Santa Rosa kids spurn neighborhood campuses

Larsen eventually enrolled her daughter at Yulupa but moved her from the Bennett Valley district to Santa Rosa Charter School for the Arts on Humboldt Street this year.

And Larsen said she is already eyeing middle and high schools. "I wish I had more options, actually."

The movement in Santa Rosa isn't just across town, it's often across the district lines that divide Santa Rosa City Schools from its eight feeder elementary districts that ring the city and funnel students into Santa Rosa's middle and high schools.

An analysis of enrollment patterns shows clear winners in the competition for students.

That movement, while shifting the raw numbers of students in every district in Santa Rosa, is also skewing the racial makeup of campuses across the city.

Kenwood, a small, one-school district on Highway 12 between the much larger Sonoma Valley and Rincon Valley school districts, pulls in more than half of its annual enrollment from beyond its attendance boundaries.

But the influx has tilted enrollment.

In 2009-10, 83 percent of students at the 148-student school were white, even though the attendance area was 62 percent white. Latino enrollment was 8 percent on campus despite area school-age demographics that were 27 percent Latino.

Without readily accessible public transportation, Superintendent Bob Bales acknowledged that some families simply cannot afford to go to Kenwood.

"We do all we can," he said. "For some families, it may not be an option."

Of the eight districts that feed students into Santa Rosa district high schools, only one has a net loss of transfers: Bellevue.

At the other end of the spectrum is Mark West, which draws students from as far away as Hidden Valley Lake and Calistoga, while the vast majority come from Santa Rosa.

In Rincon Valley, 15 percent of the district's students come from outside the attendance area. In Wright, nearly 20percent of pupils don't live in the area, and in Bennett Valley, nearly half of the students at

Yulupa and Strawberry schools come from other districts.

"It's a one-way street," said former Sonoma County Superintendent of Schools Carl Wong. "Are we exercising greater choice through enrollment and even to some extent charters? Charter schools have no boundaries, so choice and selection comes for those who have the means and resources and sophistication to do that."

But many charter schools in Santa Rosa are not the bastion of racial divides that they have become in other parts of California. Of the 16 schools, only four have a significant ethnic gap.

Rincon Valley Charter was 70 percent white in 2009-10, Santa Rosa Accelerated Charter was 72 percent white and Santa Rosa Charter was 73 percent white.

Roseland University Prep was 91 percent Latino.

But school officials are keeping their eye on charters for their potential to attract one ethnicity or another - what Gonzalez called "cool islands."

"I don't want to end up with a district with all these cool charters but they are all white," she said. "These end up becoming a place for middle and upper class, and in Santa Rosa, mostly white."

Gonzalez pointed to the successful Santa Rosa Charter School for the Arts on Humboldt Street as an example of a school that in the five years since it re-opened as a charter school reversed declining enrollment and grew its test scores, but changed its demographics along the way.

In the last year it was open, Fremont Elementary School had just 175 students, of whom 39 percent were Latino and 36 percent white. Replaced by the arts charter, enrollment rose to 317 in 2010-11, but the demographics have shifted to 29 percent Latino, 59 percent white.

The movement across boundaries is impacting high schools as well, despite efforts to develop academic programs to draw students to various campuses.

While Santa Rosa High School has a waiting list nearly every year and Montgomery and Maria Carrillo had enrollments of 1,755 and 1,574 respectively in 2009-10, westside high schools Elsie Allen and Piner struggle with a student exodus. In 2009-10, Piner had 1,178 students and Elsie Allen had 1,151.

An analysis of high school attendance boundaries and the students who are enrolled at each campus indicates a white flight from westside campuses.

Fifty-eight percent of 15- to 17-year-olds who live in Elsie Allen's attendance area are Latino, but enrollment at the Bellevue Avenue campus is 70 percent Latino. White students make up 27 percent of the residential area but only 16 percent of school enrollment.

At Piner, the school is 48 percent Latino and 32 percent white even though the area's high-school-age popuation is 43 percent Latino and 41 percent white.

Even while acknowledging the flight from certain schools, district officials say that school choice remains the paramount goal for educators and parents.

"We are not going to go back at this point. It doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time and energy on that. I don't think we are going to be &‘This is your district you are in, this is where you are going to go,' " Gonzalez said. "My understanding is that we can't stop them."

Some districts, including Bellevue and Cotati-Rohnert Park south of Santa Rosa, have tightened their transfer policies in the face of dramatic declining enrollment trends. That has led to a spike in parent appeals going before the Sonoma County Board of Education.

"We used to get one or two a year, and I think in the last two years, we have gotten 20 to 30. Some of that was because there were policies that were still being worked out," said Lynn Garric, Safe Schools project director for the Sonoma County Office of Education, who helps districts and parents navigate the appeals process.

"Things have changed a lot in the last two years," she said. "Some of our districts have declining enrollment, so they are really concerned about keeping all of their kids and serving all of their kids in their neighborhood."

The movement has played a role in debates as large as the closure of Doyle Park Elementary School, but has also affected decisions on staffing and programs when schools on one side of town are at capacity while others are losing students year after year.

"I think it's a mess and it's a complex situation," said Santa Rosa School Board member Ron Kristof. "It's political, it has caused problems that we are dealing with on a day-to-day basis."

Yet finding a way to bridge the gap between what parents want for each child and what may serve the community in fostering ethnic and economic integration remains a challenge that is virtually unspoken.

"This is a total community issue," said Monroe Elementary School Principal Rachel Valenzuela.

But it remains taboo for many.

"It's the elephant in the room," she said, "that people just don't want to talk about."

News Researcher Teresa Meikle conducted the data analysis. You can reach Staff Writer Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.

benefield@pressdemocrat.com.