Kindergartners boon for Santa Rosa schools

The specter of school closures among Santa Rosa City Schools has lifted thanks in part to a growing number of students entering kindergarten in the district.

But the unequal distribution of students among the district’s campuses remains a vexing problem for a district that touts parental choice among a variety of programs and schools.

Despite stabilized enrollment, Doyle Park Elementary and Comstock Middle School remain the district’s smallest elementary and middle school campuses. Last year, both schools were targeted for closure or reconfiguration as the district faced dire budget cuts.

The district’s budget woes remain, as do student transfers that continue to be higher on the same campuses year after year.

Yet a surge in kindergarten and pre-kindergarten students living in the district has put new focus on maintaining campuses and classroom space.

“We don’t have any school closures planned at all,” said Board President Donna Jeye. “I feel very fortunate that we haven’t had to close any schools.”

While some campuses continue to lose students to other schools, the number of early elementary students is growing and those students need classroom space, said Assistant Superintendent Greg Espinoza.

“We need all of the classrooms that we currently have,” he said.

There were 693 kindergartners registered in the district this fall, compared with 494 sixth-graders.

The growth trend — projected at 3 percent — has considerably brightened the future of Comstock and Doyle Park in particular.

“That is a happy surprise,” Jeye said of the surge in kindergartners.

While the trend in kindergartners is up, the continued loss of students from some neighborhood schools to other, highly sought after schools has fueled an imbalance in enrollment.

Doyle Park is still by far the smallest elementary campus in the district and Comstock has fewer than half the number of students at Rincon Valley Middle School, the district’s most populated middle school.

But with all of the transfers happening in the district, some campuses are becoming so-called overflow schools, where students from overpopulated campuses are transferred.

That has meant an influx of students for Doyle Park.

The Sonoma Avenue campus started this year with two under-enrolled kindergarten classrooms. But a surge in overflow students from other campuses has boosted those numbers to two full kindergarten classes and a third class with 16 students, said interim principal Steve Nielsen.

“Our kindergarten numbers look good,” he said of next year’s potential students. “I haven’t heard that, ‘Well, we are going to take our kid elsewhere because we are not sure we are open next year.’”

Further burgeoning campus stability is the district’s re-launching of a search for a permanent principal. The district did not hire a replacement for the departed Fran Link in the fall, saying the candidate pool wasn’t strong enough.

That aborted search further fueled speculation among some staffers that the future of the campus was uncertain, Espinoza said.

“I think they feel pretty good about the fact that we are out looking for a principal,” he said.

“In mid-April we’ll set up some interviews,” he said.

At Comstock, staffers responded last spring to that campus being named for potential closure with a plan to totally revamp the teaching focus at the recently upgraded facility on West Steele Lane.

Comstock staff has proposed creating Northwest Tech Middle School, a magnet school where students would have to apply, parents would be required to participate in school activities and staff would have to re-apply for their jobs.

A formal proposal is expected to be made to the board in the coming months.

Even so, public perception about particular campuses can be hard to alter, said board member Bill Carle.

“I think part of it is education and part of it is understanding what causes individual people not to go to a school, and those decisions are not uniform,” he said.

Carle pointed to the resurgence of Santa Rosa Middle School in the early to mid-’90s. After suffering from loss of enrollment, former Principal Ron Campanile took his school’s case directly to concerned parents of fifth- and sixth-graders.

Dubbed “Fireside Chats,” the talks tackled the concept of white flight from the downtown campus.

“That is precisely what it was,” Carle said. “The school didn’t change, but the information that got out to parents did.”

Now, Santa Rosa is the most requested middle school transfer site with 73 seeking admittance. Rincon Valley had 52 requests and Slater Middle School 48 to join. All requests at the middle and high school level were granted.

Such change has not come to Cook and Comstock, both of which have the highest number of middle school students seeking transfers. Comstock had 56 requests to leave during the transfer request period this year.

Jeye said parents and students are drawn to test scores and particular programs. But they have to be the right programs, she said.

Doyle Park abandoned a fledgling International Baccalaureate program last year when staffers feared it was keeping students from raising their core literacy and math scores.

The same group of campuses remain perennially popular.

Proctor Terrace remains the most requested elementary school, followed by Hidden Valley and Biella.

Steele Lane (28 students) and Doyle Park (18 students) top the list of elementary schools that fielded the most requests to transfer out.

Santa Rosa is by far the most requested high school campus by transfer students, followed by Montgomery and Maria Carrillo which had the same number of requests.

Students remain most likely to leave Piner and Elsie Allen high schools; 88 left Piner and 79 transferred away from Elsie Allen. In contrast, 33 left Maria Carrillo, 27 left Santa Rosa and 19 transfered away from Montgomery.

While student enrollment numbers are showing an uptick in the younger grades, the distribution of students among campuses remains uneven.

To address those inequities, the district could, in the future, consider re-drawing campus attendance boundaries. But officials said a move in that direction is unlikely.

“There are not plans to adjust school boundaries at this point,” Jeye said. “That always causes a lot of community turmoil.”

Staff Writer Kerry Benefield writes an education blog at extracredit.pressdemocrat.com. She can be reached at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com.