Rejecting a last-minute attempt to balance diversity among Mountain View's elementary schools, the Mountain View Whisman School District board approved new attendance boundaries that will take effect in the 2019-20 school year.

On a 4-1 vote, with board president Jose Gutierrez opposed, board members agreed to adopt what they called less-than-perfect attendance boundaries. School attendance boundaries determine which neighborhoods have enrollment priority for the district's schools, which can impact property values.

On the plus side, the new boundaries unify families in the northeast region of the city by zoning the Whisman, Slater and Wagon Wheel neighborhoods for Slater Elementary, which will open in 2019. The boundaries also shift the Shoreline West neighborhood from Bubb Elementary -- one of the most crowded schools in the district -- to Landels Elementary.

But the attendance boundaries aren't flawless. Schools like Theuerkauf Elementary are expected to lose a lot of students in the shake-up, with enrollment expected to dip below 300 students in the 2019-20 school year. Opponents of the proposal argued that shrinking enrollment threatens the viability of schools, and that Theuerkauf risks a future closure if too few families choose to send their children.

Slater Elementary is facing the opposite problem, with projections showing the school could be packed to the brim from the day it opens.

The board's vote ultimately came down to a decision between two similar maps, which came from the district's Student Attendance Area Task Force (SAATF). Option A, which the board approved at the June 15 meeting, prioritized neighborhood unity and safe routes to school by re-zoning the North Whisman neighborhood for Slater. Option B sought to carefully balance enrollment in the city's northernmost schools by leaving the neighborhood in the Theuerkauf boundary.

'Most impoverished school'

The biggest sticking point at the meeting, however, wasn't about options A and B, but a broader concern that the attendance boundaries will worsen the sharp socio-economic divides in the district's elementary schools. In both scenarios, Castro Elementary ends up with a disproportionately high number of low-income and minority students, leaving it "the most impoverished school" in the district, according to the staff report.

The concerns were enough to prompt board members Gutierrez and Laura Blakely to ask staff, at the eleventh hour of the lengthy boundary-drafting process, whether some spot changes could be made around the Castro Elementary area to increase diversity. Superintendent Ayinde Rudolph presented a third map at the June 15 meeting where Castro's boundaries were stretched to include parts of the Monta Loma, Gemello and Shoreline West neighborhoods, which would have made modest improvements to the school's income diversity.

This newly drafted map, however, drew the ire of several Shoreline West residents who urged the board to follow its own process, reject the newly cooked up map and make a final decision on either options A or B. Residents in the neighborhood have argued for months that it's bad enough Shoreline West is losing its priority enrollment at Bubb Elementary. Splitting the neighborhood vertically between Castro and Landels would simply be too much.

"I understand it may be tempting to hold out for something better or keep tinkering with these options," said Shoreline West resident Aaron Phillips. "Don't hold the community in continual anxiety."

Priscilla Taylor, also a Shoreline West resident, said she felt the new map derails the district's clear and transparent process for approving new boundaries. The task force worked for 18 months to come up with the final two options, and she and other residents were given a chance to weigh in and voice concerns. A map that makes significant changes to improve diversity should go through the same process, she said.

Board members rejected the revised, diversity-balancing boundaries. Blakely said she had a hunch that minor tweaks around the Castro area could balance out diversity at the school, but the spot changes presented at the meeting didn't move the needle far enough.

Gutierrez, the sole dissenting vote, said he was uncomfortable with what he saw as a "double standard" being set by the attendance boundaries. The school board and task force members put a great deal of importance on creating neighborhood schools and campuses that students can walk to, but he said the criteria was selectively applied to certain schools.

Slater was given far-reaching boundaries because it gave kids in the Whisman and Slater area a close, safe route to school. But when it comes to Castro Elementary, he said the objective is reversed: Students in the Shoreline West neighborhood, some of whom live just a block away from Castro, are clamoring to be zoned for Bubb or Landels and are willing to travel a mile and a half in order to avoid going to their neighborhood school.

"You do everything you can not to go to the closest school that just happens to be an impoverished school," Gutierrez said. "From an (Office for Civil Rights) perspective or a legal perspective, you call that de facto segregation, and I don't want to be put in that situation."

Parents opting out

Rudolph acknowledged that not every school has the same "drawing power," and that too many parents are choosing not to send their children to the nearest school because of the performance or reputation of a school. Kindergarten enrollment requests in past years showed that only about a third of families living within the Theuerkauf, Castro and Monta Loma boundaries requested their own neighborhood school, compared to 86 percent for Huff Elementary. Although it's a problem he inherited, Rudolph said he's not proud of it.

Shannon Gutierrez Brown, a parent of students at Mistral and Graham, said it sends a bad message to the members of the Castro community that their own neighbors would rather go all the way across town than attend the same school. By accepting the boundaries, the board would be enabling flight from the school.

"I want you to think about respecting the people in my neighborhood," she said.

The new Landels attendance boundary rides up right against Castro Elementary for a few reasons. Shoreline West residents requested that the entire neighborhood, which extends from Shoreline Boulevard all the way to Chiquita Avenue, be zoned for one school, and made clear at past board meetings that they preferred Landels. District officials also warned that Castro may not have the capacity to handle the influx of students.

Mountain View's list of neighborhood associations suggests that the western boundary for Shoreline West is actually Escuela Avenue. If Shoreline West was zoned for Landels by that measuring stick, Castro Elementary would actually lie outside of its own attendance boundaries.

Board member Greg Coladonato said his goal is to reach a point where all of Mountain View's schools are seen as academic heavyweights, and families in every part of the city will be willing to send their kids to the closest school. But getting to that goal, he said, should come from measures like staff development and intervention strategies rather than altering attendance boundaries.

"I'd like to see us do everything we can in that regard before we try to get people to go to schools that they are currently are skittish about, for whatever reason," Coladonato said.

The decision by board members to move forward with option A also came in spite of concerns by residents of the Willowgate neighborhood -- a small triangular-shaped wedge of the city between Central Expressway, Highway 85 and Moffett Boulevard -- who argued they were being pushed out of Landels and into Theuerkauf against the district's own zoning criteria.

Willowgate resident Lloyd Dunckley said families can make it to Landels on Stevens Creek trail in a short 0.6-mile jaunt. But both options A and B force students to go to Theuerkauf, traveling further on city roads to a school that's farther away than both Landels and Slater. Earlier this month, Willowgate residents argued that the boundary-drawing process was plagued with politics, and appeased neighborhoods that were the loudest and most involved in the process from the start.

With new boundaries officially on the books, the next step is to adopt new enrollment priorities that will go into effect alongside the opening of Slater, including a verdict on whether to allow grandfathering. An enrollment priorities task force will be created and begin meeting sometime in the fall.

So-called grandfathering, or allowing students to remain in their schools where they're currently enrolled despite the changed attendance boundaries, will have a big influence on how quickly the new boundaries will alter enrollment at each school. Parents in the southern end of the city, whose attendance boundaries include Huff and Bubb, name grandfathering and enrollment priorities a top concern, according to a district staff report. The schools have been massively popular and at full capacity for years, at times forcing incoming kindergarteners who live right next door to Bubb and Huff onto waiting lists due to lack of space.