Ravenswood may close 2 elementary schools
Officials set to shutter them in effort to deal with huge fiscal deficit
EAST PALO ALTO >> As changing demographics shrink the number of students enrolling in public elementary schools in the area, the Ravenswood City School District is set to vote today on closing two of its five elementary schools to deal with a massive fiscal deficit.
School officials are gearing up to close Brentwood Academy in East Palo Alto and Willow Oaks Elementary School in Menlo Park at a special board meeting and merge the schools into two of the remaining three sites.
Ravenswood Schools interim Superintendent Gina Sudaria said a looming budget deficit is forcing the district to make massive cuts of $1.35 million to its operational costs largely because of a drop in enrollment from 5,000 students at the beginning of the last decade to just over 2,000 this year. Projections for the coming decade show that number will fall by at least 300 more students.
Following months of extensive discussion, school board members have landed on a plan that will merge Willow Oaks with Belle Haven Elementary School and Brentwood with Costano School by the fall, a move that will end the days of walkable schools and put nearly all of the district’s students on buses.
After sizable cuts to staffing, a policy of keeping open positions empty, knocking down transportation costs and slashing administrative spending in the past several years, Sudaria — who has been in her position for about a year — said the final move to get the district in the black is to close the schools, a decision she doesn’t take lightly.
“I’ve gone through a grief cycle,” Sudaria said. “I went through the shock and denial phase, the guilt phase, all the phases. Now I’m to the acceptance phase in making this difficult decision.”
The mergers mean the district is now setting off on a transition plan that will include redefining and relocating bus stops for about 600 students, reworking collective bargaining agreements with teachers and other workers and making after-school programs a top priority to help parents with children relocating to schools farther from home.
Sudaria said she saw no anger when she announced the closures and mergers, but rather a somber response from a teaching staff that has seen lightning-fast turnover rates and cuts to funding in the classroom for years.
As a largely Latino-serving district — translation devices donned the heads of nearly all the parents at recent school meetings on the closures — one school board member wasn’t happy seeing how many people didn’t know what was going on.
“I had three parents come to me who had no idea,” said board member Marielena Gaona-Mendoza during a December board meeting. “We have not said this in a great way. There’s a lot of misunderstanding.”
At that meeting, GaonaMendoza criticized Sudaria’s decision to close the schools as “causing a lot more disruption when one of your main goals is to cause less.”
Pointing out the trend of students leaving public schools for private institutions, Gaona-Mendoza asked, “Who knows how many students will choose to go somewhere else?”
For Hector Valencia, a single parent and contractor who has lived in East Palo Alto for 17 years, the closures are just another sign of a trend in emigration out of the city as many of his neighbors struggle to pay ever-increasing rents and seek better educational opportunities for their children outside the Bay Area.
Valencia said East Palo Alto “has taken a 180-degree turn” over the years and is concerned at the way some parents have either succumbed to what he called the “low level of education” offered at Ravenswood Schools or left for private schools or other districts.
According to Great Schools, a website that aggregates school test scores and academic progress, Ravenswood elementary schools were ranked among the lowest in the area. Willow Oaks has a rating of 2 out of 10, Brentwood Academy rates a 1 out of 10 and the remaining three schools received a rating of either 1 or 2 out of 10.
“It makes me very worried about the other children in the community,” Valencia said. “I’m seeing that my daughter who went through Willow Oaks is having difficulty getting caught up at her new school. More than anything, I’m anxious about this situation because the closure of the schools, I’m certain, will mean families leaving the district altogether.”
Valencia said many of his neighbors work long hours and wake up early like he does, so new bus stops and schedules are likely to make life difficult for families who are used to having their kids walk or ride a bike to school.
With terrible traffic congestion in the area, Valencia also wondered when exactly children will get to school as Menlo Park students have to cross the busy State Highway 101 to get to Belle Haven.
He said he wishes more parents had been involved early on in the process.
“Unfortunately, it seems that when something happens is when people really get involved,” Valencia said. “I’m an only parent, so I’m very interested in what happens with my children. I don’t think the school district can get lower than it already is. I get that the schools are doing what they can, but why did it have to get to this point?”
The way Willow Oaks volunteer Jay Siegel sees it, a large influx of tech workers in the area might be part of why schools have seen lower enrollment rates across the Peninsula. He has spent about five years working with Willow Oaks students improve their reading.
In the district, just 15% of students are at or above their respective grade reading level, school data shows.
“Google and Facebook workers are contributing to people leaving in the sense that rents have been going up,” Siegel said. “They get married later and have kids later, so that will contribute to the declining student body. All school districts are declining in the area, so it’s not just here.”
Back in November 2018, Redwood City School District board members voted to close four elementary schools in an effort to save about $4 million — a move that parents criticized as affecting predominantly Latino students.
The same year, the Oak Grove School District closed three elementary schools in South San Jose after months of public debate and community meetings, with plans to close a fourth school in coming years. And a year later, the Oakland Unified School District closed one elementary school and one middle school.
Though each have specific circumstances, it’s clear school districts across Silicon Valley are struggling to keep their doors open as falling enrollment numbers continue and more young people who don’t have children until much later in life, according to a 2018 survey by Morning Consult, move into previously familydominant communities.
But the closures happen at the same time other districts are dealing with cramped facilities and seek to build new schools, like the Mountain View-Los Altos School District, which in December bought land for a new building.
Siegel said that is an example of the overall “baked-in inequality” in the way California funds its schools, though he agreed that the closures “had to be done.”
Though she hopes the district can grow and put the closures behind it, Sudaria still sees a stormy future on the horizon.
“Even though we’ve found savings and the 2021 school year we’ll be surfacing, the subsequent years will still be challenging,” Sudaria said.
Still, like Siegel, Sudaria sees the bright side, too.
“I’m confident that teachers will have the same beliefs, the same gumption and the same motivation to deliver effective teaching practices,” Sudaria said. “Fewer schools also means more money for every student. We want to give charter school students a reason to come back.”
“Even though we’ve found savings and the 2021 school year we’ll be surfacing, the subsequent years will still be challenging .”
— Gina Sudaria, Ravenswood Schools Interim Superintendent