Davis parents pack meeting to decide fate of junior high

Concerned parents gathered Monday night at Emerson Junior High School in Davis for a special meeting to discuss the school's possible closure, and an alternative proposal to restructure the city's secondary schools to deal with a budget crisis plaguing the high-performing district.

Linda Lukas, parent of a sixth-grader who would attend Emerson next fall, was one of 200 to 300 people who filled the school's auditorium.

"We bought a house and paid dearly for it in West Davis," she said. The neighborhood schools provided the first time her son had been able to ride his bike to school, she said.

"We never would have bought here if we had known this situation would have come up," she said, adding that closure of the school would affect house prices in the area.

Members of the Davis school board said they were unlikely to make any decisions until their regular meeting Thursday.

With declining enrollment and proposed state budget cuts, the Davis school district is facing a $4 million funding shortfall, based on the governor's January budget figures.

Just a few weeks ago, the closure of Emerson, one of three junior high schools in Davis, seemed a near certainty. The school is operating under capacity and needs updating.

School officials said closing it and moving its students to the two other junior high schools in town would save nearly $600,000 annually.

But parents, upset about the closure of a neighborhood school in West Davis, rallied in the city's Central Park and marched on the school district offices to protest the closure.

Two days later, at a school board meeting March 20, board members seemed to shy away from closing Emerson and instead embraced an option to move about 250 students from Leonardo da Vinci High School, an alternative program, to the junior high school campus.

They also discussed a reconfiguration of all secondary schools, with all ninth-graders – who now attend junior high schools – moving to Davis High School or da Vinci.

Superintendent James Q. Hammond said Monday the changes would save $420,000, up from the $120,000 in savings previously projected.

Board President Sheila Allen said the district is hoping for good news from the May revision of the governor's budget.

Board members also are optimistic that by May, the nonprofit Davis Schools Foundation will have raised enough private donations to offset the deficit.

The foundation has undertaken a campaign to raise $1 a day, or $365 a year, for each child enrolled in Davis schools. The group hopes to garner about $3 million total.

Davis schools have been hard hit by declining enrollment, a problem affecting about half of the state's more than 1,000 school districts.

At Monday's meeting, dozens of parents, teachers and students came to the microphone and said Emerson was a special place, with a supportive environment, small class sizes, and offerings such as gardening and an integrated gifted program not found at other area schools.

Others suggested Davis residents would be willing to support a new parcel tax or bond measure to pay for school programs.

Many speakers – including Gustavo Soberano and Frances McChesney, co-presidents of the Emerson Parent-Teacher Association – said the current junior high configuration of grades seven through nine should be maintained. Ninth-graders, they said, were not ready for high school.

They urged board members to seek creative solutions and to spread cuts across the district, rather than closing Emerson.

Lorne Silverstein said he had moved from the East Coast to live in the progressive university town with its esteemed schools.

"I moved from 3,000 miles away to educate my kids in Davis," he told the board members. "We have great thinkers, great brains, in this community. We have passion. Tap into it."

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