It is time to take the audacious step and bring the Belle Haven Elementary School and the Willow Oaks Elementary School into the Menlo Park City School District (MPCSD). We need the courage of all of our stakeholders and a deep belief in community to get there because it is not only extremely difficult to do, but it requires great sacrifices before we truly reap the benefits.
First, we must understand the Ravenswood City Elementary School District’s concerns that underlie a recent letter from its superintendent threatening Menlo Park should we take this route.
Ravenswood stands to lose the most from the onset given the school is funded by the state on a per-pupil basis. Truancy is costly enough, but the idea that an estimated 700 students (estimate is Menlo Park residents only) would leave at one time, could put the district at the brink of economic failure. However, if you look at the recent Edbuild.org article “Fractured: The Breakdown of American School Districts,” there is a valid argument in California that smaller school districts can thrive, and do thrive. Ravenswood would have to realign some of its administration and re-scope projections, but the district would still have the amazing volunteers and leadership it had before. Funding models would need to expand. But this is a unique situation when looking at the broader secession trends.
According to that Edbuild.org article, a recent Alabama ruling supported a white student majority school’s secession from a larger predominantly black student majority district, allowing the school to gain property tax benefits while stripping out diversity of students. Arkansas is seeing the same trends materialize.
This is the basis of the Ravenswood superintendent’s argument.
Ravenswood argues that it is somehow beneficial for children in Menlo Park to stay under a school system that performs much lower than another school system in the same city but on the other side of the tracks, as all tides will rise. It has been decades and the tides aren’t rising at the pace promised or needed.
The threat from Ravenswood’s perspective is that if we leave the district, we improve the conditions of Menlo Park to the detriment of the Ravenswood district, and since the majority of Menlo Park residents are wealthy and white, we are going to be challenged in court.
According to Ed-Data.org, Belle Haven School is 95 percent-plus nonwhite and Willow Oaks is 97 percent-plus nonwhite. Belle Haven demographics prove out that the community is of color at a very high range. We’re proposing bringing our minority children into a single majority district that is now mostly white. Not the other way around.
The Menlo Park City School District is not exactly going to be doing back-flips over the idea of 700 more students, and it stands to lose in the beginning as well. In the MPCSD, schools are funded via property taxes rather than per-pupil allotments from the state. Every new student takes money from the property tax pool, and if it is not replaced, the MPCSD would have to cut programs or staff to make up the difference. The district is already challenged by the prospects of more housing and more families without the revenue to support them. If you assume that salaries of Belle Haven and Willow Oaks teachers and staff would have to meet the MPCSD levels and accept the idea that positions cannot be eliminated for the first two years of the unification, you can see the costs spiraling up.
But if you also consider the impact of property taxes within Menlo Park’s M2 district now rolling into the MPCSD, it could become a sustainable source of revenue to help make the transition become a real benefit.
Since 2006, when I ran for City Council, I had in my literature and stump speeches an argument that the seeds of separation in Menlo Park start at the schools. It’s an obvious point that correlates the value of property to the quality of schools.
So I should thank the Ravenswood superintendent for shining the brightest light on our most embarrassing secret: Most of the children of lower economic means in Menlo Park are forced into a regional school district of fewer resources, which equates to less opportunity than that provided to kids in the same city who have the fortune of a higher economic status.
It’s the same old story. Poor kids get poor schools.
We can do better. You know it. I know it.
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