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The Contra Costa County Board of Education voted 3-2 early Wednesday morning to recommend denial of a petition to create a controversial new school district in the county.
The board, sitting as the County Committee on School District Organization, met to consider whether to split off part of the Mt. Diablo Unified School District.
The meeting began at 4 p.m. Tuesday and lasted until after midnight, according to David Soldani, legal counsel for Mt. Diablo Unified School District.
“It was a marathon,” Soldani said.
Close to 90 people, including students from the district, came to the meeting to voice their opinions on the proposal.
Board president Mike Maxwell and board members Fatima Alleyne and Vikki Chavez voted to recommend denial of the hotly contested petition, Soldani said. Board members Jeff Belle and Christine Deane voted to recommend acceptance of the petition.
The board will now send its decision to the State Board of Education for consideration.
Advocates of the proposal, who go by the moniker Northgate Community Advocacy for our Public Schools (Northgate CAPS), can appeal the decision to the state board.
The state board has the final say on whether to reject the petition for the new Northgate Unified School District or approve of sending the question to the voters.
Northgate CAPS members said that the current curriculum in the Mt. Diablo Unified School District is chosen without regard to Northgate students. They claim that because the district is large, district officials are unable to execute strategies to improve teaching and learning and local schools lack support.
About 32,000 students are served by the Mt. Diablo Unified School District.
A new district would include Northgate High School, Foothill Middle School and Bancroft, Valle Verde and Walnut Acres elementary schools. It would have about 3,800 students and include neighborhoods in Concord and Walnut Creek.
Northgate CAPS officials also said a new district would allow educators to be more responsive to the individual needs of each student.
But opponents said that the new district would be made up of mostly white, wealthy students.
Soldani said that while the district’s student body consists of about 40% white students, the new district would be about 65% white.
He a number of efforts are underway across the nation to create smaller, wealthy, less diverse school districts.
Northgate CAPS president Linda Loza did not respond to requests for comment on the vote.
— Janis Mara, Bay City News
When did parents start serving the schools instead of the schools serving parents? If the parents of 3800 kids want to band together to focus their children’s educators on common needs and for the betterment of their own children… who dares deny them that choice?