Santa Rosa City Schools drops boundary change plan, vows to address racial imbalances

Santa Rosa City Schools has backed away from redrawing boundaries that determine which students go to which schools, instead opting to tackle long-standing ethnic and economic disparities through policy change.

The unanimous vote at the school board meeting late Wednesday night puts an end to Sonoma County’s largest school district’s monthslong effort to remake its internal boundaries.

Area 3 Trustee Alegría De La Cruz said the district’s challenges are larger than any school boundary decision.

“It’s not our district boundaries that are causing disparity, it’s the fact that our community is segregated,” she said Wednesday. “And I think what we realized as we studied this is that no redrawing of our boundaries could address the inherent segregation in our community.”

Board members vowed the move will not diminish their efforts to create more balance and equity at 24 elementary, charter, middle and high schools.

“We were set to go ahead and take on this huge challenge and try to really live up the equity that we were talking about, but that wasn’t the solution,” board president Laurie Fong said Thursday. “There wasn’t enough bang for the buck. There wasn’t enough switch of the demographics in what we are looking for to merit the upset the change would bring.”

Superintendent Diann Kitamura said Thursday that although district officials have changed their tack, the goal to foster more balance in the enrollment at each campus remains at the fore.

“It was doing our due diligence to be sure,” she said of the district’s initial efforts. “It was just ’OK, well that’s not going to get what we want by doing boundaries so what will?’ That is where we decided the policy part of it.”

The board Wednesday adopted a multi-faceted resolution that spells out the district’s intent to address equitable allocation of resources, analyze its decades-old transfer policies, apply for funds specific to schools that “require additional assistance,” consider creation of magnet programs and “confront biases and actively engage in the challenging work of dismantling practices that may limit opportunities for our students of color.”

‘This is a community-wide issue’

The districtwide boundary line study was part of a two-pronged effort to redesign where kids in Sonoma County’s largest school district go to school. Spurred by the district’s move to close Cook Middle School on Sebastopol Road at the end of this school year and allow Cesar Chavez Language Academy to assume the entire campus, district officials broke the project into two parts.

The first adjusted boundaries for Comstock, Santa Rosa and Slater middle schools to give students living in Cook’s traditional boundaries an option to attend a school other than the language academy.

The second, more significant effort, was aimed at redrawing lines for all campuses with the goal of creating more racial, ethnic and economic balance.

But the studies showed that potential new lines would not substantively address current imbalances, according to the district’s demographer and legal counsel.

“This is a communitywide issue,” Kitamura said. “How are we planning the city and the county housing developments such that neighborhoods become more diverse across Sonoma County? Are city leaders, county leaders asking those questions?”

Imbalances are apparent at all levels in the district. At Lincoln and Monroe elementary schools, about 92% of students are Latino. Conversely, Hidden Valley Elementary is 30% Latino and 45% white.

In the district middle schools, campuses on the west side of Highway 101 have the most racial imbalance and the highest rates of poverty. At Cook, which will be shut at the close of the school year, 86% of the school’s approximately 428 seventh and eighth graders are Latino, while 7.5% are white. At Comstock, Latinos make up 86% of the student population, while 6% of students are white. At Santa Rosa Middle, the breakdown is 60% Latino to 27% white, while at Slater it’s 49.5% Latino and 37% white. At Rincon Valley, the enrollment is 25% Latino and 56% white.

The breakdown at the high school level is similar: Of Elsie Allen’s approximately 1,000 students, 82% are Latino and 8% are white; at Piner, 69% of kids are Latino, 17% white; at Montgomery, 49% of students are Latino, 38% white; at Santa Rosa, 40% of students are Latino and 45% are white; and at Maria Carrillo, 26% of students are Latino and 56% are white.

Transfer policies play a role

Years-old district policies have also contributed to the imbalances. For decades — spurred in part by the charter school boom and transfer trends created by the federal No Child Left Behind policies — the district has largely allowed students to petition to attend schools outside of their neighborhood boundaries. Barring space issues, those requests are typically granted.

Those policies have had ramifications, both in the demographics of the student body and the sheer size of enrollment. Santa Rosa High School, the largest school in the district, has about 1,900 students, according to the California Department of Education. Elsie Allen, the smallest high school and also the campus with the highest rate of student poverty and students of color, has about 1,000 kids.

But if all of the high-school aged students who live within Elsie Allen’s current boundaries attended the Bellevue Avenue campus, enrollment would be vastly higher, Kitamura said.

"It would be significantly more because the students who live in the residential area that feeds Elsie transfer“ to other schools, she said.

That points to a key element of the district’s new adopted resolution: “The District will institute an outreach program to increase its efforts to engage the community and foster a culture of belonging in our school environment for all students.”

Kitamura pointed to Elsie Allen High School’s University Center program as a potential beneficiary of the new policy. The program, a partnership with Sonoma State University that allows Elsie students to take courses at SSU for college credit, has an enrollment cap. With additional equity-focused funding, that cap could be lifted, Kitamura said.

‘It’s not going to be easy’

Area 2 Trustee Jill McCormick has long pushed for an overhaul of district policies that have allowed students to transfer at will, leading to some campuses to bleed students while others burst at the seams.

But those policies, like redrawing attendance lines, will likely spark pushback, she said on Wednesday.

“It’s huge,” she said. “It’s something we need to tackle and it’s not going to be an easy fix.”

Fong expressed confidence the newly adopted resolution is a key step in addressing disparities.

“This is a beautiful document,” Fong said Wednesday night. “This is the most unique, the most important, the deepest resolution that I think Santa Rosa City Schools has ever enacted.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.