Seattle's Franklin High School facing urgent maintenance needs amid ignored pleas

SEATTLE — Broken down bathrooms, loss of power, and refrigeration are just a few of the serious problems plaguing Franklin High School in Seattle.

It’s so bad that a staff member went all the way to a school board meeting, not once, but twice, to tell the Seattle School Board and Superintendent Brent Jones and the rest of the staff that attends those meetings that this school needs attention from maintenance.

It’s now been at least six weeks, according to his public comments, that the boys’ bathrooms on two floors are not usable.

“Can you imagine the chaos that there’s been? The boys’ bathrooms on two floors do not exist,” Franklin HS staff member James "Whitney" Parker asked during Wednesday night’s school board meeting.

That was the second meeting in a row he signed up for public comment to put the problems at Franklin on record. The first time was March 20.

“Two weeks ago, the boy's bathrooms on two different floors were broken. They’ve been broken since then. Our principal sent in a work order. We received no word, how our bathrooms are not a priority,” Parker said.

Two weeks after that comment, Parker again stood before the board and superintendent and said, “It’s horrendous it’s causing huge amounts of problems in the school. Please get that fixed.”

Adding up the weeks on his timeline means the bathrooms have been broken since the first week of March. But that’s not the only major problem at this school, which first opened in 1912.

During his public comment at the April 3 meeting, Parker said they came back from winter break with partial power.

“There was no heat, no Internet, no working elevator for our wheelchair users, and no cafeteria or nurse refrigerator that had power. When our principal reached out to SPS about closing the school he was denied. How is that not enough to close the school? It wasn’t until there was a literal fire on the third floor - that’s when it was canceled,” said Parker.

“It’s beautiful on the outside, but a mess on the inside. There’s a 10-foot pit outside the lunchroom that’s a safety hazard for students,” said another Franklin staff member, Jonas Crimm, during the March 20 meeting.

“Our inner city kids need to have new facilities. new books and everything else like that,” said Cedric Dennard, a care coordinator at the school, who suggested the old school would be better kept as a museum.

“It is a drawback not having, you know coming to an old building like this and you know, it’s dim, dark,” said Dennard.

Crimm also said it took six months for him to get a work order to get a leaky sink fixed. He that moisture in his classroom was causing a mold problem, giving students headaches.

“Physically I would hope that the school could invest in the staff that we’ve all been talking about, but also in the maintenance staff, in the physical maintenance of our structure so that we can do our jobs as professionals,” said Crimm.

KOMO News talked with students outside the school after dismissal who rolled their eyes and agreed that the bathrooms were a mess.

A grandmother outside the school, waiting to pick up her grandkids, told KOMO they don’t use the bathrooms at school at all.

KOMO News reached out to the communications department at Seattle Public Schools, asking for an interview with the district’s Chief Operations Officer Fred Podesta, or Chief of Staff Beverly Redmond, who also is the head of Public Affairs, Media Relations, Community Engagement, Communications, Customer Service, School Board Office, and the Ombudsperson Office, among other duties.

KOMO went to the district's central office and nobody was available to talk with us. Three hours later, the district sent KOMO an email that said they were working on safe and functional restrooms for all schools, including Franklin High School.

The district said they are working on temporary solutions to increase access to restrooms and long-term solutions to prevent vandalism. SPS said these solutions will be available Monday, April 8, but the district is on spring break next week.

“I’m not saying it’s not safe but just not a warming facility. Franklin, as a school, has staff and students here that’s warm and welcoming but the building itself like I said I just feel personally like it’s time for a new one,” said Dennard.

In regard to the power outage that Whitney detailed at a March School board meeting, SPS told KOMO that was related to a Seattle City Light transformer malfunction.

"In addition to the loss of power, the incident damaged some of the building's HVAC pumps. As a result of that incident, Franklin received new heat pumps and building maintenance support to improve power balance and control," SPS wrote in an email to KOMO.