San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
VISTA PARENTS WORRY ABOUT INEQUITY, ATTENDANCE WITH SCHOOL CLOSURES
District closing two neighborhood schools, moving magnet school
Vista Unified will shutter two neighborhood schools as soon as next year as it faces declining enrollment and aging facilities. Now some parents wonder how the closures will impact children’s ability to get to school and access to special magnet programs in the majority low-income district.
Last month the school board voted to consolidate Beaumont Elementary, which has 460 students, and Rancho Minerva Middle, which has 530.
The board also decided to move one of its magnet middle schools, Vista Innovation and Design Academy, also known as VIDA, to occupy the buildings being vacated by Rancho Minerva. Unlike Rancho Minerva, VIDA has enrollment demand that exceeds its capacity but has outdated facilities that would be expensive to renovate, officials said.
The closure decisions have raised questions from many in the district about the potential impact on families’ ability to get to their new school, especially since the district has recently scaled back transportation due to staffing shortages. More than 80 percent of families at Beaumont and Rancho Minerva are considered low-income, which is higher than the district average.
“Unless they factor in how they’re going to get each kid to another school, it’s going to cause a lot of inequity in our district,” said Amanda Remmen, a Beaumont parent and chair of a committee that helped decide the closures.
VIDA families are also afraid their kids will lose access to facilities that VIDA’S current campus has but Rancho Minerva lacks. VIDA has its own swimming pool for aquatics classes, a performing arts theater and makerspace labs for engineering classes.
None of those matters have been decided yet, said Shawn Loescher, the district’s chief operations officer. The district will spend the next several months weighing those issues, as well as others like redrawing school attendance boundaries.
“Everybody would like to have the answers, but we’re dealing with a very complex situation and the answers are going to come over time with additional studies,” he said in an interview.
“These are very difficult decisions that impact not just individual school communities and families but also have implications for the entire school district,” he added.
Some community members also question whether enough was done to ensure Spanish-speaking families know that schools were slated for potential closure. Students learning English as a second language make up almost a third of families at Beaumont and more than a quarter of Rancho Minerva families.
Ana Cruz, who chairs the district’s English Learner Advisory Committee and who speaks primarily Spanish, said she struggled to understand what was being discussed at meetings about the closures, and she worries many Spanish-speaking families might not know their school is slated to close.
“That’s why I think families, they don’t know nothing,” she said. “It’s totally misunderstanding everything to me.”
Spanish translation was available for meetings of the committee that recommended the school closure decisions, Loescher said, but families had to request translation at least two days beforehand. The committee agendas weren’t posted in Spanish until after the committee meetings were held.
Vista Unified’s enrollment has fallen from about 21,700 students eight years ago to 18,800 in the school year that ended last month. By four years from now, the district projects that it will have dropped to 16,000 students.
Demographers have attributed the decline to a falling birth rate and population changes — when housing turns over or new housing opens, those homes tend to be occupied by people who don’t have school-age children, Loescher said.
Enrollment matters for public schools because they are paid by the state based on how many students attend school daily on average. The district is currently projecting about $14 million in deficit spending for this school year, out of a $360.6 million budget.
But the district must close schools not only because of declining enrollment — it’s also facing higher facilities costs, Loescher said.
“We have over $1 billion of facilities that require updating, but we don’t have $1 billion,” Loescher said.
The district has a $247 million bond program called Measure LL that was approved by voters in 2018. But the bond program is at the tail end of implementation, so most of the funds have already been spent or committed to projects.
Beaumont and VIDA were selected as the two sites to chuck because of the poor conditions of their facilities. Beaumont in particular has long had water intrusion problems that have caused mold to grow in the school’s buildings, as well as uneven pavement.
The district was slated to use bond funds for new classrooms and buildings for Beaumont but halted construction after officials realized the school’s site condition would be more difficult and expensive to work around than previously believed.
The district convened a committee of community members earlier this year to provide input on consolidating schools. It was the committee that recommended closing Beaumont and Rancho Minerva and moving VIDA.
Some parents complained that the committee’s scope and powers were restricted so that they couldn’t do much other than recommend closures of schools that had largely already been picked out for them by the board. They could only recommend what to do with four pre-selected schools: Beaumont, VIDA, Rancho Minerva and Monte Vista, a school whose building is about as old as Beaumont’s.
Committee members said they were told that talking about the impact on students and school programming was out of the scope of their work.
“The committee hasn’t been able to talk about programs and children, as if these facilities didn’t house families and programs and children,” said Zulema Gomez, a parent of a seventh-grader at VIDA.
Loescher said it’s ultimately the purview of the board to decide which schools would be considered for consolidation. The board chose the four schools for consideration by the committee as part of the district’s long-term facility planning, which goes back almost a year and a half, he said.
The closure of the two neighborhood schools comes as the district is pushing for more magnet schools like VIDA.
Because magnet schools offer special programs that are not available at neighborhood schools, they are often high-demand and difficult to get into, offering enrollment only by lottery. VIDA, for example, regularly has a waiting list hundreds of students long.
The push for magnets has raised questions of equity among some parents. The district does not provide transportation for magnet schools, Loescher said, making them accessible only to families who can afford or secure their own transportation.
The district otherwise offers free transportation for some of its students, including those who are not in special education — a rarity in California, which does not fully fund transportation.
Last school year, the district reduced its transportation to offer mostly shuttle buses, rather than traditional school bus routes, because it was short many bus drivers.
Shuttles pick up students from one fixed meeting point, rather than making many stops throughout neighborhoods closer to children’s homes.
Last year, the district offered shuttles for Mission Vista High, Rancho Minerva and two other middle schools, and three elementary schools, not including Beaumont. Rancho Minerva, Loescher noted, already has one of the largest attendance areas in the district, so many of the school’s families already must travel far.