Consolidation proposal failed to engage community
I first heard about San Jose Unified School District’s “Master Plan” to possibly consolidate nine schools via a panicked mass email message from a fellow parent. My daughter attends River Glen, a pioneering and much beloved dual immersion (bilingual Spanish-English) school that is on the list. We received no official communication from the district. After I read online the District’s twopage “Master Plan” document that was unveiled at its Sept. 27 board meeting, I was ready to drop everything and drive down to Leland High School (also on the list) to raise hell at a hastily called community meeting last week.
But instead I spent the next few hours doing some more research, which included listening to the recordings of the relevant background discussions at the last three SJUSD board meetings. I slowly realized that I actually might support moving my daughter’s school if doing so was part of a thoughtful plan to address the affordable housing crisis and consolidate school sites in the face of declining enrollment.
There are some good intentions over at the district office. Officials are thinking seriously about the enrollment trend (down 6 percent over the last three years, which means less state funding) and the extreme housing shortage that makes teacher recruitment increasingly difficult. We’ve seen firsthand some of the tangible impacts on kids. Kindergartners at River Glen at one point faced a revolving door of substitutes while a teacher recruited from overseas waited for months for a visa issue to be resolved.
So the district is right to be thinking boldly about how to make the best use of any surplus school district properties, partner with other agencies, and make use of bond funding to build employee housing.
But SJUSD has completely failed to engage the community in a respectful and meaningful way as it begins to actually select schools and develop plans. The two-page “Master Plan” document is so abstruse and indirect that it never says what it is trying to say. After a page of background and flowery rhetoric (“The world around us continues to change. San José Unified continues to change”), the document names nine schools without actually saying what it means to be on the list. One can infer that they are potentially to be razed in order to build affordable housing only because the criteria for selection are given as: “1) properties that have the potential to better serve students, 2) properties that have the potential to positively address enrollment imbalances across schools, and 3) properties that have the potential to support employee housing projects.”
The document is emblematic of a long-standing and deeper problem: the failure of senior district staff to trust that they can actually open up decisionmaking processes to meaningful community engagement and treat us with respect. It all has the whiff of a one-party state that is afraid of its own citizens. Real 21st century leaders know that the future belongs to those who can collaborate.
My family and I want to be part of the solution. We are ready to make sacrifices. We understand like most people in the Valley that our shared future here is in peril, particularly for working families and people of color. We might actually support moving our school to another site if it makes sense as part of a larger plan that has been thoughtfully developed through an open and genuinely democratic process. But so far the district has handled this school consolidation process in a way that makes me want to do exactly what district officials probably fear most: rage against the machine.