Parents, students and staff at A.M. Winn Elementary school could not have been more surprised or more pleased when Sacramento City Unified School District trustees and Superintendent Jonathan Raymond shelved plans this week to close and consolidate district schools.

Winn boosters made up a big part of the overflow crowd that showed up two nights ago to plead with board members to spare their school. The 50-year-old campus sits in a working-class neighborhood at the eastern edge of the district. Designed for more than 500 students, enrollment has dwindled to just 371. Closing Winn, officials calculated, would save the district $181,063 yearly.

Those calculations hadn't impressed Winn's tight-knit community. I got so many calls from teachers and parents there I decided to check it out for myself.

Just hours before trustees did their stunning about-face, I stood Thursday in the morning chill with A.M. Winn Principal Michael Kast as he greeted kids arriving at school, waved to parents and directed traffic. I watched sixth-graders lead the Pledge of Allegiance and pint-sized second-graders struggle with two-digit addition that involved a technique called "grouping."

I was particularly impressed with what Alyce Hammond, the Head Start teacher on campus, told me. A third of the students enrolled come from non-English-speaking homes. Kids like Jesus Luna, who arrived at Winn as a 3-year-old, unable to speak a word of English. But after spending a year at preschool and playing with his buddy Tom Yokoi, Jesus is completely bilingual.

That means he will move on to kindergarten, Hammond explained, ready to tackle the vigorous language arts curriculum the district demands of 5-year-olds.

The preschool is paid for with federal funds. It would have survived, but sadly, not necessarily at the school where Winn students would go if the school closed. Other campuses in the area don't have extra rooms, Hammond says, so there's a danger that the area would be left without a Head Start program – a big loss.

Barbara Hokamp, the mother of a third-grader, lives around the corner from Winn and worries about property values. "Would the empty buildings that used to be a school become a haven for criminals and the homeless?" she wondered.

But more than anything else, the parents, teachers and students talked to me about the fabric of the neighborhood. Sixth-grader Dorian Jones, who led the Pledge of Allegiance, put it best. "Shutting the school down" he said, "is like shutting down the whole community."

Principal Kast was the most realistic. "I understand the fiscal situation the district is in," he told me. Still, he wished the people making decisions would visit the school before deciding to close it.

The fiscal situation is so dire for Sac City schools that Winn Elementary may have to close eventually. But in shelving the closure plan for now, district officials have given themselves time to do the minimum that Winn's principal, teachers, students, and parents have asked. At least visit such schools and talk to the community before deciding which ones to close.

– grutland@sacbee.com

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