6 vie for 4 seats on Santa Rosa school board

It’s a time of flux for Santa Rosa City Schools and the Nov. 8 election will bring more change.

In the past year, the district has changed superintendents and begun implenting a plan to fix ailing campuses, thanks to $229 million in bonds passed by voters in 2014.

This fall, two longtime school board members, President Donna Jeye and Vice President Larry Haenel, decided not to run for re-election.

Voters will decide the district’s new direction, as six candidates vie for four seats on the district’s school board.

Incumbents Jenni Klose and Laura Gonzalez, who have been on the board since 2012 and 2008, respectively, are running along with newcomers Ed Sheffield, Evelyn Anderson, Caroline Bañuelos and Laurie Fong.

The new board will need to better serve the district’s growing Latino population, and address the likely pushback from parent groups as it grapples with when and how to prioritize repairs to the district’s crumbling schools - estimated at $1.2 billion in deferred maintenance and technology upgrades.

The 2014 bond measures eased the district’s budget crunch, but not by much.

The addition of $229 million to the district’s allowance, earmarked for such upgrades, means many projects will go untouched - and a lot of community members will be disappointed.

The board has attempted to alleviate some of that by creating a facilities master plan, which ranks campuses’ needs on a rubric, with safety and coding projects ranking highest.

“I think we’re in a very difficult situation: $1.2 billion in need, and less than a quarter of that in our pockets,” said Klose, a civil litigation attorney. “I think we’ve done the best that we can to prioritize the projects based on input from state coalitions, students, family, community, teachers. They went through a very specific process to do that.

“... I think the facilities master plan is a quality product, and I trust that the choices that we make out of that will be good ones.”

Communication about the funds, and how best to use them, has been debated among candidates.

Evelyn Anderson, parent of a current Maria Carrillo High School student and a recent district graduate, said that in all her time volunteering at school sites, she “rarely saw a board member on campus.”

“I never had a conversation with one until I was a candidate,” she said. “I felt that we needed to bring a parent voice to the decision-making on the board. ... There is a tendency for parents to think that the district is just checking off a box of something that’s required by the state, rather than saying, ‘Hey, parents, we’d like to work with you.’?”

Sheffield, who works as a staff member for Assemblyman Jim Wood, D-Healdsburg, has two boys, ages 2 and 4. For him, parental involvement is key.

“There’s room for improvement,” he said. “I think in some populations, you have to do more than just make it available, you have to actively seek parental involvement. A lot of the parents do not have the luxury of giving time, but parents need to. They’re part of the conversation. They need to be at the table.”

Gonzalez, a seventh-grade history and English teacher at Windsor Middle School, proposed more outreach to parents via social media.

“We could use social media to bring forth what are the issues that (parents) see at their children’s schools, what they see in their communities,” she said.

The achievement gap is another hot topic among candidates.

Klose noted the board has done much to improve the achievement gap, specifically her push to change the district’s disciplinary policy toward one more focused more on restorative justice rather than punitive, and keeping children in the classroom rather than out.

Her efforts followed district statistics showing that despite Hispanic students outnumbering white students by 50 percent, nearly three times as many Latino students were suspended as white students.

For both Gonzalez and Bañuelos, a community organizer and longtime tutor, addressing the needs of low-income and Latino students is a matter of having a board that represents the demographics of the district, which last school year was 50.4 percent Hispanic out of 16,717 students.

Fong, a retired teacher and administrator who most recently served as principal at Montgomery High School, criticized the way the district addresses needs of English language learners.

“We ... place these students in other core classes with little to no support, leaving it to individual schools to figure out,” she said. “A more robust, streamlined system, tiered to English proficiency - not age or grade - would better serve students.”

Bañuelos and Gonzales lamented the lack of diversity on the school board.

“I think it’s important that our elected officials have an understanding of the lives of the people that they are serving,” Gonzalez said. “I don’t think that this board really understands what the lives of the majority of the people in the community are like.”

That thought was echoed by Bañuelos.

“The demographic population has really changed (toward more Latino students),” she said. “I’m really concerned that the board doesn’t represent that. ... I think there’s some misunderstandings or unconscious biases out there about both students of color and low-income students, in terms of their abilities and what they can do.”

Anderson offered a proposal she said is used in Arizona school districts to best serve its growing population of Latino students.

“Right from the get-go, those students should be identified so they’re engaged and given the opportunity to learn, even if they’re not speaking English proficiently,” she said. “I think we do a huge disservice to them by not engaging high-level learners.”

You can reach Staff Writer Christi Warren at 707-521-5205 or christi.warren@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @SeaWarren.