The unintended effect of school choice

While the disparity between enrollment and neighborhood is greatest in Doyle Park, it is happening across the city in ever-increasing numbers.

Like thousands of parents who have decided to bypass their neighborhood schools, Cyndi Saunders and her husband didn't consider Steele Lane Elementary when it came time to enroll their daughter in kindergarten.

Instead, Saunders' daughter attends Yulupa Elementary in the Bennett Valley district, a drive of more than five miles across town from their home near the Redwood Empire Ice Arena.

Saunders is not alone. What is happening at Steele Lane is an example of the trend across Santa Rosa as parents shop for schools.

In 2009-2010, 71 percent of Steele Lane's 410 students were Latino, while the attendance area was 53 percent Latino. Just a decade earlier, the school was ethnically balanced, with 44 percent Latino students and 43 percent white.

In 2010, 61 percent did not speak English as their first language. Steele Lane's API test score was 730 out of 1,000 - second-lowest in the district.

In deciding the best school for her daughter, Saunders considered her time spent as a student teacher at Kawana Elementary a decade ago, when nearly half of its students were English-language learners and nine out of 10 qualified for a free or reduced-price lunch.

Teachers were "excellent" and "worked their butts off," but were taking on assignments much broader than teaching reading, writing and arithmetic, Saunders recalled.

"Some kids just come to school with more issues, with more on their plates than other kids," she said. "Most of them came from fantastic families who loved them. We all want the same for our children, but some of the kids lived at the Llano Hotel, some lived on Santa Rosa Avenue. They had difficult situations."

Saunders also had a teaching stint at Yulupa, where she found teachers were supported with parent volunteers and donations, and test scores were robust. At that time, about 7 percent of kids were English-language learners and 11 percent were considered poor.

Last year, when Saunders was signing her daughter up for kindergarten, Yulupa posted an API of 881 - well above the state goal of 800.

"The teachers at Yulupa aren't faced with a large majority of students who come in with as English as a second language and that was big for me," said Saunders. "I want my daughter on the college prep track."

As a student teacher a decade ago, Saunders recalled thinking families who drove across town "just weren't giving the schools a chance." More recently, she wrestled with the larger implications of her family's decision.

"Things totally changed when I had children," she said.

But many Latino parents have difficulty understanding the flight of so many students from schools they believe are serving their children well.

"I don't know why American parents don't bring their kids to the school," said Miguel Angel Chavez, whose daughter is in the fifth grade at Doyle Park.

Chavez lived on Fourth Street before he moved to west Santa Rosa five years ago. His daughter was in kindergarten at the time and he also had an older son who attended Doyle Park.

"I liked that school a lot and I've always liked the students there," he said. "My kids have always gotten good grades there."

He said that he suspects the real reason why he parents do not take their kids to Doyle Park is because it is viewed as a Latino school.

"Really, for me, it's racism," Chavez said, struggling a little with the thought. "It will never change, discrimination against us."

While many school officials worry about the widening of the ethnic divide, they remain committed to school choice.

"This is the direction that the state and federal government want us to go," said Santa Rosa School District Superintendent Sharon Liddell. "Parents want choice."

Schools offer what parents want, whether that is a commitment to the arts, accelerated academics or a year-round schedule, said Steve Herrington, Superintendent of the Sonoma County Office of Education.

"Choice has not hurt the public education model because it has made it a little more competitive," he said. "I consider charters a choice, there are public school charters that are very tailored for certain interests. We have become more of a boutique school system."

But the steepening racial imbalance has led some educators and community activists to wonder aloud about the effects of what they describe as the schools' self-segregation.

"It's a trade-off between choice and segregation," said Michael Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education and an education professor at Stanford University. "That is the public policy analysis of this. Do you favor parent choice or do you favor preventing segregation?"

Yet the issue has been largely absent from recent public policy debate, he said.

Leaders are much more apt to focus policy decisions on raising test scores and closing the academic achievement gap between whites and Latinos than they are to addressing segregation, he said.

Complicating the discussion is that in the push for school choice, parents with the means and the time to deliver their kids to school often have an advantage.

"It turns out that many of our schools have turned brown and we have Hidden Valley and Proctor Terrace and Hidden Valley Satellite that are pretty white, but the kids that are left in some of these schools - the real issue is probably poverty," said Santa Rosa School Board Trustee Ron Kristof.

The enrollment at Lincoln Elementary School on West Ninth Street was 92 percent Latino in 2009-10 - the highest rate in the district - despite pulling students from a neighborhood where elementary aged kids are only 77 percent Latino. In that year, 94 percent of kids qualified for free or reduced-price lunches.

Nicole Lamare, second-year principal at Lincoln Elementary School, said about 85 percent of her students live in apartment complexes immediately surrounding the West Ninth Street campus.

"The way I look at it is I have to focus on the things I can control, and the things I can control are the kids who have chosen to come here," she said. "That gives me more purpose to the job that I do."

That same white flight has occurred at Monroe Elementary School on Marlow Road, where 89 percent of the students were Latino in 2009-10 despite neighborhood data that shows only 69 percent of elementary-aged kids are Latino. Monroe has the highest rate of student poverty, at 97 percent.

"I think the last walk-through I have had was probably two years ago," said Monroe Principal Rachel Valenzuela.

Santa Rosa School Board Trustee Donna Jeye said the movement is about more than just race.

"What we do have is flight from underperforming schools and I think that goes across the racial divide," she said at a recent school board meeting during which student flight from Doyle Park was discussed.

"There is a shift going on all over the place of people who are saying, &‘I want more for my child,'" she said.

That emphasis on school choice in the face of dramatically shifting demographics is a radically different approach for California leaders who less than three decades ago promoted cross-town busing programs in some communities to foster school integration.

In his first stint as president of the California board in 1977, the state pressed districts to tackle racial inequities, Kirst recalled.

"We could act at that time on de facto segregation," he said, noting the state education board had a regulation meant to discourage it.

When voters passed the landmark Proposition 209 in 1996, which prevented schools from giving preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity or sex.

The movement has been accelerated by the explosion of charter schools.

Since the first charter school opened in California in 1993-94, scores of initiatives and laws have cropped up, giving parents multiple avenues to move their children from one school to another.

"The phenomena hasn't crested, nor do I expect it will," said Bob Henry, general counsel to Santa Rosa City Schools since 1984.

Even though some legal restrictions on movement do exist, Henry said most districts are loathe to enforce them.

"We know that if we stop them, we have simply purchased heartache," he said. "There is conventional wisdom that if a parent feels strongly about it, forcing them through the letter of the law to stay doesn't serve anyone."

Educators across Santa Rosa expressed support for parents and their right to choose, but many acknowledge that decisions parents have made have changed the makeup of the city's schools.

"As a parent, you will do whatever is necessary to see that your child has the best opportunity that they can get. That is just the nature of parenthood," said Santa Rosa School Board member Bill Carle. "We have a society that is certainly allowing for that and as a result it may have byproducts and unintended consequences."

The rate of demographic change locally is so swift that a move must be made, according to Carl Wong, retired Sonoma County Schools Chief.

"If nothing is put into place, the demographic issue will continue to be compounded," he said. "The worst-case scenario is to do nothing until things get so bad that someone files some legal action that you are allowing segregation to take place that is now harmful."

Staff Writer Kerry Benefield writes an education blog at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com.

She can be reached at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com.

Staff Writer Martin Espinoza contributed to this report.