Parents, teachers, students seek school closure answers
No date set for decision, even as other enrollment deadlines have passed
At a sometimes heated meeting Wednesday night, students, teachers and parents pressed local education officials and representatives from a Sunnyvale charter school for answers about the school's potential closure this summer, urging them to make a definitive decision about the school's future and asking for more transparency about its past.
The school, Summit Denali, is one of several Summit charter schools in the Bay Area and currently serves more than 600 middle and high school students at its Sunnyvale campus. But on Jan. 11, Summit officials announced that the school likely would have to close permanently at the end of the academic year, citing financial issues.
Parents at the meeting — some of them wearing T-shirts with “Save Denali” and “We Are Denail” across the front — expressed their alarm that the Summit board has not yet cast a final vote regarding whether or not the school will permanently shut down this summer, saying they already have missed the deadlines for enrolling in other private or public schools.
The deadline for the first round of open enrollment in Santa Clara County Unified School District schools was Feb. 3, and the deadline for open enrollment in Sunnyvale School District schools was Feb. 14. Deadlines for many private schools were even earlier — for example, the application deadline for Helios School, a private school for gifted students, was Jan. 13, just two days after the Summit Denali announcement was made.
“If it's going to be closed, let us know now — the private school deadlines are complete; we're on waiting lists for other charter schools. We have people calling us and asking, `Are you going to attend our school next year?' ” Harfijah Oliver, the parent of a Summit seventh grader, said. “We can't even give them an answer because your board refuses to take action and is just drawing this out. … It's extremely disheartening. You are not here for our students.”
Summit Denali administrators so far have refused to set a date for a decision on the closure. They say the school has a $4.5 million gap in funding that it would need to fill to keep operating, and that it also would need to come up with a way to continue securing enough funding year after year. According to Summit officials, those avenues don't currently exist.
“To be clear, we want to keep the school open,” Edward Lee, chief financial officer for Summit Public Schools, said at the Santa Clara County Board of Education meeting. “I want to make sure we communicate that clearly.”
Lee, along with Summit CEO and co-founder Diane Tavenner and Chief of Public Affairs Kate Gottfredson, also said the company only recently discovered the full extent of the school's financial troubles, and that officials have thoroughly explored other options for students, including operating Summit Denali as an online-only school or phasing out specific grades over time in a gradual move toward the school's closure. Those options didn't seem viable, either, they said, prompting Summit officials to move toward closing the school altogether.
But attendees at Wednesday night's meeting were skeptical of the notion that nothing could have been done until now, saying that Summit officials had plenty of opportunities to warn the school's stakeholders about its financial troubles before they reached a point of no return.
“I do understand the complexity and nuances and all the drivers that you're looking at,” Oliver said. “But — and this saddens me to say — a lot of the forecasting could have been predictable, and you had so many missed opportunities to work in partnership with parents.”
“But let's be real here, looking at your financials,” Oliver continued. “We are a sacrificial lamb, that's what Summit Denali is, to feed your underenrolled schools at Tahoma and Redwood City, and that's the direction we're going.”
Summit teachers also demanded more transparency from Summit officials, saying that the sudden announcement betrays the demands that the teacher's union, Unite Summit, long has been asking for.
Justin Kim, an eighth grade teacher at Summit K2 Middle School in El Cerrito and the president of Unite Summit, said that teachers decided to unionize to push for the stability of Summit schools and make sure conditions were optimal for both teachers and students.
But the union's demands — specifically, that Summit administrators increase transparency and cooperation with the union — haven't been met and have come to a breaking point with the announcement of Denali's potential closure, Kim said.
Those demands were echoed by Kim Nicholson, a sixth grade history teacher at Summit Denali who has taught at the school for seven years. Nicholson said that she and the rest of the Summit community were “blindsided” by the announcement that the school could close, and that teachers were not included in any conversations about financial troubles ahead of time.
Students also had strong words for Summit officials, saying that their futures are being jeopardized by the instability Summit Denali currently is facing.
“I'm here to talk to you because you need to open your eyes and realize that what you're doing is not right,” said Karen Escudero, a sixth grader at Summit Denali. “I'm really ashamed that I even have to be here speaking to the school board and asking for justice. My future, other students' futures, parents' futures — everyone's future is at risk because of merely a few people having such a gigantic impact.”
“The phrase `I'm sorry, we don't have that for you at this time, we'll get back to you' has been repeated countless times in this room,” Escudero said. “But that doesn't justify anything. That doesn't give us anything.”
Another Summit sixth grader, Suhani Ovalekar, said she and other students don't want to let go of the learning environment they've come to cherish.
“This school taught me to learn completely differently — for the first time, I was organized and self-reliant,” Ovalekar said. “I'm proud of the student I'm becoming, and going into a public school, I fear I will lose these capabilities … I do not want to lose my confidence, I do not want to lose my friends and I do not want to lose my teachers.”