HAYWARD — Faced with a declining student enrollment and growing budget deficit, the Hayward Unified School District might be forced to close or merge as many as eight elementary and middle school campuses over the next three years.
District officials tried to explain the grim news to hundreds of dismayed parents who attended a virtual town hall Monday night to plead for them to consider other options. The school board is scheduled to approve, modify or reject the school closure plan Nov. 17.
“What’s become clear is that we have more facilities than we need,” district spokesperson Dionicia Ramos said in an interview before the meeting.
Ramos noted that the district has lost about 2,000 students in the past couple of years, faces a $14 million budget shortfall and would need to find more than $900 million to properly upgrade many of its aging campuses. The district already has cut almost $13 million over the past five years.
“It’s really about the students and their experiences in Hayward,” district Superintendent Matt Wayne said at the town hall. “And it’s us having the difficult conversations to ensure that we are setting the district up for success, to ensure our students and our children have an equitable educational experience.”
District officials blame the Bay Area’s high cost of living as a main reason for its declining enrollment as families leave the region. It’s a trend borne out by 2020 census figures that show the share of California residents age 18 and younger has dropped in all Bay Area counties from a decade ago.
District officials also noted that the pandemic contributed to the problem, although they didn’t specify how many students they lost as a result.
Statewide, enrollment in K-12 public schools in California fell by almost 3%, or 160,000 students, in 2020-21, according to annual data released this spring by the Department of Education. That’s the largest enrollment drop in two decades, according to CalMatters.
The nonprofit journalism organization reported many parents decided to pull their kids out of public schools that offered little or no in-person learning and enroll them in charter schools; others held their children out of kindergarten.
“Our current structure of schools is based on a time when we had over 24,000 students over 20 years ago,” according to a staff report for the Hayward school board. “We were at 19,000 last year and (are going to continue) to decline for the foreseeable future.”
The district will have a series of virtual town hall meetings to get feedback on its “Operational Sustainability” plan, which lays out the reasons behind the possible closures.
Mercedes Faraj, president of the Hayward Education Association, which represents teachers and has about 1,200 members, could not be reached for comment.
But the association questioned the district’s proposal on its website: “The district says the announced closures are not yet a finalized plan. But announcing the closure of eight specific schools sounds like a plan to us. The announcement includes new boundaries to be created, where students would be moved, impacts on teachers, increasing school capacity, and more. It also fails to take important considerations into account, and lacks the time, thoughtfulness, and stakeholder participation required to be successful.”
According to the district’s proposal, Bowman, Eldridge, Glassbrook and Strobridge elementary schools would close in 2022-23, along with Faith Ringgold School of Arts and Science and Anthony Ochoa Middle School. Staff and programs at the Helen Turner Children’s Center and the Student Information & Assessment Center would move to elementary school campuses.
East Avenue Elementary School would close in 2023-24 and the Brenkwitz Continuation High School and the Hayward Adult School would move into the former Ochoa campus.
Cesar Chavez and Bret Harte middle schools would close in 2024-2025, with the students and staff at Bret Harte shifting into the former East Avenue Elementary School campus.
Sabrina Reyes, the parent of a kindergartner, said at Monday’s town hall that students such as her son with special needs will be especially impacted if the district goes forward with the plan.
“With these kids that need special accommodation, and they need more customized scenarios for learning, by shutting down all of these schools that have a significant amount of special day classes, you are really disrupting them, not only the teachers,” Reyes said.
Luis Colindres, president of the PTA at Fairview Elementary School, said he accepted the need for school closures.
“If it had to come down to closing schools and having good teachers at all the schools — school closures would be my way to go,” Colindres said.
According to Hayward district officials, more than 40% of elementary and middle school students attend campuses that are 60 to 70 years old, which have aging infrastructure that is costly to maintain.
If a campus does close, the district might sell the property to generate revenue, Ramos said.
The district has 25 elementary schools, five middle schools and three high schools, as well as an alternative high school and an adult school.
