When I was running for School Board, a past board member said to me: “may you not have to face the decision to change boundaries among schools.” Apparently it’s quite the school district legend that few decisions are more controversial and politically charged than changing school boundaries. My sense is that this stems from a history in many school districts where you have the “good” schools and the “bad” schools. Certainly if you are a parent or homeowner, who wants to be redistricted out of the “good” school area?
Fortunately, we do not have this problem in San Carlos. All of our schools are excellent — not identical, but offering equally good educational experiences for our children. However, we are facing capacity issues in our schools. First of all, there is a mismatch between the demographics in each of our school boundaries with the capacity of our elementary schools, with one or two schools always butting against capacity (and often doing a lottery for kindergarten students to get in), while one school always having extra slack. In addition, both of our middle schools are at or above their practical capacity.
We had a special Board meeting a few days ago to discuss these issues and potential solutions. It would take way too long to describe the whole meeting, but I found it to be an interesting and lively exchange among the Board members, and we also had some great imput from community members. You can read the enrollment and boundary subcommittee report here, but we talked about issues ranging from:
- The current boundaries and the impact of any change
- What happens when you have a lottery for kindergarten students
- Our past practice of accepting out of district “charter” students to manage capacity utilization and our ability to continue to do that
- Policies with regard to sibling preferences for enrollment
- Adding temporary or permanent capacity at the schools and/or creating “quality space”
- All of the above’s effect on the district finances
So, needless to say, this is an extremely complex and multi-faceted problem. However, as I expressed at the Board meeting, I believe that boundary changes are an invetiable outcome of this discussion. I don’t imagine we will fix this for the upcoming school year as kindergarten registrations begins in January, but I suspect we will have a change before the following school year.
I am also a firm believer that, by and large, parents and homeowners will support this change. Although there may be an instinctual reaction when the border moves from one side of your house to the other, I think that most San Carlans understand the equity among our schools really makes these “legendary” concerns irrelevant in our town.
Although I support the schools, I was conflicted in my support for a few reasons:
1. The parcel tax passed just a few years ago with a sunset provision. To pass a new, higher one and make it perpetual at the same time made it feel like the previous one was just the first step on a slippery slope. It was hard to be confident we wouldn’t have another one in two more years that raised it again.
2. The recent contract negotiation with the teachers, under threat of strike, had them end up with high pay relative to other revenue limit districts in the County. Yet the contract only had a provision that they’d wait to the end of this year before negotiating again. So the risk of the new contract discussion this year ending up with the whole increase going to the teachers seems real. Not that I support underpaying teachers – they always deserve more – but how would we know that we’d pass a parcel tax to avoid cuts in programs and then actually not get those cuts anyway? The last round of negotiations gave me little confidence in the next round once a larger pool of money from the parcel tax was in the mix. Especially with my first concern, it felt like we might descend into a cycle where we raised the parcel tax, negotiated it away, and then raised it again every few years.
3. The consultant the district hired said something to the papers like “It is a unique opportunity to take advantage of a big ballot and pull it off.” That didn’t seem like a great reason to support the measure and certainly didn’t make me feel like the money was urgently needed. I hope the district didn’t pay the consultant much.
4. There wasn’t a lot of detail (at least that I could find) about exactly what the budget was, how much it had grown in the last few years, and what exactly would change with Measure S. There was a lot of alarmism, probably justified, about the state cuts, but it seemed like a general vague concern than a specific plan about how the money would be used.
Hopefully we can rally the support next time. Although supportive this time, I had some angst. I wrote these comments to help explain why so that, if my concerns were shared at all, you can get it through next time.
Thanks for the comments. I appreciate the perspective as well as your support of the measure. I did have a coupple of thoughts related to your comments:
1. We were the only district that had a parcel tax measure without a term on it. In hindsight, this may have been a mistake, although it was modeled off what we thought were “best practices” by some high-performing districts like Menlo Park. That said, perhaps this caused enough people pause not to support the measure.
2. The teachers’ negotiations is a complex subject, and certainly in the presence of more money (parcel tax or otherwise), we’d be in a better position to pay teachers more. Paying teachers competitively is always a goal particularly when faced with competition from other districts (many of which are Basic Aid) that can pay more. To your point though, there is an implicit trust required by the community that the Board would do the best thing with whatever financial resources it has — I appreciate your perspective that the teacher negotiations may give people concern about the pressures we face here.
3. The consultant’s comment was, I believe, referring to purely the timing of the measure. We have to face the political realities, and choosing the timing of the ballot measure is important, and clearly a lot of other school districts chose this past election because of the perceived high turnout of those who would presumably be more favorable inclined to support such a measure.
4. There was budget detail on the district website along with the Measure S web site, but again I appreciate that perhaps there wasn’t a strong enough effort to share these details and be very specific on the true financial threats that we face. Unfortuntely the State situation has gotten worse since Measure S was put on the ballot. So, unfortunately the alarmism is real, and we will likely see some serious cuts very soon.
I agree with you that hopefilly we can rally the support the next time. I’m optimistic that we can, particularly given how specific the problem will become as we go through our budgeting process over the next few months.
Again, thanks for the input.
Seth