Sacramento News & Review - Sacramento city district's worst practices on school closures - Bites - Opinions - February 7, 2013

Sacramento News & Review - Sacramento city district's worst practices on school closures - Bites - Opinions - February 7, 2013:

Sacramento city district's worst practices on school closures
Sacramento News & Review

By Cosmo Garvin 
cosmog@newsreview.com

This article was published on 02.07.13.

Related stories: Downsizing the district Sacramento neighborhood schools to be shuttered, and the superintendent's “priority schools” will be spared. SN&R, 01.24.13. Superintendent man and the meddling mayor Michell Rhee and Mayor Kevin Johnson screw with other people's school systems, and Superintendent Jonathan Raymond sets The New York Times straight on Race to the Top. SN&R, 11.08.12. High-school shuffle Is it time for a new high school in East Sac? And what about Sac High? SN&R, 06.02.11.

The more you peel back the layers of the Sacramento City Unified School District’s brutal “rightsizing” plan, the weirder it gets.
The administration wants to shutter 11 elementary schools—one out of every five run by the district. It’s a drastic solution, suited for a drastic problem. Unfortunately, it’s not clear what problem the school board and SuperintendentJonathan Raymond are trying to solve.
Is it the district’s short-term budget deficit? We won’t know the size of the shortfall until the state budget becomes clearer, but we do know school closures—estimated to save only $2.5 million a year—likely won’t close the gap. Where will the rest of the money come from? What alternative cost-saving measures have been considered, and then rejected, before escalating to the nuclear option of closing schools?
Or is the district trying to solve a long-term problem of declining enrollment and structural deficit? That’s not a new problem. Why ram the solution down the public’s throat at the last minute? (District officials are allowing just five weeks between announcing the closures and the final vote by the district board of trustees, scheduled on Thursday, February 21.)
Maybe some school closures make sense. The California Department of Education suggests a number of “best practices” to help the public decide. It starts with formation of something called a District Advisory Committee “before decisions are made about school closure.”
The CDE says: “Gathering the facts must be as credible, transparent and non-political as possible. So, at the very least, the DAC …