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Mountain View Whisman School District officials are launching a nine-month effort to untangle a complex web of enrollment priorities that dictate where parents can send their children to school.
The changes, which would go into effect in the 2019-20 school year, are expected to have major implications for the overcrowding at the district’s most popular schools, and could put hard limits on how many families can opt out of their assigned neighborhood school.
Starting this fall, the district will assemble a new “Enrollment Priorities Task Force” to figure out how to simplify the district’s 26 different competing enrollment priorities, which take into account place of residence, past school attendance and where siblings currently attend school. The labyrinth of priorities on the books are frustrating to the community and staff, and need to be simplified and made as transparent as possible, Superintendent Ayinde Rudolph said at an Aug. 17 school board meeting.
Perhaps the most pressing decision in front of the task force is how fast the district ought to enforce new attendance boundaries set to take effect in fall 2019. Several communities, like North Whisman and Shoreline West, will be assigned to different schools, and Rudolph said the district needs to set a “hard” cut-off date on kids moving over to their newly assigned campus.
Feedback collected by the district during the spring found that an overwhelming number of families in southern Mountain View neighborhoods — areas zoned for Bubb and Huff elementary schools — pointed to grandfathering policies as a top concern during the boundary-drawing process, and for good reason.
Both schools have been struggling with overcrowding for years, reaching a point where children living right next door to the school face getting sent across town — a situation that left many parents fuming about the district’s sluggishness in fixing enrollment priorities.
The revised boundaries take Shoreline West out of Bubb’s boundary and the Wagon Wheel neighborhood out of the Huff boundary, providing much-needed relief to the popular schools. But if grandfathering rules allowing current students to continue attending those schools after the boundaries change, it’s anyone’s guess when enrollment will actually decrease. Students are given higher priority if they want to continue attending a school, an enrollment preference that extends to their siblings.
Rudolph told board members that there are nine portable buildings on Bubb Elementary’s blacktop, housing enrollment in excess of 450 students, and those portables can’t be removed until the new boundaries take effect.
“Those portables do not disappear until Bubb’s population starts to decrease,” he said. “Every year that you extend grandfathering (to) siblings, the district incurs a cost for the portables being rented and kids’ play areas are impacted.”
In an effort to deal with high enrollment at both Bubb and Huff, the district agreed open up additional portables at both schools as an emergency, short-term measure to accommodate students living within the schools’ respective attendance boundaries. Because the new enrollment priorities won’t take effect until 2019, it’s possible a similar short-term measure will be needed again early next year following the open enrollment process.
In order to sort out all the competing interests, Rudolph proposed that each school community have at least two representatives — one staff member and one parent or community member — on the new task force, and that the district conduct “focus group” meetings with residents from each school attendance area. Anyone interested in joining the task force can go to tinyurl.com/eptf2017.
Rudolph encouraged trustees to give input at a future board meeting on what they want to see in the new enrollment priorities, but cautioned against being too prescriptive. He said the members of the task force who recommended new school boundaries, the Student Attendance Area Task Force (SAATF), felt cramped once board members gave specific directives on how to draw the new boundaries.
“The lesson learned here is when the SAATF asked you very specific questions and you gave them very specific answers, we limited the options of the choices by which you choose,” he said.
The board could also decide to pour more time and resources into address verification, which would ensure families who claim to live in a school’s attendance area actually live there. Parents are encouraged to report to the district if a family appears to be living outside the school’s boundary, but doing annual attendance checks on more than 5,000 children each year would be impossible without more staff in the district office, Rudolph said.
Board member Laura Blakely said she was interested in an enrollment policy that would allow families to continue to send their child to the same school even if they leave the school’s attendance boundary. She said the skyrocketing cost of rents in the region have forced many families in Mountain View to uproot and get “bumped around” the city, and kids could really use the stability of going to the same school.
“If you had to switch schools each time, that takes a toll on the families,” she said.
Limits on free movement?
One of the primary goals in drawing new school boundaries for the 2019-20 school year was to promote the idea of “neighborhood” schools — the idea that families should send their kids to the local school just blocks away from home rather than commute longer distances.
But the enrollment priorities currently on the books say that families can send their children to pretty much any district school they want, provided there’s space, which doesn’t quite match up with the priorities and guidelines board members espoused during the boundary-drawing process — a situation Rudolph called an “interesting concept” that’s up for review over the next nine months.
Enrollment during the 2016-17 school year shows that hundreds of families choose to send their kids to a school other than the one nearby with the largest exodus coming from Castro, Theuerkauf and Landels elementary schools. In the case of Castro and Theuerkauf, the number of children who live within the school’s boundary but don’t attend the school nearly equals the number of kids who do attend the school.
Board member Greg Coladonato said the concept of free movement as long as there’s space has been around for years, but it may not be a great idea to pack schools to the brim just because they have the facilities to permit it. The district’s most popular schools attract a lot of intradistrict transfer requests from families in other regions of the city, and the policy has been to permit those transfers so long as enrollment doesn’t exceed the maximum number of students allowed by the state and agreements with the teachers union.
Members of both the SAATF and its predecessor, the Boundary Advisory Task Force, made clear that as long as more than 1,000 students are rejecting their neighborhood schools and enrolling in choice programs or other district schools, it will be difficult for the new boundaries to make any meaningful changes to the current situation. SAATF members were told from the outset that enrollment priorities were an entirely separate endeavor from setting new boundaries.
You want to level the playing field first you make the entire district equal. Using public funds to run a lottery privet school that’s funded by public money is an outrage. Salaries, school supplies, maintenance all paid by tax dollars our kids are not equally or fairly being educated.
The teachers are union prepresented how about some study that clears up this private injustice . Rejecting students from a neigbirhood school yet allow outside children to come into our distrect is an outage.
It’s time MVWSD’s bad behavior and greedy ways get called to the carpet. Verifying address is a joke when many of these students attend PACT.
Your ‘ Task Force’ in past groups represented their own agenda. So nothing changes.
Blossom Valley’s in the Los Altos School District but this article concerns the Mountain View Whisman School District. LASD has separate problems.
Really Waverly Park, that’s all you got. Is my location.
You make my case. MVWSD has big problems. If you can’t address actually concerns that effect elementary school children. Check yourself and your 4 ‘likes’
Can anyone figure out Trustee Blakely, I wonder what kids she’s thinking about?
Why not make Castro and Landels be better rather than force attendance? Seems like people are rating with their feet. Cost of a portable to onstall is over 5 years of rent. Coat is already sunk. Make better schools. Don’t segregate the richer vs. Poirer students. Without transfers Huff and Bubb would have a quarter or less the low SES kids of orher schools.
The current Bubb and Huff parents be the largest proponents of GRANDFATHERING – but they only represent 1/5 of the residential population of the MVWSD according to the 2010 US Census. Money talks (loudly Trustee Blakely and former Trustee Chiang). Blakely cannot be serious about supporting Integration of wealthy and poor families- if she is two-minded about boundaries detrimental to economic Integration and yet she fully supports Wealth Flight from Castro, Landels and Monta Loma. (Grandfathering etc.)
A family renting/leasing South of El Camino – and then insisting on Grandfathering an ATTENDANCE RIGHT when they buy or rent a residence in another part of town? Chiang – that is not right IMO. You can make an Attendance (broad) Policy that focuses on Integration / diversity and awards ‘points’ for balancing the Integration that both Gutierrez and Blakely have previously spoken of favoring. Points for Family attending neighborhood school of their residence, points for Family moving to increase economic Integration ( – Points for decreasing Integration), + or – Points for attending the nearest ‘walking distance school’. Add the ‘sum of Points’, place families in Priority Order of Points. Do first school assignment pass.
Trustees Blakely and Gutierrez, IMO you need to show this community that you actually have some gonads on this Integration Policy of the wealthiest (Waverly Park/Cuesta Park) and the rest of the District. Otherwise – if there is no policy or a strong Integration Directive from the Board to the new superintendent’s committee – segregation, de-facto or Grandfathered, will just continue! Step up Jose!
SN is a retired Trustee of the MVWSD and a progressive Republican
C. Chiang – did you listen in past years to the Stevenson parent / Stevenson past Principal public exchange on who (which families) value the education of their children most? Feb 27th, 2015 Voice reported it well
https://mv-voice.com/news/2015/02/27/new-school-could-close-down-stevenson-pact
I disagree entirely with your thesis that all parents are after the welfare of all the community children. There is an immense “I got mine – I want MY Children to have Their’s” entitlement in some wealthy sectors of this district. Principal Tyler Graff was the only former administrator to have the guts to publicly challenge That SEGREGATION (Wealth/Poor) sentiment of some parents. Dr. Rudolph seems to be toying around with a public stance almost as brave as Gaff’s. We will see of what moral stuff Rudolph is made.
A child needs to understand – by working shoulder to shoulder with children of ‘different privilege’ – that all social classes and all economic and cultural groups have much to gain from INTEGRATION. The American melting pot metaphor!
best to you and yours Chris
No, Observer, I can’t figure out Blakely. She needs to get a clue (or perhaps common sense), in my opinion.
Although I don’t love the idea of kids having to move schools over and over again if their families move, my thought on this is 1) over-crowding of schools puts a toll on families too and doesn’t benefit children, 2) many well-adjusted people had to move schools a lot as children and are just fine and accomplished people (my mom attended 11 schools before 8th grade and she’s honestly one of the most well-adjusted people that I know) – it’s up to the new school to welcome kids transferring in, 3) when you have grades in excess of 100 children (which is what we have in MV), kids have to get to know new kids year after year anyway, 3) there are a lot of benefits to going to school where you live – community is a big deal, and 4) Mountain View is the outlier here. I don’t know of any local school district that allows for kids to remain (beyond the school year) if their family moves – they, instead, monitor transfers according to space available in schools (i.e., some kids can legitimately transfer back into a school).
Bottom line, Blakely – what’s the point of working so hard to re-open Slater, change boundary lines, etc. if kids are going to be grandfathered in to their current schools indefinitely? Strides that should have probably happened ten years ago are just going to take another five years – or ten!
I’ve also thought that there are many ways to increase economic diversity in schools, increase enrollment at the lower-scoring schools, and bring up the scores in the lower-scoring schools that MVWSD is not exploring. For example, Chinese-immersion schools have turned around schools and districts near us. That’s just one option but there are, of course, others.
Board should make the changes all at once, in one year so students are reassured they aren’t the only ones moving schools, schools can be ready to welcome new students, etc. If all the kids in the Theuerkauf neighborhood actually attended Theuerkauf that school would be rated at least a 9 like Bubb. It’s true it’s difficult when some many of those kids decide to go to Stevenson (the elephant in the neighborhood). But we know enough families who rent South of El Camino for a couple of years, get their kids enrolled in those schools and then move North and still attend Bubb/Huff which is just silly.
District also needs to check addresses. We know several students who put in for the Stevenson lottery who don’t even live in Mountain View! They use a family member address and then figure if the get in they will then just find a rental in Mountain View. This gaming of the system is so frustrating when children living directly across from Stevenson for years are denied access. We also know out of district families attending Theuerkauf so if they are playing this game at Theuerkauf I have to imagine it’s happening at other MV schools too.
Hopefully this change will make all our schools great and they can all become schools of choice (meaning that people want to attend them.)
Typical big government mentality.
Get rid of all these overlapping or competing attendance policies.
You live in a school’s attendance area you go to that school.
It’s that simple.
You’ll never be able to make everyone happy all the time. It’s time for decisions to be made and them put into effect.
We are paralyzed while the board tries to make everyone happy.
Can’t be done.
Why not turn the less attended schools into some kind magnet school ( language immersion, traditional teaching method, project based learning, performing art, STEM, etc). I am sure if you turn one into science and technology magnet, you will have more students who want to attend (lottery ).
This has been done by many school districts to help balance the schools.
Implement School Integration – “with all deliberate speed”? How long does that take in the face of parent opposition? The 1954 court decision “Brown vs. Board of Education” was stymied for over a decade and a half by that legal phrase being added to the decision in a 1955 court re-visit.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/6-legacy/deliberate-speed.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment-jan-june04-page_05-11/
If the Well-Off and Economically Disadvantaged children, are to have a better chance of working in school together, that old “with all deliberate speed” (wait! wait!) argument has to now be clearly voted out of local Public Policy by the majority of the Board. Well-Off parents shouldn’t be segregated.
Dr. Rudolph has allowed – by his administrative actions – that this particular Public Policy discussion and debate work out over several seasons. The Superintendent candidates that I personally tried to advance in-the-process-of-selection – were only those that I felt could strongly support the DIVERSITY that this community (majority) loves. Dr. Rudolph was definitely one of those several candidates.
I hope the board and taskforce focus on the needs of children, then families, and last, and only last, the streamlining of schools (which this board and superintendent rightly recognize that schools, like children, shouldn’t be viewed as uniform pegs).
That means children currently in school should not be uprooted because of new district policy. It is also cruel to force families to travel to two schools because of new district policy. So if a younger student is already at a current school, their near age siblings (within five years) should be allowed to complete their path as well, assuming they continue to live in the old boundaries.
If however a family moves to another part of MV, then they should move schools, and if they leave MVWSD boundaries, they too should re-enroll elsewhere. In those cases, it’s not fair or sustainable to keep their spot if their school is overenrolled and denying students living in the boundary zone.
For homes where there are no children currently enrolled at a school, then no child is harmed to implement the new boundaries without delay.