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As the Mountain View Whisman School District grapples with the unintended consequences of its choice school enrollment practices, the board is expected to take a vote on a draft policy aimed at improving equity across choice schools at the next board meeting.
The choice elementary schools offer specialized experiences that the other schools don’t. Gabriela Mistral touts a dual immersion program, where students learn to read, write, and speak in both English and Spanish, while Stevenson is a parent-participation school.
The school board discussed the district’s lottery system for Stevenson and Gabriela Mistral at a special meeting on Nov. 7. Karin Jinbo, the district’s director of student services, presented data and two updated lottery options to the board, which they’re expected to vote on Nov. 19.
“The thinking behind this was much more about representation of the district, that we would be representative of our neighborhood schools at Stevenson based on our certified enrollment data,” she told the board at the Nov. 7 special meeting.
The first option would limit new lottery enrollees at Stevenson to 48 kindergarten students proportional to the number of students across the other schools.
The district would also expand the criteria for year-round requests for applications, allowing new, eligible students to request to apply year-round to available seats at Mistral only for grades 1 through 5. Currently, year-round requests are limited to grades 2 through 5, Jinbo said.
The second scenario, which most board members preferred, would alternate new lottery enrollees at Stevenson between 48 and 72 kindergarten students every other school year, while keeping the number of enrollments proportional to the district’s neighborhood schools. The same changes outlined in the first option would apply to year-round enrollments.
Enrollment in the choice schools is not even across the district, Jinbo told the board. Choice schools receive the most applications from families in the neighborhood schools closest to them.
However, Conley voiced concern that the district may further disadvantage low-income students by limiting the enrollment spots to each school.
“Allocating certain seats to Imai and Bubb and some of our more affluent communities could disadvantage our low-income students, who we want to see more represented at Stevenson,” she said during the meeting. “The majority of our low-income students attend Castro, and so by doing that cap, by doing it in proportion to the enrollment at each school site, it’s equitable across schools, but we know our students are not equitably distributed across schools.”
Mistral’s enrollment is 70% Hispanic, 10% white, 7% multiple ethnicities and 3% Asian, Jinbo said. Stevenson’s enrollment is 44% Asian, 24% white, 18% multiple ethnicities, 13% Hispanic and 1% Black.
Approximately 6% of Mistral students experience unstable housing, while no Stevenson students are reported to experience unstable housing. At Mistral, 57% of students come from socioeconomically disadvantaged families, while 14% of Stevenson’s students were economically disadvantaged, Jinbo said.
Exactly 47% of Mistral students are also English learners, while just over 10% of Stevenson students are the same.
“There is a great deal of work that we need to do around whether or not families who are not represented at Stevenson feel welcome, feel like they are part of it,” Conley said during the meeting. “If nobody applies, even though there’s weights in the lottery, you’re not going to see any change.”
While the board didn’t seem to overwhelmingly support one option over the other – Trustees Lisa Henry and Devon Conley preferred the first option, while President Charles DiFazio preferred the second – board members made requests for student number predictions and input from stakeholders before staff come back at the upcoming board meeting.
Among the board, there was also interest in updating and discussing the lottery process more regularly.
“I don’t want to be hearing the issues that come up the first time from the public,” DiFazio said. “I want us to be up here on the dais getting a regular report on how the goals we’ve set and the functions that we’re expecting this to provide are actually being felt in the community.”
Trustee Bill Lambert also questioned the purpose choice schools have in the community. He suggested that a deeper conversation will need to take place in the future.
“Rather than jump into the solutions, we need a much higher level discussion about what purpose they serve in our community. What students do they serve that have a need for this kind of program?” Lambert said during the meeting. “It’s articulated in different ways all the time, but I think we need to have that deeper discussion. There’s a lot of change going on right now in our school district, and this is a great opportunity to do that.”
