malvasia bianca

Another meeting at Castro last night. Not too much excitement in the community comments. I did admire (?) the chutzpah of a certain group of parents in the dual immersion program who talked about how horrible it was to close a school in that community, and then floated a plan which would turn the school into a collection of magnet programs, closing down the neighborhood program that kids in the community actually attend. (Not that they couldn’t attend the magnet programs, they just wouldn’t get priority.) I liked the guy who talked about how nobody is talking about closing Huff, despite its being as segregated as Castro, even though leaving Huff open mainly helps about a hundred kids in its neighborhood, all of whose parents have multiple cars to drive their kids to school anyways…

I actually missed the most interesting part, which was the budget discussion and voting. The district’s finance director now no longer believes that they’ll be able to rent out a school next year if they close one. So the new budget doesn’t include any actual revenue from closing a school, and is mum on the issue on whether or not they’ll reduce costs by closing a school (and, for example, eliminating jobs).

Which is a ray of hope. If they close a school, I still tend to think that they’ll close Slater. (And I can’t say I have an informed opinion about whether it would be less harmful to close Slater or Castro.) But maybe the budget news will give one trustee an excuse to shift her vote away from closing a school next year…