Hundreds of Mountain View families have grabbed a ticket and staked out a place in line, hoping for a spot in one of the Mountain View Whisman School District’s highest-performing schools. But the prospects for getting their kids into their preferred school — which in some cases, is their own neighborhood school — is looking worse than usual this year.
Wait lists to get into schools across the district, as of March 21, show that close to 450 families are bracing for disappointment. A total of 90 families, most of whom live near Bubb, Huff and Landels, have been given the bad news their children cannot attend their own neighborhood school because of space constraints. Another 368 families have requested transfers from their home schools throughout the city to another campus, or to the district’s popular choice programs, Stevenson PACT and Mistral Elementary’s Dual Immersion program.
The district has a long-running problem with too much demand and not enough room at its choice programs, but the growing number of families getting pushed out of their own local school has many parents furious that the district hasn’t done more to avoid displacing students. Susan Tighe, who lives a few blocks south of Huff Elementary, said she felt sick to her stomach when she heard the news that her child had been placed in Monta Loma for kindergarten instead. Not only is Monta Loma 5 miles away, but her daughter was looking forward to going to school with her friends at Huff.
“When I was pregnant I had heard rumblings of wait lists at the school, but I didn’t think it would still be a problem by now,” Tighe said.
Similar stories have started popping up on the social networking website Nextdoor. Parents living near Bubb Elementary — sometimes just a block away from the campus — told the Voice that their children have been turned away because of limited space, and instead placed in schools like Monta Loma and Castro Elementary, which have few, if any, children on a wait list.
The wait lists are constantly monitored and updated as parents move, change their minds or scramble for other options, and there’s always a chance that, by the time school starts in August, that kids can make it into their neighborhood school. In the case of Bubb Elementary last year, for example, all of the wait-listed kindergarteners made it in by the first day of school.
That’s unlikely to happen again this year, said Assistant Superintendent Karen Robinson. Because of growing enrollment year-over-year, there are about twice as many kindergarteners who have been displaced by the open enrollment process. For parents like Tighe, the odds of her daughter getting into Huff aren’t great — she is No. 19 out of the 22 kindergarten students lined up to get into the school.
Tally up the wait lists across all grade levels, and a total of 44 families zoned for Huff are on a wait list for their own school, followed by 34 families who live within the attendance boundaries for Bubb and 5 families for Landels. Parents are unlikely to find any relief by opting for the choice programs as a fall-back: 88 kids have been wait-listed for kindergarten at Stevenson, out of a total of 198 kids at all grade levels who are on the wait list for the popular parent-participation school.
At the March 16 board meeting, Robinson announced that the district will be opening up extra kindergarten classes at Monta Loma and Castro to accommodate the students rerouted away from Bubb, Huff and Landels. As of March 6, she said, all of the students who didn’t make it into their neighborhood school had at least been placed somewhere.
“Those students are in a class somewhere, at the right grade level, but not necessarily (in) their neighborhood schools,” Robinson said.
It’s hard to pin the problem on any one particular reason, but the district’s flawed school boundaries is a good start. The number of elementary school-aged students zoned for Huff Elementary surpassed 700 students last year — followed by Landels at 637 and Bubb at 575 — which is well beyond the school’s capacity. Huff already has four kindergarten classrooms packed to the brim, and adding a fifth class would be unsustainable in subsequent years, Robinson said.
District staff have been trying to find an elegant solution to the problem for years, and could be nearing the answer. New boundaries are currently being drafted by the district’s Student Attendance Area Task Force, in hopes of re-balancing enrollment so that each school will have close to 450 students. The boundaries are being drawn under the assumption that a new school, Slater Elementary, will be open by the 2019-20 school year.
Though the boundary-drawing process is still underway, parents on the task force are taking a crack at solving over-enrollment at Huff and Bubb. Both schools are south of El Camino Real and split enrollment in the southern end of the city along Grant Road and Phyllis Avenue, but also include neighborhoods north of the busy thoroughfare. Shoreline West, with its roughly 200 elementary school-aged students, is zoned for Bubb, while the Wagon Wheel neighborhood — a Whisman neighborhood with about 170 students — is zoned for Huff. All of the “scenarios” currently on the table call for rezoning the Wagon Wheel and Shoreline West neighborhoods out of the two popular schools’ boundaries.
The district is banking on these new boundaries to even out enrollment. Construction is set to begin in just a few months at Bubb, Huff and Landels, and each school is only going to get 18 permanent classrooms — enough to house about 450 students with three classrooms for each grade level. The assumption is that new boundaries will not only resolve the wait list problem, but also allow the district to reduce the number of kindergarten classrooms.
Even that basic assumption seemed tenuous at the March 16 board meeting. When board member Greg Coladonato asked if it’s possible some schools will continue to have four classrooms at each grade level despite the construction plans, Superintendent Ayinde Rudolph said “anything is possible.”
Coladonato later told the Voice in an email that he had concerns about whether Slater will kick off its inaugural year in the same position as Huff, with too many students clamoring to get in and prompting what the district calls “forced moves” to other schools. Even if it doesn’t, schools like Slater are faced with a great deal of uncertainty in the years to come. The city plans to re-zone the East Whisman and North Bayshore areas to allow the construction of thousands of new homes to the city, and there’s been no long-term planning on how to handle the potential for hundreds of new students.
“If we aren’t thoughtful with our planning, we could likely end up with over-enrollment problems in the schools nearest to North Bayshore and East Whisman a few years down the road, but without any land on which we could build another new school,” Coladonato said.
Although the opening of Slater Elementary and new boundaries could finally provide some relief to schools like Huff and Bubb, that doesn’t do much for parents of incoming kindergarteners this year. With the wait list throwing her plans into limbo, Tighe said she’s keeping her options open by applying to private school.
“The fact that there’s going to be a new school in 2019 is still a day late and a dollar short,” she said.
A quick fix
In the two-year period between now and when Slater opens, what — if anything — should be done to avoid displacing students? That’s the big question that will be facing board members at the Thursday, April 6, board meeting. Rudolph told the Voice on Tuesday that the board will consider 11 different ways to bring down the wait list and allow students to attend their own neighborhood schools.
Options include opening satellite classrooms for Bubb and Huff on district-owned land at either Slater or Cooper Park, adding a fourth kindergarten class at the district’s choice programs or simply adding more classrooms at the two crowded schools. The district could also do a “soft open” of Slater elementary starting as early as this August for kindergarten only. Each option has its own logistics problems, and some of them could be cost-prohibitive.
Rudolph described the list as a way of getting all the options on the table: “everything under the sun including the kitchen sink.” He said the district owes it to families to explore all options. The one unifying factor is that all of the possibilities have to be viable for at least two years.
“Some of these are extremely doable, some of these are extremely expensive, and some of these are not viable options,” he said. “We want to explore what these options look like.”
The list of options, as of March 28, are the following:
•Continue the current practice (do nothing)
•Open Bubb and Huff satellite classrooms at Slater
•Delay construction at Bubb and Huff, and use planned temporary portables to house wait-listed students
•Open Bubb and Huff satellite classrooms at Cooper Park
•Open a fourth kindergarten class at Mistral and Stevenson
•Open kindergarten classrooms at Slater for the 2018-19 school year
•Open kindergarten classrooms at Slater for the 2017-18 school year, followed by kindergarten and first grade in the 2018-19 school year
•End extended-day kindergarten at Bubb and Huff and move to half-day kindergarten
•Add additional portable classrooms at Bubb and Huff to house wait-listed students
•Add additional portables at Bubb and Huff and end extended-day kindergarten in the 2018-19 school year
•Add additional portables at Huff and Bubb and open kindergarten at Slater in the 2018-19 school year
Email Kevin Forestieri at kforestieri@mv-voice.com
