How can you help a depressed and blighted community if you don’t ask the community what it wants? This question occurred to Bites while attending the 7-11 committee meeting for Collis P. Huntington Elementary School last Monday. Maybe a half-dozen members of the public showed up that night.
What’s a “7-11 committee,” you ask? And who cares?
Exactly.
The 7-11 group will recommend whether C.P. Huntington and six other schools, all
closed by the Sacramento City Unified School District earlier this year, should be turned into private schools or charter schools or reused for some other public purpose. The name is arcane, referring to the number of committee members. And the committee’s recommendation is just that—the SCUSD board has the ultimate power. But it’s a big decision, and these are valuable public assets, affecting whole communities.
Unfortunately, SCUSD has done very little effective outreach on school reuse. There’s a link on the district’s website and in its electronic newsletter, which says “7-11 committee meeting” and gives a date. If you click enough times, you can find out more, but as committee member
Michael Minnick noted, “Why would you click on it? Unless you were looking for a
Slurpee?”
And so, no one showed up. The committee—all appointed members of the public, many connected in some way with education policy or local politics—asked questions of staff, mostly about process. There was a quick tour of the school. A couple of folks spoke on behalf of the private
Camellia Waldorf School, which hopes to lease a “surplus” school site. That was the only proposal.
“I’m really disappointed in the outreach,” said SCUSD Board of Education member
Diana Rodriguez, who showed up near the end of the meeting. She said she wouldn’t have known about it if she hadn’t happened to see a flier for the meeting posted at another school site earlier that day. “When you have fewer than 10 people show up, we have to get more community input.”
Of course, community input didn’t amount to much when the school-board majority set its mind on closing all these schools (Rodriguez was opposed). And Bites suspects the district and certain board members already know exactly what they plan to do with at least some of the campuses. Doesn’t mean they should be left alone to do it.
The next 7-11 committee meeting is at Fruit Ridge Elementary on October 21, from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. So far, the schedule is every Monday at that same time, though it may change. After Fruit Ridge comes Joseph Bonnheim, then Maple, Mark Hopkins, and Washington elementary schools
