My, my, I guess my, my ultimate talking point here is what is basic education? What do people consider basic education? What are you getting for your money? What do you want? You want a counselor? Do you want to make sure the books are up to date? Do you want to make sure that math curriculum you want to make sure you got for us that afterschool activities, you know, and athletics, athletics is covered by a levy.
The state doesn't give us money for athletics and activities. You want to have those afterschool activity on do all those things. That's not basic ed.
And when our budget uh, for us, uh, half the money is basic ed. The other half are restricted dollars or levy dollars. They're all like, so when you think about that, they say you can operate the Shelton school district, $44 million.
I mean, we would talk about talk about cuts, right? And so that's why every dollar matters at this particular juncture for the Shelton school district and other districts is what is basic ed. We are at a place where if we don't continue to fund it, then we are going to have to really curtail the services that we and everybody else is providing. So where is, is there somewhere in some book, the definition of this, has it ever been That's a great question.
Adjudicated like, uh, like You know, what, what exactly is basic ed? That's why they love to have the authority at the local level, right? Like, so that's the pride and joy of public education is trying to move, uh, authority at the public level. You have school boards, right? You have votes, you have levies, you have things that are local authority, right? Uh, curricular adoptions, that's, you have your own community group that comes together and formulates and makes those, some of those decisions. So there's a lot of good things about that, right? That's things that make America powerful.
Um, the champ, the, the bad side of that is communities that are not have high property values like Shelton compared to other communities that can generate a lot more with a lot more, you know, industry, for example, there's a lot more property value on that industry. Right. And so you can only generate so much of that, that will ultimately feed into the taxes that support that.
So when you have lower, you get lower amounts off your levy. And so those with richer amounts even get more money. And then they also run capital levies.
They run multiple levies for one school district, as opposed to here we, we run one and it's truly a renewal of an operations levy that helps pay for those expenses. Like I was mentioning, you know, it is literally done a pay for some special education, our athletics and activities, and also, um, literally for staffing. It pays for basic ed.
It's called basic at enhancement. What a nice title, right? Jeff? Yeah. Basically had an enhancement from the levy.
So that's the, there is no definition of it, but what do you want the future of Shelton students to experience and have that's where we're at. And that's the things that us and every other district needs to wrestle with and they do wrestle with. So the difference then between basic ed, I mean, so what would, so if you saw, if you had like a list and he said basic ed, what would be the other extra? And so if people would have to guess or say what, well, I think, you know, most folks would be hard pressed to take anything out of what you would consider basic education.
Right. So the state does have a formula. They, you know, for specific positions and money, they say, Oh, a prototypical model says for every 300 students, you get, you know, one counselor or one school administrator.
Right. But even then on what they say, that is, they put their own dollar amount on it that is not meeting market rate. So you're getting 80% of the monies that these things truly cost.
And that is why the districts across the state are running out of money because you're only getting so much to run these basic things. I mean, they don't even give us one full time security person for the entire district. They don't even fund that.
Right. And so, you know, we're short like, like, you know, like for a nurse, you know, we need to, we do need nurses here. We have kids that have significant medical issues.
It might not be your kid, but it is your neighbor's kid. Yeah. You know, and those are the things that I think sometimes people forget, like those things that we are responsible, I'm responsible for the lies in providing those services.
You know, if you have diabetes and like, I got a, we got a monitor, if not, you know, that could be a student, you know, we have a number of kids with have seizures, for example, or have a lot of medications that they have to take and monitor. Right. And that's a very serious business.
And that type and all of that has really changed over the years, the need for mental health counseling, the need for medical counseling or medical nurses. I mean, those numbers, as people become more comfortable talking about them in a, in a generalized, polite society. I mean, the focus on those things have, has only increased.
It's not like there's less, there's not people out there who say, well, we have less folks with mental challenges that might need additional therapists or things like that. Jeff, just take those first graders. You saw amazing skills.
Well, you know, when we think about it, those kids come through the door, we're going to do everything we can to serve them. The thing that's different now is that schools and school districts are different. When I entered this profession 25 years ago, I was clearly told schools are not responsible for mental health services, right? Guess who's, I feel like is primarily responsible for mental health services.
Yeah, it's the schools now. Schools. And that's not just here, right? Like that's, again, you're in other places, you see other things.
That's not just here. But if I don't have those first graders, they expect to get a meal, meals through their day. They are relying on those meals, backpacks, back to school event.
I think you've been there for that. We've got over 800 families lined up out there needing backpacks, vaccination rates, right? After school activities, healthcare. I mean, these things extend on.
If we're not already directly providing it, we are the conduit for it. And so there is not the money for those things. I love, I think schools are the center of communities.
I'm obviously a superintendent. I think that way, you know, I'm all about the services we provide our students and our families. You know, I love the kids that we have and I love the families.
We're trying to do the best we can to serve them. And we will continue that. Those amazing skills.
Those first graders have though, can't be had if they're coming to school really tired and they don't have a mattress, right? Or there's three deep, right? If I, if I'm not working to help make sure when they come to the door, they feel safe and they have some mental health therapy because maybe things aren't going so well necessarily at home. That's not every house, but it is enough, right? And making sure that the lights and the power and making sure that they get some, we can help be that conduit for them. And after school activities, we know as kids get older, we want them to be in athletics or activities as much as possible.
We want to have after school activities for them to also for tutoring that we need to do to get them to grade level and beyond. So all those services add up and I'm glad we're doing it. It's just, it is, it is expensive.
And you know, it kind of goes back then to what I was saying just a little bit ago. If it's been a while since you've been in a school or seen how education is done these days with those services that are relied on so heavily you may not quite understand how necessity, how, how big of a necessity they are, including with that breakfasts and lunches and making sure these kids have food to be able to focus on what's going on throughout the day and things like that. Yeah.
And that pair of educators there to help provide supervision, but also pick them up and help to solve a conflict between two kids and work on their friendships. It takes an incredible amount of time to investigate all the things that come through. I know on the front page, you know, just like we're going to have no cell phone policy next, next year.
Right. That's been really helpful at both Olympic middle school and Oakland Bay junior high this year, really cutting down those things. So like those things take time, but when those investigation and managing those situations, it just, everybody has to do their part.
Right. How do you so for, for parents and their kids have cell phones, right. And they say, well, let's take that to school or we'll at least have it in our backpack.
No, we didn't have the, I mean, they didn't have cell phones when we were in school. Fine. But if somebody needs to get in touch with the student, you call the office.
They can always call the office. Students can be released to go to the office. Obviously we do that at the elementary level.
And then even in this policy and the procedures that are written for it, if there is an emergency, a student can use a phone, but it needs to be really emergent. But I mean, Jeff, I'm in classrooms every Thursday and I walk through, how often is there emergency and kids are on, I mean, kids are on their phone to entertain themselves. That's the primary reason we're having this is not to, you can have both situations.
You can have both of those things happen at the same time. Jeff, we can curtail usage of phone while the kids are learning. If there is an emergency, the kids are going to have access.
We can manage that. So how do you, how do you explain that to parents? I mean, my age and when I was again, kid, no phones cause they didn't have them. That's fine.
But we're starting to get to the point where adult parents may have grown up with cell phones and they're part of their growing up, just like social media and yada, yada. So, I mean, how, how do you explain the negative side effects or, you know, you don't have to have that constant line of communication or. That's a great question.
Look, my, our job is to educate the students and it's clear with the research or your own two eyes or just common sense. You look at the kids, they're in a class and you're trying to compete against a cell phone. You're losing.
Come on. I mean, like seriously, which parent hasn't been like, could you please put your phone down and give me your eyes and give me your attention so we can have a conversation. Right.
This is, come on. It's just the same thing. And when there is, you know, again, emergency situations, you know, kids can have access with, they don't even have a phone.
There is access to the office. We do work on that. Parents can call.
We do communicate, you know, and for them. So. Additionally too, it's kind of the sending out, you know, the gossip chains and the text messaging and the Snapchats and all these other major distractions that lead right back into a student's mental, mental health there when it comes to bullying or, you know, there's a picture that's moves around and things like that.
That's a tough one. So is that, are the phones going to be locked up? Is it a one, two, three strike? Yeah. It's, it's a progression, just like other things, a progression of discipline.
You know, it's really about educating the students. We're not into punishing them, you know, and about how to manage your resources. Back in our day, you know, there's other things we had to manage too.
I don't know. When I was in middle school, I was trying to sell candies, like trying to make a buck off, off some, you know, like whatever. I was trying to read Mad Magazine all day.
So there was, there was a lot going on, right? Like there was, there's always other distractions, regardless of the generation. Sure. Cell phones just happen to be a super dynamic tool to engage and provide a lot of stimulation, right? Like, so like it is engaging you, it is set up, those apps are met and they are, you know, the algorithms, they're working there to pull you in all the time.
I mean, so that's why people, but that's why, you know, hours, we're not talking about minutes, we're talking about hours in which students can be engaged on their cell phones when there's no cell phone policy. We just need to have ours up to date in a way that supports our student learning and keeps them safe. That's our paramount duty.
We'll continue to do that. We have, I think we've done a really great job here in the Shelton school district and keep their learning. Again, back to the things that we see in the students and more kids graduating, graduation rates are up for a reason here in this Shelton school district, right? Like, so our kids, our teachers are doing a really good job.
The kids are doing a great job. We'll continue to improve. We always have room to improve, Jeff.
But like I said, OMS and OBJH did their cell phone, no cell phone view learnings. It's gone really swimmingly well. So it's just, let's try not to make something, a whole lot of something out of nothing.
Sure. End of the school year is here. And so you just mentioned graduation and graduation rates.
How's it looking for the graduates at the Choice Cedar and Shelton High as we get into these final weeks, really? Yes, it is. It's almost a month, right? So school ends June 13th and graduation looks great. A lot of kids are, especially at the high schools going, you know, getting ready for their next step.
Many kids going on to, you know, some trade schools, some of them worked off their, you've been directly involved in like some of their internships. They're all of a sudden getting job offers and doing that and then continuing getting their training on the job or maybe go back to some level of apprenticeship programs and stuff that furthers post-graduation. And we got over 50 kids going to Evergreen State for free.
Really? For free. On the Shelton Promise. On Shelton Promise.
So again, over 50 graduates this year between the three high schools going off to Evergreen State for free. Wow. Hard to say, right? Hard to believe.
You're like, what? Like, no, really. Yeah. When I went and did the feature with them and talked to Monir and I talked to the president over there, they were so happy to have the partnership and to see the students and how they felt that they were gooey ducks from the jump, you know? Like, they recognized that the students here in the district had a real unique connection to Evergreen and that's pretty awesome.
I'm even a little surprised, you know? Like, I try to talk to as many seniors as I can at a variety of events. What are you doing? What's your plan? Because I very much like, what I'm trying to work away is the couch surfing post-graduation, right? You know that that is still a challenge, right? That is a challenge for us, right? And so we get excited about these things and so I talk to them and then I'm like, all right, what's your plan? Where are you going? Okay. And friends are usually right there too.
Yeah. I'm trying to get them to do, you know, friends trying to help them make good choices and come up with plans and that they've been working on right in high school. But this Evergreen state thing catches me a little bit as a surprise only because, uh, I thought people, I thought kids would sign up.
I didn't realize that they were going to be this excited. Sure. I think there, they have a lot of tie-ins.
We have a number of staff that went to Evergreen state here. A lot, a lot of staff, all makes and models of staff here. Uh, and that relationship is stronger than I realized.
Um, I think great people, the president, ever going to say it's really trying to remake that school and he's, John's done a great job. I, I had nothing. And then partnering with us.
Are you kidding me? Like I, yeah, it's, it's great for Shelton. There's our students, uh, an opportunity to go there. And I think a lot of kids, I think a lot of our students in the past have chosen to go to what most people know as community college, even though you can usually get a four year degree.
Most of them, they go to community college because it's just affordability. Jeff affordability is driving their decision, even though they, I think a lot of them wanted to go to a four year school. They didn't think it was really fiscally positive, uh, possible.
Yeah. And I think for a lot of those kids, that's what is part of the excitement is twofold. I'm going to four year school.
I'm going for free, but I don't want to forget that. And I better have the third one is just the relationship with Evergreen state being so close, but just far enough. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, that's great. Great news.
Well, let's leave it with that. Let's try to get one more of these in either right as school ends or right around, uh, the middle of June and kind of look again to the future of next school year and how it may look with any, uh, additional changes that you see coming through the budgets and things like that. But, uh, that's great news.
50 students going to Evergreen and, uh, man, 50 plus. Yeah. At least 50.
Yeah. That's super cool. Superintendent Wyeth Jessee here in the Shelton school district.
Thank you. Thanks, Jeff.