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Final vote Thursday on school boundaries

Original post made on Jun 11, 2017

The Mountain View Whisman School District inched forward in its years-long effort to redraw school attendance boundaries.

Read the full story here Web Link posted Sunday, June 11, 2017, 10:15 AM

Comments (3)

Posted by Diversity of what?
a resident of Monta Loma
on Jun 11, 2017 at 11:27 am

Some children do not speak or understand English and/or have family situations that have left them behind in learning. Are the advocates of "diversity" saying that those children should be spread out across all of the schools? The criterion of "family income" appears to be a cover fo spreading out students with special needs.


Posted by Juan
a resident of Rengstorff Park
on Jun 11, 2017 at 4:17 pm

This looks to me like "Operation: kick the poor kids out of the good schools". It's not acceptable to run this process where "student diversity not a priority". That should be the TOP priority. Time to abandon all the proposals and start over from scratch. ALL Mountain View kids deserve an education, not just those with two million dollar homes.


Posted by SAATFmember
a resident of Rex Manor
on Jun 13, 2017 at 12:28 pm

SAATFmember is a registered user.

The school boundaries causes school diversity fallacy.

Some people believe that it's best when each individual school matches the
economic and ethnic demographics of the School District as a whole.
Those people want to manipulate the attendance boundaries to accomplish that goal, but this method to achieve that goal does not work.

An area of the Whisman neighborhood, called the Wagonwheel, used to be mostly poor and Spanish speaking people. The MVWSD thought that by assigning that area to the top rated school they could get more poor kids into Huff and help the poor kids.

What happened instead was that the housing values in the Wagonwheel area
skyrockted and all the poor people moved out and wealthier people moved in and renovated or rebuilt the housing. Today, the demographics of the Wagonwheel area match the demographics of the neighborhood near Huff.

The only poor people to benefit were those lucky few who were long time home owners who quickly sold out and left the area. All the renters just got
priced out of the area.

The perception of schools is a big factor that drives housing values. For any given address, you change the perception of their assigned school, you change the market value of that address and the people move accordingly.

You cannot force diversity in schools by gerrymandering the school boundaries.

What you can do with boundaries is balance school enrollment numbers to the best levels practical to allow each school and the district to function better.

If you want to help kids educationally, then carefully and continually examine each school and figure out what the kids at that school need now to help them achieve the very best they are capable of and give it to them.


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