Letter to the Publisher:
School Board taking John Muir campus
John Muir is a wonderful K-12 public school of about 300 kids in our neighborhood that the school board is threatening to close because they want our campus to build a magnet middle school to compete with the incoming High Tech High in 2018.
Our John Muir families are heartbroken at how the school board and school district have treated our school and set us up to be discarded. Every family at our school has choiced in. However even though our classes are well under the maximum ratios the district turns kids away from choicing into our school. And that’s if they can ever find us on the district website to begin with. Due to “glitches” our incoming kinder families have to dig and dig sometimes looking under a high school heading to find info and choice in to John Muir. Our school was buried on their website. We’ve had volunteers working tirelessly for over a year to get the same presence on the district website as the other public schools and still haven’t been successful. They set us up to have low numbers and are now using that as an excuse to try and shut us down. Despite that we persist. We love our school and we love our kids.
My Kindergartener has Sensory processing disorder and anxiety (diagnosed), but at John Muir he’s been able to learn successfully without an IEP and with very little accommodation. I attribute this to the community we’ve built here, of thoughtful caring teachers and families, and the small campus. Just stepping foot onto the campus of Holmes makes him anxious. It’s a huge campus cram packed with 500+ little kids. Our school has been a blessing for him when I thought I was going to have to put him in a charter or private school to find this type of an environment.
We’ve had several meetings with school board representatives and can’t make any sense of why they’re doing this. There’s insane budget cuts going on, but they want to retrofit our campus to create this magnet school that would require busing kids in to attend or taking kids from our neighborhood middle schools that are already struggling. We couldn’t get approved to put in a locking front gate to close our campus, but they can spend money ripping out perfectly good play structures to accommodate a middle school. It makes no sense.
Thank you from a concerned parent,
