Efforts by a group of Walnut Creek schools to leave one of the Bay Area’s largest school districts and form their own were killed Wednesday by the state Board of Education after a large coalition of opponents likened the secession attempt to racial segregation.
The 10-member board’s unanimous vote extinguishes a yearslong effort by families in the city’s Northgate neighborhood to ditch the Mt. Diablo Unified School District, which serves 29,000 K-12 students in a diverse swath of central Contra Costa County.
The board’s decision was centered around how a departure by Northgate High School, Foothill Middle School and Bancroft, Valle Verde and Walnut Acres elementary schools would split up campus facilities unevenly between the two new districts, forcing each to spend more on new space to accommodate their students.
Before the vote about two dozen public commenters — every one of whom opposed the secession proposal — and a couple board members themselves said a graver consequence would be removing majority-white campuses in higher-income neighborhoods from the larger, more diverse school district.
And while the backers of the secession proposal argue that Mt. Diablo has become bloated with too many students and unmanageable finances, the board members felt the proponents didn’t make a convincing case at Wednesday’s hearing for why they should be allowed to leave the district.
“What I didn’t really hear was anything terribly specific as to what was not working,” said state board member Kim Pattillo-Brownson. “What I did hear very clearly and specifically, however, was a rather significant amount of adverse impact in terms of effectively removing the highest-performing high school in the whole district.”
The state’s decision upholds a county Board of Education vote in 2017 to reject the secession application. And it will allow Mount Diablo Unified’s leadership — which steadfastly opposed the secession and secured the support of faculty and staff unions — to avoid having its voters decide on the latest of several attempts by families to leave the district.
The plan’s proponents have the option of filing a lawsuit against the state. But one organizer who spoke at Wednesday’s hearing said the political deck had been stacked against the movement, and that the district had smeared their intentions of seeking more financial accountability.
“Our quest has been about the children,” said Linda Loza, a secession leader and district volunteer whose three children graduated from Northgate High. “Regardless of what the opposition says, it has never been about exclusivity, race, real estate values, etcetera.”
“We wish that every child would reap the benefits that come with focused education, local control and a smaller school system that represents the needs of the children within the community,” Loza added. “We never imagined that we would find this to be an insurmountable feat plagued with nasty tactics, defaming lies, outright coercion and power-brokering.”
Mt. Diablo has campuses in Concord, Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill, Martinez, Clayton, Pittsburg and Lafayette, as well as the Pacheco, Bay Point and Clyde communities. The five schools seeking to split from the district are all located in Walnut Creek, and the median income around Northgate High School is 75% higher than the overall Mt. Diablo district, according to American Community Survey data compiled by Census Reporter.
The proposed new district’s student body would have been 16% Hispanic or Latino and 51% white. Mt. Diablo’s student body is is 45% Hispanic or Latino and less than 30% white, per the state board’s staff report.
Given Mt. Diablo’s enormous size, the Northgate schools’ departure would increase the district’s portion of non-white students by only a small margin, from 70% to about 73%. Because of that, the state education department’s staff determined Northgate’s secession attempt would not promote racial segregation, though it still recommended rejecting the proposal over a messy splitting-up of campus facilities.
Board member Sharon Olken worried that a secession would have resulted in the creation of magnet programs that allowed students to transfer to the Northgate schools. That could have actually worsened the gap in diversity levels between the two districts if it led to even more white students leaving Mt. Diablo behind, she said.
Parents, teachers, school board members and a handful of district employees who spoke at the meeting were united in condemning the secession as an attempt to separate white students from the rest.
“We do not need to start segregating our schools again — that was back in the ’60s,” said Vanessa Miranda, a food-service worker in the district.
Karen Jenkins, a Northgate High teacher with three daughters who graduated from the district, said the plan would disadvantage special education students and English-language learners because of an “inability to share resources” between the districts.
Northgate High Principal Kelly Cooper, who previously taught for 17 years at the more diverse Ygnacio Valley High, which wouldn’t have been invited to the new district, called the proposal “blatantly segregation and classist.”
“While the intent might not have been there, the outcomes are very clear,” Cooper said. “We are better together.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com