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In under a year, Mountain View’s Theuerkauf Elementary School undergone a dramatic demographic shift and no longer has a majority of its students coming from low-income families.
The shift, from 55% low-income students last school year to 38% this school year, has been so dramatic that the board of the Mountain View Whisman School District was asked on Feb. 6 to approve a waiver to continue to offer federally funded educational programs that are contingent on having at least 40% of a school’s kids qualified as low-income.
The board approved the waiver application unanimously.
While the reason for the sharp decline isn’t entirely clear yet, there has been an uptick in the reported incomes of households applying for free and reduced price lunches. This school year there were some households that reported monthly incomes of $12,000, $24,000 and $45,000, far over the federal guidelines used to determine whether a student is eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, said Heidi Smith, the district’s director of federal and state programs.
“I had to do a double-double take,” she told the board.
When board member Laura Blakely asked whether there had been a mistake, and those numbers reported were annual incomes instead, Smith said the nutrition director also had verified the numbers and they were accurate.
Another potential reason for the decline, suggested by former trustee Steve Nelson, is that some qualified immigrant households may not be registering for free and reduced-price lunch because they are concerned that doing so will impact their ability to obtain citizenship. School food programs are not subject to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services department’s new restrictions on citizenship eligibility for immigrants set to take effect on Feb. 24, but that information may not be common knowledge.
Theuerkauf Elementary is one of the Mountain View Whisman School District’s two Title I schools — the other is Castro Elementary. Title I is a federal program that gives financial assistance to schools with a high proportion or a high number of children from low-income families. If a school has 40% or more of its students who are low-income, the school can use Title I funding for programs to support all students; otherwise programs have to be targeted only toward low-income students.
To keep the existing Title I programs such as summer school in place through the rest of the school year, the school also has to conduct a needs assessment, develop a schoolwide plan and get board approval of that plan. It must also demonstrate that at least 25% of its students qualify as low-income, at least 30% of its students are English language learners; the school has a graduation rate lower than the state average; or that the school is otherwise performing poorly, among other factors.
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MAGA results!!
Incomes rising for everyone!!!
The demographics have been shifting in this neighborhood for years. Most kids attend Stevenson or private schools. It makes sense that eventually the neighborhood school would come around.
Isn’t this in fact a win for the low income students? These title 1 funds are for THEM. In the past they were diluted by being spread across 100% of the students with the majority being non low income. Now the funds are reserved just for the 38% that are actually low income.
It seems like the school district has been virtually cheating for all these years by taking away the low income funding for use by the higher income students.
Demographics of the school changed this year due to a major redistricting of the MVWSD school district. Landels lost 1/3 of its student population to Theuerkauf and Slater. This is a super obvious factor!!
I wonder what the percentage of ELL students is. Especially those who don’t reclassify after a year or so (which indicates problems beyond not just knowing English when they started school).
This is a much more accurate measure of the school’s academic achievement/number of disadvantaged families: how many kids cannot reclassify due to either undiagnosed learning differences or to the fact that there is no academic support at home.
“In under a year, Mountain View’s Theuerkauf Elementary School undergone a demographic shift, from being a place where a majority of its students are from low-income families to one where at least one household earning more than $500,000 annually applied for free and reduced-price lunch.”
Please rewrite the first paragraph. I don’t understand the part about the household earning more than $500,000 annually applying for free and reduced-price lunch.
This shows how wrong our city can be. These greedy tech workers should be paying 10k/mo. for rent and they ask for a free lunch! There should be income qualifications for rent control. They are taking advantage of the poor landlords. Yes on D!
This article is poorly written. The first paragraph is impossible to read!
@Winning
Isn’t that the way Title I funding works tho’? That’s not specific to MVWSD, that’s how all school districts handle different types of Title I funding based on % of students qualifying at a site. Why blame the district for following rules?
@MV Mom
Isn’t it interesting that the boundary changes didn’t appear in the article at all? Seems like it should have been considered and disclaimed if necessary as a possible factor. A big miss by The Voice / MVWSD.
The neighborhood demographics have changed dramatically. Low income, immigrants have moved out since they could not afford the higher rising rents. One summer, they just seemed to all vanish overnight, no more bikes or walking with strollers observed. Now many older apartment buildings/ bungalows are torn down and big townhouse are being built. Thank goodness I purchased my townhouse 20 years ago, or else I wouldn’t be able to afford to purchase now.
You do now that it is illegal for you to be removing people’s respectful comments, your rules are being followed.
Just because you personal do not agree with a comment that supports a politician that you oppose, it is illegal for you to discriminate against people’s opinion when you have made this an open public forum.
The courts have ruled on this matter.
It would be best for you to review your actions with your legal advisor.
If anyone has been paying attention to the news as reported about housing, homelessness including people who are working full time jobs, you would have noticed that there is no affordable housing in the Greater Bay Area. There are plenty of new developments but not many can afford a million dollar condo or townhouse. Even the lot rent in most mobile home parks have skyrocketed. It’s big investors who are buying the mobile home communities and raising the rent on the mobile home owners. They are responsible for pushing out seniors living on social security and the low income families have no other choice but to leave the area. Local cities have caused a big housing crisis because for many years, they were only interested in attracting high tech companies and giving them incentives and tax breaks..
MVWSD’s school boundary changes took effect this 2019-2020 school year.
Many of the low income students from several MVWSD schools were assigned to the new Vargas Elementary.
There has not been a change in the low income population in the community itself. What changed was the distrition of the low income students among the district schools.
That student distribution shift in MVWSD resulted in the loss of a Title I school, which means that resources destined especifically to low income families do no longer exist at Theuerkauf.
The loss of a Title I school in a school district IS A BIG DEAL and in this case it is the direct result of MVWSD’s decisions.
Now, we need to ask if this result was meant to happen (was the elimination of a Title I school intentional?) or it is an honest mistake made by an incompetent superintendent, an incompetent federal programs director, incompetent district leaders, and an incompetent board of trustees.
When my kids were in the district we were asked to fill out the free and reduced lunch application every year even if we did not actually expect to receive free and reduced lunch. I cannot remember the reasoning but it has something to do with getting an accurate assessment of the percentage of families qualifying. I would assume the $500k per year family filled out the application for a similar reason.
To the writer of the article:
Not mentioning the shift in boundaries in the article seems like journalistic malpractice.
@I SEE INCOMPETENCE:
Concerned about what you seem to be suggesting… that when the District updates school boundaries, it should ignore neighborhood factors, and deliberately concentrate low-income families into specific schools in order maximize federal funding?
Not only would that be de facto segregation, it seems like it would be an abuse of the Title I system.
Personally I’d have serious issues with any district staff or school board that condoned that sort of thing.
I would say an interesting question revolves around how the school board
can have a discussion about this drop in the fraction of low income kids
at a school and not mention how they changed the make up of the school
the same year. It’s not a matter of the coverage. Did they actually
discuss the matter and not bring up the factor of redefining attendance
boundaries? If so, was this a sort of cover up or were they truly unaware
of the cause and effect involved? The actual numbers 2 years ago had
Theuerkauff at 63% and then it dropped last year to 55%, with no change
in boundaries. Some change was inevitable. But to drop all the way down
to 38% must have meant multiple factors were at work. I believe they
were trying to reduce the low income kids at this school by the boundary
changes. They just overshot. But there is the question of how
they can discuss this waiver and not mention this. The purpose of a waiver
has to do with the dip being temporary or transitional. How can they
ask for a waiver when they caused part of the drop?
The Middle schools are changing to. Graham has held stable over many years
at around 1/3 low income students. Crittenden though was 57% in 2014-15 and dropped steadily to 42% last year. So what happened at Crittenden this year? It seems like
it well might have dropped below 40% or if not it soon will. Is the board planning for this change?