Several Tucson Unified School District campuses may be enlarged to create room for more students in more grade levels in the approaching academic years. A total of five proposals were put to a vote by the TUSD governing board on Tuesday night, with four of the actions passing unanimously.
The proposed expansion to Sabino High School was a contentious 3-2 vote in favor, however all the decisions are pending Department of Justice approval to make sure the district complies with the more than 40-year-old desegregation court case.
The Sabino proposal would allow seventh and eighth graders who would normally go to Magee Middle School to attend Sabino instead. The proposal was originally attached to the expansion of Fruchtendler and Collier elementary schools to include sixth graders, which normally feed into Sabino. Although the proposal was later fractured, the development of the two aforementioned elementary campuses passed unanimously during the governing board vote.
The protest of the expansion comes from both the plaintiffs and the desegregation expert appointed to oversee the ongoing court case, Special Master Willis Hawley. The worry is that Magee Middle School will drop in student population and begin to serve specifically lower income, minority students. This would be due to more higher income families choosing to go to Sabino as higher income families have more access to transportation to get their children to school everyday.
Attempts to alleviate these concerns in the proposal include express buses from ethnically concentrated areas to Sabino. It was noted at the meeting that express buses would be an extra expenditure and that efforts to promote express have been lackluster in the past.
Many parents don’t see Magee as a viable option to school their children, according to Kimberly Mulligan, a fourth grade teacher at Fruchtendler. She said she doesn’t know one student who says they’re going to Magee.
Many families choose to leave the district during middle school years in order to avoid sending their kids to Magee, and they often don’t return, said Sabino High School Principal Matt Munger. He said the expansion of Sabino was the best option to attract and retain students to the district and spoke against the concerns of the desegregation plaintiffs that the expansion would promote segregation.
“In attempting to rectify the sins of the past, the plaintiffs are committing the same sins upon this community’s current students,” Munger said. “In their quest to find a solution to the egregious actions committed 40 years ago their solution is now resulting in the active loss of opportunities today. That is no solution.”
The proposal had additional support from teachers like Christine Gronowski, a biology teacher at Sabino, who said that adding the two grade levels would bring a better level of consistency to students.
The vote was splintered by board members Michael Hicks and Mark Stegeman voting no to the proposal. Stegeman’s concern was that the complaints from the plaintiffs and Hawley would make the proposal null when it stood up to court review. Hicks’ concerns were that the wide age range on the Sabino campus, seventh to 12th grade, could be a detriment.
The remaining three board members, including Adelita Grijalva, passed the measure, but it is still in the hands of the U.S. District Court to determine whether the measures comply with the desegregation case.
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2015.
” The worry is that Magee Middle School will drop in student population and begin to serve specifically lower income, minority students. This would be due to more higher income families choosing to go to Sabino as higher income families have more access to transportation to get their children to school everyday.”
Do you really expect us to believe that renters and homeowners near Speedway/Camino Seco ($150,000-$200,00 homes) do not have cars? Or is it that they expect someone else to transport their children for them?
When will reporters go back to asking logical questions?
I have to agree. It is ridiculous to make excuses for the lazy incompetent ones. If you want something bad enough, be willing to do something to earn it. Legitimately.
Stop trying to make a story out of somebody earning more than somebody else. We have made jealousy and envy somehow in vogue.
It’s not.
TUSD is a disaster. The board needs to be REMOVED, we do not have money to pay teachers a decent wage but we do have money to cover construction costs. Why does the Supt. of TUSD have a 1/2 million dollar salary plus bennies? Kevin V. Sinclair Tucson resident.
“The remaining three board members, including Adelita Grijalva” ?
Why not use the appropriate term, “the TUSD board majority”?
Tanner Clinch: do you understand what the dynamics of this board have been since January of 2013, when Ms. Grijalva’s two BFF’s, Kristel Foster and Cam Juarez, joined her on this governing body and began following her lead on every blessed issue that came before them? Not too long after they formed their gang-of-three, they chose their idol and hero, H.T. Sanchez, as Superintendent. Since then all three of these politicians whom voters elected as part of the district’s “leadership” team have instead been following their employee in lock step, following him down the primrose path into ill-considered initiatives like the “Infant and Early Child Learning Centers” and a ridiculously inflated superintendent compensation package that outraged the community surrounding this sadly underfunded district.
Do you consider it a relevant detail that H.T. Sanchez’s family utilizes Fruchthendler, and that one consequence of the proposed plan is that the Sanchez family (if they stay in Tucson that long) will not have to send their children to Magee? How about the fact that the original proposal was the Fruchthendler-Sabino one, which was rejected by the deseg authority, after which the other proposals were bundled into the deal?
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/tusd-plan-to-expand-sabino-fruchthendler-rejected/article_aa0cbbc7-b60d-55df-88e8-a3721f47a0c6.html
Dare we say that the intent in creating this bundle of expansions might have been to make it appear that the proposed changes weren’t just a northeast-side-privileged-parent-fear-of-TUSD-middle-schools issue, but a broader, district-wide attempt at strategic changes to combat attrition?
Coverage of TUSD keeps getting passed from one hapless blogger to the next, like a hot potato. It’s amusing to observe the newbies try to figure out how to handle this gift without getting burned.
What a move by the Grijalva’s with their documented liar and bigot, H.T. Sanchez. Get all the white kids out of Magee and concentrate them at Sabino. Then Magee becomes another node of Grijalva’s largest radical chicano indoctrination center in the country. As current residents flee, the homes will be rented and filled with the ‘golden people’.
And Sabino, now that we got all the whitey’s in one place, the Grijalva’s can steal your education dollars to recruit more illegals give to the ‘majority minority’.
In TUSD, if you ain’t brown, you ain’t down.
What does David Safier think of this?
Transportation is a huge issue and it is the main reason some children cannot go to charter schools also. Please do your research . Segregation has happened in all school districts because of this but especially in TUSD because it has a high number of poor people compared to the surrounding areas. Many of these homes have single parents who work. Schools get out before many places of employment. Even if it is a 2 parent home, many both work at low paying jobs. There is much written about this and documented which is a primary objection to charter schools. Supposedly they give more choice to all but not the poorer families and also special education students. We need integration of all social-economic levels in our schools for the good of all children. The reasons to monitor and watch how money is spent must go to all public education schools.
Guardians, you write, “We need integration of all social-economic levels in our schools for the good of all children.”
That must mean you want to abolish private schools and deny the rich the right to enroll their children wherever they please. You will require the 1% to enroll their children in TUSD, preferably in the schools serving the poorest, most troubled student populations, so that proper “balance” between high and low can be achieved. Good luck accomplishing that in a country where economic elites are allowed to set the policy agenda.
Or perhaps your more modest, achievable goal is only to ensure that middle class families are not allowed to exit districts like TUSD, as they have been doing for the past decade by the thousands? Any student who cannot afford to pay tuition in a private school should be under lock-and-key in public districts that the community can’t find a way of holding accountable for serving students’ best interests.
Not a sane policy agenda for students, but perhaps we can understand why employees of the district would promote it….
As far as (all) Middle Schools go (everywhere) I always thought Magee was not that bad, and now I am curious about more of the reasons why “families choose to leave the district during middle school years in order to avoid sending their kids to Magee.” Mentioned in passing here as a “detriment” here is something I have seen in the past: there is a safety factor where middle schoolers, especially the girls, are exposed to far older high school students. Such access can be irresponsible as the young ones get drawn far too easily into older teens’ intrigues.
Why not find out why people want to avoid sending their children to Magee and develop programs that make it a more attractive option?
“Equity” I have no desire to abolish private schools that wealthy pay for themselves. I went to a private school and my parents paid for the specialty that went beyond the curriculum of regular public schools. I was referring to schools paid for with tax payer money….. but of course you knew that. Transportation is a huge issue. In addition, lock and key? You have got to be kidding. I demand as a tax payer, parent and grandparent of children in regular public schools that there be equality on oversight and services for all with taxpayer money. We are putting the poor at much more of a disadvantage…. no level playing field. No, we can differentiate all we want but there needs to be certain standards for all schools in public education.
Guardians: get TUSD to actually live up to “certain standards” — any reasonable standards for oversight of taxpayer funds and equitable distribution of them within the district — and then we can talk about what improvements need to be made (and there are many) in regulatory oversight of charters and schools benefiting from vouchers.
Take this issue of Fruchthendler-Sabino, for example. Social justice advocates object to taxpayer money being spent to create programs in east side schools that they say enable privileged east side parents to keep their kids out of a TUSD school (Magee) they do not want their children attending. Why, as Betty Cooper Sanchez suggested, would those same funds not be invested in Magee to improve the quality of education there and make it a more attractive option? Wouldn’t this serve your stated goal of “integration of…social-economic levels in our schools” more than the creation of a Fruchthendler-Sabino pipeline, one of the initiatives the TUSD board just passed?
Also, you should recognize that as long as you “have no desire to abolish private schools that wealthy pay for themselves” and as long as you don’t have a systematic plan for improving the widely varying conditions within and between various public school districts, you do not actually support the goal of “integration of all social-economic levels in our schools.” You only support the much more limited (and harder to defend) goal of maintaining a broader range of socio-economic levels within TUSD by de-funding charter and voucher programs that allow children who can’t afford private schools to exit the district, if they choose to do so. Transportation IS a huge issue, and it may be much more of a burden on families that want to exit dysfunctional TUSD schools to transport their kids to other public districts than to get them to a nearby charter or private that provides tax-credit funded financial aid programs.
You think low-SES parents unhappy with conditions in TUSD should stick around and wait for the TUSD board to improve conditions for them? This school expansions plan just passed, which, by-in-large does not serve social justice or integration goals, just makes it even clearer that that is NOT the district’s priority.
Mark Stegeman posted on Facebook a very appropriate discussion of his visit to Magee recently. All of you should read it.
Do not respond t “Guardians”, do not read “Guardians” She is a racist against white people. Her whole agenda is one of jealously of people who work, have money and want to be around other people who have money and work.
Minorities and the poor can never do wrong in her opinion. She will never be happy until she has white slaves.