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There was much going on beyond educating students in local elementary school districts in 2017: parcel taxes passed in two districts, school board members resigned and new members were appointed in two districts, and at year’s end it was announced that all the local districts have declining enrollment.
Administrators came and went and won honors, volunteers worked to help students in other districts, a new student mental health organization moved into town, two schools had emergency closures, and construction was underway in one district and contemplated in another.
Parcel taxes
Voters in the Menlo Park City and Woodside Elementary school districts approved parcel taxes in 2017. Such taxes require approval by more than two-thirds of voters.
After two parcel taxes failed to gain approval in May of 2016, the Menlo Park City School District set out to better communicate with its community, including school parents, non-parent district residents, and district employees.
The school board held months of public meetings on budget issues and eventually approved putting a slimmed-down measure with a seven-year expiration date on the ballot. The board also came up with millions in cuts to district spending.
The strategy worked, and in March, 79 percent of those voting approved a $360 parcel tax. It brings the district $2.83 million each year.
In the Woodside Elementary School District, 73 percent of voters approved a $290 parcel tax on April 4. The tax brings about $300,000 a year to the district.
Two weeks after the election, the Woodside district finally answered a question the Almanac had been asking it for more than a year — how much the district had spent to dismiss a teacher in 2016. The answer, which the district provided only after the Almanac made a public records request, was $584,000, or almost two years-worth of parcel tax revenue.
The teacher had appealed his firing, and the Woodside district lost the case in a unanimous decision made by a three-member appeals panel. The panel included an administrative law judge and two teachers, one picked by the district and one by the teacher who made the appeal.
The teacher received full benefits and salary while on 16 months of leave after he was replaced, plus a $200,000 settlement. The district also paid all the costs of the hearing, in addition to legal bills for the teacher and the district.
Administrators
Maurice Ghysels, the superintendent of the Menlo Park City School District, announced he would be retiring almost a year in advance of his July 2017 departure. Assistant Superintendent Erik Burmeister, who had been hired by Mr. Ghysels as principal of Hillview Middle School and was promoted to assistant superintendent in 2015, took over when Mr. Ghysels departed.
Mr. Ghysels is now working for the Ravenswood City School District as its chief innovations officer, and indulging in his love of performing live music with his friends in occasional gigs at Cafe Zoe and other venues.
The district named Jammie Behrendt, who had been the director of educational services in the Belmont-Redwood Shores School District, as the new assistant superintendent.
In March, it was announced that another Menlo Park district administrator, Student Services Director Ginny Maiwald, had won the California Special Education Administrator of the Year award from the Association of California School Administrators. Ms. Maiwald, the mother of two deaf children who are now young adults, was nominated by school employees who said she had transformed the district’s culture since her hiring in 2013.
In the Portola Valley School District, Eric Hartwig, hired as interim superintendent when Superintendent Lisa Gonzales abruptly left the district in October 2015, announced in January that he would stay at the district for at least two more years, through June 2019.
The word “interim” was removed from his title.
Also in January, Pam Duarte, one of two principals at Woodside Elementary School, announced she would be leaving mid-year due to health and stress problems, for a new job in Nevada.
Bob Sherman, who was a Woodside assistant principal (during the time the district’s superintendent also served as its principal) from 2002 to 2008, was named interim principal. The district hired Lauren Petrea, who had been the principal of Booksin Elementary in the San Jose Unified School District, to replace Ms. Duarte.
Volunteers
While every local school has scores of volunteers who work in classrooms, school organizations and after-school activities, not all school districts are so lucky.
In 2008, All Students Matter began sending volunteers from Menlo Park, Atherton, Palo Alto and other local communities to volunteer in the Ravenswood City School District in East Palo Alto and Menlo Park’s Belle Haven neighborhood. In 2017, the organization had more than 230 volunteers in six Ravenswood school classrooms, from transitional kindergarten through fifth grade, serving about 2,000 students.
Youth mental health
In mid-2017 SafeSpace, a mental health clinic designed by and for young people from age 12 to 26, opened on El Camino Real in Menlo Park.
The nonprofit, founded by three local women who all had family members who had experienced mental health problems, is based on the Australian clinics called “headspace.”
With an advisory board of students helping determine its direction, SafeSpace offers professional mental health services. It also works to educate youth, parents, teachers and the public about youth mental health problems and how to recognize them, while trying to erase the stigma attached to seeking help for such conditions as anxiety and depression.
By year’s end, SafeSpace had opened a Community Engagement Center in a vintage bungalow on Oak Grove Avenue in Menlo Park. The space will house groups, workshops and events, as well as Youth Advisory Board meetings.
The need for such services, and such education, was illustrated in early March, when a student at Hillview Middle School in Menlo Park ended up with a broken jaw while involved in a variation of what students call “the choking game” with a group of students on the school’s playing field at lunchtime.
Participants in the “game,” either in groups or alone, use various methods to block their airways until just about to pass out, which can result in a short bout of euphoria.
Devin Prouty, the father of a teen and preteen, a licensed clinical psychologist who works with adolescents and an SRI researcher of adolescent brain development, said talking about the dangers of this behavior “is probably the most protective thing you can do for your kids.”
Mr. Prouty said children of this age have undeveloped frontal brain lobes, which he called “the seat of reason.”
“Kids of this age will take risks,” he said. “Their brains are still developing and they’re still working out the balance between impulse control and decision-making.”
Board members
Two local school district’s governing boards had mid-term resignations this year. When a school board member resigns, state law says the remaining board members have 60 days to either schedule an election or appoint a new board member.
In the Woodside Elementary district, the process went awry. Board member Wendy Warren Roth submitted her resignation April 6, a day after the school district announced it would be appointing a new board member.
Not until May 1 did the board vote to fill the vacancy with an appointment, with the deadline for applications (which had been announced on April 5) only four days later, on Friday, May 5.
The Almanac pointed out that the decision on whether to make an appointment or hold an election was not on the agenda for the meeting, which violates the state’s open meetings law, the Brown Act. On May 16, the board rescinded the action and voted again to appoint a replacement for Ms. Warren Roth, with a later application due date.
On June 2 the board appointed Jennifer Zweig, a parent of Woodside Elementary students and co-chair of the district’s parcel tax campaign.
Portola Valley had a similarly fraught round of board appointments, but for different reasons. After the deadline to add an open position to the November ballot, board member Jennifer Youstra resigned with nearly two years left in her term.
The November ballot included three open seats on the Portola Valley board, and four candidates had filed for those seats. But when the only incumbent in the race, board member Karen Tate, had to withdraw due to health issues, the election and the appointment became more complicated.
In October, the board appointed Jeff Klugman to fill Ms. Youstra’s seat.
But Mr. Klugman was also a candidate, and when he won a three-year term in November, he had to resign the seat he’d held for a month, leaving the board to make yet another appointment.
In December, the board, including newly elected members Karyn Bechtel and Mike Maffia, appointed Brooke Day, a district parent and active volunteer.
Closures
In October, Woodside Elementary School went into lockdown mode for a little over an hour and half while sheriff’s deputies searched, without results, for a man with a gun reportedly seen by an 11-year-old near Bear Gulch Creek behind the school.
While the nearly two dozen sheriff’s deputies (and numerous media helicopters) that converged on the scene found nothing, the incident did serve as a very realistic drill for the staff, parents and students who were on the campus. Most students had left the school earlier in the day while parent-teacher conferences took place.
In December, La Entrada Middle School closed down for a day and a half after a sewer backup left the campus without running water or bathroom facilities. That school also had a chance to practice its emergency pickup drill with parents and students when the school week ended prematurely at 11:30 a.m. on a Thursday.
Construction
The Las Lomitas School District began construction on major projects at both its Las Lomitas and La Entrada schools in 2017. Both projects are expected to continue into 2018, and the district is already exploring asking voters next year to approve another bond measures for projects not part of the current work.
The Portola Valley School District is also exploring asking voters to approve a bond measure in 2018. The district spent much of the year working on a new facilities master plan that lists possible projects at Ormondale School totaling $30.2 million and at Corte Madera School totaling $42.2 million.
A consultant’s poll found, however, that voters were unlikely to approve more than a $40 million bond measure, meaning the school board will have to do some prioritizing in the coming year.
Enrollment
In December a report by demographer Tom Williams showed falling enrollment in all four local school districts.
Mr. Williams said that historically a robust economy means an increasing numbers of births, and more students in local schools. The high prices of housing, however, may be pushing young families away from local districts, he said.
The report showed drops in enrollment in the four local districts of between 4 and 18 percent from recent highs.
The numbers are significant because the Menlo Park, Woodside, Portola Valley and Las Lomitas districts are all “community funded” (formerly called “basic aid”), meaning they receive most of their revenue from local sources, including property taxes, parcel taxes and donations. Little of their funding depends on enrollment, so dropping enrollment means more funding available per student.
Mr. Williams’ report compared the enrollment in transitional kindergarten through fourth grades from 2010 to 2017 in local districts. It showed that in 2017:
• Menlo Park City School District was down 4 percent from the 2013 high of 1,721 students.
• Las Lomitas Elementary School District was down 18 percent from the 2012 high of 838 students.
• Portola Valley School District was down 17 percent from the 2011 high of 406 students.
• Woodside Elementary School District was down 9 percent from the 2014 high of 265 students.
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Ginny Maiwald, the Menlo Park City School District’s director of student services, was named the regional Special Education Administrator of the Year in March. Here she chats with a 7-year-old student at Encinal Elementary School. (Photo by Michelle Le/The Almanac) -
Workers scrambled this summer to get as much work as possible done on the construction projects in the Las Lomitas Elementary School District. Here, on Aug. 8, workers were installing rebar for the grade beams in a new two-story building at La Entrada Middle School. (Photo courtesy Las Lomitas School District) -
Sheriff’s deputies blocked the entrances and exits to Woodside Elementary School for more than an hour and half on Nov. 26 after the school was put into lockdown mode while deputies searched without results for a reported gunman. (Photo by Barbara Wood/The Almanac) -
Keri Tully is a volunteer for All Students Matter, which sends volunteers into Ravenswood City School District classrooms, as well as its only paid (half-time) employee. Here she’s with Guillermo in his first-grade classroom at Belle Haven Elementary School in Menlo Park. (Photo by Irene Searles/All Students Matter)
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If enrollment is down, why don’t we broach the conversation of merging, at least the two Menlo Park districts? How can we support such overhead? I would like to see the school boards look at this possibility before asking us for more money. I want strong schools but don’t see significant benefits of having two small districts remain independent and increasing our taxes.
I’d go further- merge all the elementary districts that feed into Menlo-Atherton High School. The kids are ending up at the same secondary school, so why not start mixing earlier? I think the M-A district is pretty similar to the Fire District service area, so there’s some consistency with that as well? “Curious”‘s point about overhead and efficiency is also apt.
More taxes! This is becoming daily news!
How about less spending, really tired of sky high taxes, Everytime I turn around there is a new fee, tax, prop, trying to extract more $ out of my pocket. CA is a mess and it’s getting worse by the minute!
I’m confused about how the Hillview “choking game” episode referred to above demonstrates there’s a need for mental health services for kids. What’s the link? The implication is that the “choking game” is a symptom of mental illness among youth – is that true?
MPResident –
Please read the original story for more information:
https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2017/03/16/parents-warned-of-kids-choking-game-dangers
An excerpt:
When to seek help
Some of the research indicates that children who take part in the activity alone, often in their bedroom at home, may have more serious mental health issues. The CDC study said 95 percent of deaths were of children who were alone.
“If your child is doing this alone, you really want to talk to the pediatrician and maybe look into more intense support for this child,” Mr. Prouty said.
The New York State Department of Health website says the following are symptoms that a child may be involved in a pass-out activity: bloodshot eyes, frequent and severe headaches, unexplained marks on the neck, pinpoint bleeding spots under the skin on the face or eyelids, disorientation after spending time alone, increased and uncharacteristic irritability or hostility, wearing high-necked shirts even in warm weather, finding ropes, scarves or belts tied to bedroom furniture or doorknobs, or the unexplained presence of things such as dog leashes, chock collars or bungee cords.
The health department’s website says that “after just a few seconds of choking, children may pass out. This can lead to serious injury or even death from hanging or strangulation. Within three minutes of continued strangulation, basic functions such as memory and balance start to fail. If this happens, death can occur shortly after.”