Nearly a week after parents, students and former employees of East San Jose’s O.B. Whaley Elementary School gathered outside their school to demand the district keep it open, a Evergreen School District advisory committee recommended the school close in the wake of a severe budget shortfall and declining enrollment numbers exacerbated by the pandemic.
The school board has scheduled a meeting with O.B. Whaley parents at 6 p.m. April 3 and two public hearings on the proposed closure April 26 and May 2 at 6 p.m. at Quimby Oak Middle School. The board will make its final decision on the recommendation at a meeting on May 12. If approved, Whaley would close June 2023 at the end of the 2022-2023 school year.
“This is a difficult recommendation to make because none of us want to have to close schools. However, we also know that we cannot ignore the rising operating costs and declining enrollment that we have been facing — and will continue to face as a district, resulting in a $12 million financial shortfall,” said Interim Superintendent Steve Betando in an email to parents Thursday. “This decision keeps the best interests of our students in mind so that we can ensure that our schools maintain the level of excellence that our families expect and our students deserve.”
Jennifer Rubalcaba, who lives a block away from O.B. Whaley, says her nine-year-old daughter Elysa was upset to hear that her school will most likely be closed.
“Yesterday, she was in tears because her friends are going to have to move somewhere else or she’s not going to have all the friends she’s made,” Rubalcaba said. “She’s worried she’s gonna have a hard time at the new school because she’s had problems in the past with bullies. I said, ‘I tried to fight for your school’ and she said, ‘I know mom, but they don’t want to fight for our school.’”
Rubalcaba is also concerned that the school’s closure would displace residents and leave families without childcare or transportation, forcing parents and grandparents who don’t drive to walk their kids to another school by crossing major roads. Rubalcaba said Elysa will most likely have to attend Katherine Smith Elementary,
“My dad can keep transporting them until something happens to him and I pray that nothing does, but it’s not just for my kids,” Rubalcaba said. “I’m fighting for kids who don’t have transportation, where their parents don’t drive and now they’re going to have to cross not only King Road, which is dangerous, but they’re gonna have to cross Tully. There have been fatalities at both of those streets.”
Tully Road was one of San Jose’s deadliest streets for fatal traffic collisions last year, according to an analysis by this news organization.
The Evergreen School District, which includes 16 schools serving kindergarten through eighth grade students, had a peak enrollment of 13,400 students during the 2005-06 school year and numbers dwindled down to about 11,799 in 2017 and 9,784 by 2021, costing the district state funding, according to district figures. It costs nearly $600,000 a year to keep a school open, the district said.
Due to a $12 million budget shortfall, Santa Clara County Department of Education notified the district it would have to create a fiscal stabilization plan in order to get its budget approved. The district’s board of trustees decided to close two schools — Dove Hill Elementary and Laurelwood Elementary — at the end of the 2019-20 school year and a third at the end of the 2020-21 school year.
The pandemic delayed the third school closure until the summer of 2023 and the re-consolidation process began again in February 2022 when COVID cases started dropping. O.B. Whaley was originally third on the list for school closures based on its low enrollment numbers. Among O.B. Whaley’s 328 students, about 60% come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, 55.8% are English learners and 6.5% are students with disabilities, according to California’s Department of Education School Dashboards.
Transportation remains among the top of parents’ worries for the school closure, as well as the removal of services it provides to the neighborhood, including twice-a-month free food distribution through Second Harvest Food Bank, a COVID clinic offering testing and vaccination and help with filling out rental assistance forms, according to Kimble.
“O.B. Whaley is a walking school, which means that most of the families live in the neighborhood and the kids walk to school,” said Charlotte Kimble, a retired teacher who taught at the Evergreen School District for nearly 40 years and helped organize the protest last Thursday. “My kids walked to school when they went to Whaley. How does an 80-year-old grandparent get their kids to school by walking 1.4 miles to Katherine Smith or 1.8 miles to Montgomery? That’s cruel and unusual punishment for someone who simply wants their children educated.”
“The difference is eating or not eating,” Kimble continued. “Having somewhere to live versus not having somewhere to live. Having health services or not having health services. Now we’re taking food out of the mouths of children. It’s really sad.”
Due to lack of funding, the district only provides busing for special needs students and cases in which students are forced to attend another school because their assigned school is over capacity, according to district spokesperson Johanna Villareal, adding that district officials are still ironing out the specifics for the O.B. Whaley closure.
“We’re working on the details on that, but right now, we cannot finalize the process because it still needs to go to the board,” said Villareal. “We just can’t release it at the moment. Out of respect for the board, they still need to discuss and approve it May 12. We will make sure that if it’s something we’re making (parents) do, we’ll do our best to provide transportation.”
Bay Area school districts have grappled with dwindling enrollment numbers worsened by the pandemic, teacher and substitute shortages and reduced funding from the state. In February, the Oakland Unified School District, citing economic reasons, authorized the closure of seven schools, merging another two and removing middle grade levels from two others.
“The majority of the parents feel that Evergreen School District doesn’t care about them because we’re poor, black, brown and Asian families and they don’t care about us,” Kimble said. “They can use words like ‘fiscal stabilization’ and ‘school consolidation’ and dress it up to mean something else.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com