2 separate, unequal Marin schools finally merging
After years of bitter feuds over funding and segregation, the Sausalito Marin City School District will merge its controversial charter school with its largely Black traditional public school, in what will be the state’s first mandated school desegregation effort in 50 years.
The unification plan, which will create a K8 school across the two campuses this fall, will combine two disparate school communities sharing the same ZIP code, but divided by race, income and Highway 101.
On one side is Sausalito, a 92% white community known for its restaurants, art galleries, houseboats and luxury
homes overlooking San Francisco Bay, where the median income is l112,000 and a district charter school serves 346 K8 students.
On the other is Marin City, where African American shipbuilders settled during World War II, a community that’s 60% people of color with a public housing complex and a median income of l45,841, where a traditional public school serves 111 K8 students.
Following a harsh audit of the district in 2016, the state ordered the district to desegregate in 2019, pointing to discrimination, varying academic outcomes and other problems.
At the time, Black students were suspended 66 days for every day a white student was sent home for misbehavior, the largest disciplinary disparity in the state, officials said.
Test scores also showed wide gaps. At Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, 21% of students were proficient in math and English, far below the share at Willow Creek Academy, where 65% of students were proficient or above in English and 55% met or exceeded proficiency in math.
Bayside had been neglected for years, with the school board shifting resources and focus to the charter school, the 2016 audit confirmed.
While Willow Creek has been more diverse than Bayside MLK, with 38% white students and 14% Black this past year, the Marin City traditional school was 8% white and nearly 50% Black.
At Bayside MLK, 68% of families are considered lowincome, compared with 41% at Willow Creek.
Creating a single school out of two disparate communities felt nearly impossible not long ago, with racism, privilege and anger too embedded in the relationship between the communities.
Despite its reputation as a bastion of liberal politics, Marin is the most segregated county in the Bay Area, with most communities fighting affordable housing or even marketrate apartments. Many cities are 90% white, with pockets of people of color in Novato, San Rafael and Marin City. Racial covenants in decades past prevented African Americans from buying homes in certain cities. The effects linger today.
But with the racial reckoning and push for equity set off by the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd last year, a new urgency took hold, officials said.
“The pandemic really dou
bled down on the Ìwhy,’ ” said Terena Mares, county Office of Education deputy superintendent, who has overseen the troubled district for years. “It was a baptism into the real crisis behind the social justice and equity issues that have plagued that district and community.”
But the roots of the conflict over desegregation in the district date back decades.
“What’s been going on in this community goes back all the way to when they were building boats,” said county Superintendent Mary Jane Burke, citing a policy that prevented African Americans from buying homes in Marin County after World War II. “Of course people are absolutely bitter about the historical racism that existed.”
On paper, the district just north of the Golden Gate Bridge looks flush with money — spending l35,000 for each student at the traditional school in Marin City in recent years, nearly triple what most other districts spend — with funding based on excess property taxes.
While that’s about three times what San Francisco Unified spends per pupil, in the tiny Marin County district, with just over 100 students and the standard overhead costs required to run a public school district, it sounds like more than it is.
Willow Creek Academy,
which opened in 2001, was eligible for limited funding, spurring fights over the property tax funding, as well as services, staffing and more.
Over the years, Willow Creek pulled students, money and power from Bayside MLK. A school board majority, aligned with the charter, hired a Southern California charter school consultant to be a parttime superintendent making l165,000 a year. He was granted a paid leave when he faced felony conflictof interest charges in San Diego. He later pleaded guilty and resigned.
Mares stepped in about that time. Her first impression of the conditions at Bayside MLK, the largely African American school, were devastating.
“All the children and adults just felt abandoned,” Mares added.
Following the fiscal review in 2016, Burke reported the concerns to the state, leading to an investigation, which found “intentional racial and ethnic segregation” and discrimination.
In 2019, then Attorney General The district had several years to complete the process, but finished the merger in two. The pandemic and racial justice protests resulted in “epiphanies about social inequity,” creating momentum to move forward, said district Superintendent Itoco Garcia. “We got this unification process done in the middle of a global pandemic and amid social unrest,” he said. “It was the right thing to do for kids for families, for staff.” Parent Jahmeer Reynolds, whose son will be in the fourth grade in the fall, moving from the Marin City site to the Sausalito campus, hopes the community can start breaking down barriers and myths, including fears that the Bayside MLK campus was chaotic or unsafe. His autistic son thrived there, made friends, felt safe, he said. “We’re breaking down all of the walls, destroying all of the negative comments and rebuilding with a solid foundation,” he said. “I just believe we’re going to come out on the other side stronger.” As of July 1, the former Willow Creek campus will become the district’s new K5 school, while Bayside MLK will enroll middle school students as well as preschoolers. Willow Creek parent Jennifer Conway, a longtime supporter of creating one district school, said she is “super excited” about the merger. Her daughter will attend sixth grade at the middle school in the fall. “I just didn’t see how two schools and two sets of infrastructure made any sense whatsoever,” she said. “The division that caused bifurcation of energy and resources was not productive and certainly not helping our kids.” She called the desegregation order “the wakeup call that the community needed to get to work and make it happen.” Overall, per student spending will dip to about l27,000 because of the merger, still well above state average. Kurt Weinsheimer, president of the Willow Creek Board of Directors, said he believes the timing is right to bring the schools together. A decade ago, he said, “you didn’t have a lot of trust in public schools,” and there was a “big sense of separation,” between Marin City and Sausalito. “From a parent and family standpoint the idea of unification just makes sense,” he said. “Kids are already going to school together, and live in different communities that have different backgrounds.” Merging the two schools, however, is only the first step, Mares said. She added that the effects of historic racism still linger and adults need to check their bias. “The really hard work is in front of us,” she said.