Last year, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) ham-fistedly announced plans to shut down up to 21 schools—only to later reduce that number to four and then table the proposal altogether. For now, at least.

After that emotional roller coaster for parents and students, the only thing that’s actually closing is the current SPS superintendent’s career. He announced his upcoming departure just a month after accepting a contract extension through 2027.

Surprisingly (to me, too), a major plotline in my new novel Supersonic revolves around a fictional Seattle community fighting the closure of their neighborhood school. The battle stretches from the students and PTA all the way up to the school board and a mayoral candidate.

I started writing the book in 2020, drawing not on current events but inspiration from my own experience at SPS as a kid. My elementary school was once considered for closure in the 1980s, but it managed to survive—at least as I remember it from my third-grade point of view—by creatively integrating some indispensable district programs.

In Supersonic, PTA president Sami Hasegawa-Stalworth leads the fight to save Stevenson Elementary, the school her children attend—and where she herself was once a student. A generation before, her grandmother was a beloved teacher at the school who built its music program into a source of community pride.

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But Sami soon learns she’s not engaged in a clean or heroic battle. She’s forced to consider cutting the very music program that defines the school’s legacy to make room for a STEM lab that might justify the school’s survival. She also makes uneasy alliances—leaning on wealthy donors and tech-world power players (including her sister-in-law) she knows she can’t fully trust.

The novel explores how even the best-intentioned efforts to preserve public institutions can become entangled in Seattle’s good-when-it’s-good but otherwise precarious dependence on the ultra-wealthy.

The book also confronts a harder truth: Years of disinvestment by upper- and middle-class families—many of whom have opted out of public education entirely—have helped create the conditions driving school closures in the first place. And I say that as someone who straddles this reality; I’m a product of Seattle Public Schools, my wife works for SPS, and we currently have one kid in the district and another (quite happily) in private school.

Local Books
Seattle Met Book Club

May 20, 5pm at University Book Store

Join the Seattle Met book club in person for a conversation with author Thomas Kohnstamm.

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In a city defined by constant growth and reinvention, difficult, and often ugly, decisions must be made about the institutions that hold us together. Public education is especially complex, thanks to its haphazard funding model. And in a city that strives for consensus and to not hurt people’s feelings, the toughest decisions are often deferred for the next generation.

If my kids are able to afford to live in Seattle when they’re adults, odds are they’ll face some of the same questions. This story is nowhere near its conclusion.