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.
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