The Mountain View Whisman School District is drafting a team of parents and faculty members to take on some of the biggest problems facing the district, including overcrowding, lack of diversity and families fleeing lower-performing schools. The Enrollment Priorities Task Force is set to begin meeting next month, and could potentially upend years of lax attendance policies.
School board members agreed earlier this month to set the groundwork for the new task force that is charged with fixing a complex, outdated list of 26 different enrollment priorities that spells out where students may attend schools throughout the district. Among the suggestions, trustees agreed that the district ought to at least loosely enforce the idea of “neighborhood” schools, limiting the ability of parents to opt out.
That could result in restrictions on school transfers, caps on migration away from some neighborhoods, and even limits on enrollment in one of the district’s parent-participation programs — Stevenson PACT — based on family income.
Parents from all over the district have long argued that the district’s enrollment priorities need to be revised to fix chronic problems, particularly overcrowding at popular schools, but the district is now facing a two-fold challenge it can’t ignore. Earlier this year, the board approved a new set of school attendance boundaries, and roughly 341 students — most of them in the Whisman area and Shoreline West — have to either abide by the new boundaries when they go into effect in 2019 or be grandfathered and allowed to continue at their current schools. Without changes to the enrollment priorities, the new boundaries could be rendered virtually useless.
The other challenge is that the district’s construction plans at Bubb and Huff elementary schools call for 18 classrooms to house up to 450 students, which are inadequate for the 608 kids currently enrolled at Huff and the 571 at Bubb. Until the new attendance boundaries actually force a better distribution of students across the district’s campuses, Bubb and Huff — and to a lesser extend Landels Elementary — will require several portable classrooms on the blacktop. The portables are costing the district a total of $225,000 each year.
The district could phase in the new boundaries starting with younger grades, allowing a few years for older students to finish school where they started, or the board could decide to “rip off the Band-Aid” and force all 341 affected students to move in fall 2019, Superintendent Ayinde Rudolph told board members.
Board members largely agreed that solving the problem without delay is the right way to go.
“We’re addressing an acute problem with the boundary change,” said trustee Greg Coladonato. “There are portables all over the place at some of our schools, and I want to fix that by implementing the boundaries as fast as we can.”
Board member Laura Blakely said she could see grandfathering students and siblings under the old boundaries for one year, but said it needs to be limited to balance out enrollment. Board member Tamara Wilson, who lives in a region zoned for Slater Elementary School under the 2019 boundaries, said she personally would be okay with having to move her son to another school. With how fast demographics and the city’s population is expected to change in the coming decade, she said the district has an obligation to be nimble and adjust attendance boundaries without a huge lag time.
“I think we’re doing a disservice the longer we prolong this,” she said.
In public feedback on new boundaries earlier this year, many parents expressed big concerns about the prospect of having their kids involuntarily torn from the school they’ve been attending because of tight policies on grandfathering, particularly from those rezoned out of Huff and Bubb. Parents argued that grandfathering should extend to siblings so they aren’t forced to drop kids off at two different schools, and so children can preserve friendships and ties to the school.
“Ripping kids out of their classes to send them to a different school midway is a really bad idea,” one comment read. “If you switch boundaries, keep the grandfathering clause and let people stay or switch as they want.”
Another wrinkle with a zero-grandfathering approach is that if all the kids within the Slater attendance boundary were to attend the school, it would start the 2019-20 school year with 104 kindergarteners and 103 first graders — well exceeding the district’s goal of three classrooms per grade level.
Blocking the free flow of students
During the two-and-a-half-year struggle to draw up new attendance boundaries, board members repeatedly emphasized the concept of neighborhood schools. In stark contrast to school districts like San Francisco Unified, the goal was to give each neighborhood region in Mountain View its own local, walkable school, instead of parents schlepping children across the city.
But under the district’s current enrollment policies, that’s hardly the case, former board member Bill Lambert told the board. Lambert, a Monta Loma resident, called the “neighborhood paradigm” entirely fictitious, and said it was used to justify opening Slater Elementary — a decision he opposed when it came to a vote in 2015. In reality, he said, 30 percent of the district’s kids go to choice programs or schools other than their own neighborhood school, and that percent is much higher in neighborhoods with schools considered lower performing.
“There’s a disparate impact on probably over half the schools in our district, especially Monta Loma, Theuerkauf and Landels, where almost 50 percent of the kids either go to one of the choice schools or do intradistrict transfers,” he said.
Rudolph said the board could adopt a light-weight model for restricting transfers that still leaves room for some parental choice, like a system of enrollment “zones” where families living in one attendance boundary could send their children to one or two adjacent schools as well.
There’s also plenty of changes that can be made to enrollment at the district’s choice programs — Stevenson PACT and the Dual Immersion program at Mistral Elementary — in order to rein in the mass exodus of families from certain neighborhoods. Transfers could be capped after a set number of families from an outside neighborhood are attending the school.
Rudolph said the board could also decide that diversity needs to take priority, and that enrollment in the PACT program should more closely align with the socio-economic diversity of the district at large.
The district has huge “poverty gaps” between its campuses, Rudolph said. Only 5 percent of students at Stevenson qualify for free and reduced-price meals, compared to 67 percent at Castro Elementary, according to district data.
“If the idea is to bring parity among sites, that’s something we can consider,” he said.
Wilson said she believes diversity is important at the district’s choice programs, and signaled support for imposing some kind of restrictions.
“We can’t have 40 percent of students from a single school (boundary) going to a choice program,” she said.
Lambert urged the board to give the upcoming task force as much freedom as possible, and avoid giving specific marching orders on what they would like to see under the new rules. The Student Attendance Area Task Force, which drew up the new boundaries for the 2019-20 school year, was largely constrained in what it could do because of demands to create neighborhood schools, Lambert said.
“We’re going to face the same thing again when we start talking about intradistrict enrollment policies.”
