Trustees ripped for not saving Marin City program - Marin IJ - March 11, 2006 - by Don Speich, Marin IJ Reporter

Trustees ripped for not saving Marin City programMarin IJ - March 11, 2006
Don Speich

marinij.com/news/ci_3588614



The head of a key social-service organization in Marin blasted trustees of the Sausalito Marin City School District Thursday night for failing to help relocate 175 underprivileged preschool and after-school children attending programs in Marin City.
"We are struggling to stay in this community because you have chosen not to work with us," said Gail Theller, executive director of Community Action Marin, a group that has been running preschool and after-school programs in Marin City for 40 years.

CAM runs several programs at Marin City's Manzanita Learning Center, a former school site it leases from the district. It has been told it must leave to make room for the construction of a new middle school.

With the exception of a possible portable classroom the district has not offered any additional space for the programs.

Theller was joined in her criticisms of the district by Trustee Whitney Hoyt, the principal of Mill Valley Middle School, who agreed - as her fellow trustees sat stone-faced and silent - that CAM had been treated poorly by the district.

"CAM is being stonewalled and we do not get together and meet with them until they get an eviction letter that is unsigned," she said.

Theller, looking directly at board members and occasionally back into the room packed with child-care supporters, said, "For over 40 years we've had a wonderful relationship with the school district, which has provided space which is at a premium. I am saddened to say at this point CAM does not have a relationship with the school district."

The children "desperately" need the programs, she said, and "we are the only resource you have in the community at this point."

"There is little left to say since you have chosen not to talk to me," she said.

Trustee Shirley Thornton, who had been critical of CAM for failing to produce what she said were adequately prepared children for the district's primary grades, said: "We have been assessing every program in the district and we want the best programs for our children.

"If programs don't meet muster we don't keep them," she said. "Our job is to make sure children that leave here can make it through Tam (Tamalpais High School). So please, this is not personal."

Theller and others from CAM said they are working with the Marin City Community Services District to see if it is feasible to have some classes at the Manzanita Recreation Center.

But, she said, there is no space for the Head Start children and as a result, "some children are going to lose child care because we will not have enough space."

She said some Head Start children may be able to attend programs in San Rafael and Novato, if they can find transportation.

As the result of a successful $15.9 million bond election in 2004, the district plans to raze the center and replace it with a new Martin Luther King Middle School, now occupying temporary quarters about 100 yards behind the center.

Construction is scheduled for November. The district has provided no other site for CAM, except for a portable building on its Bayview Elementary School site, a few miles away in Sausalito.

The portable could hold only 22 students, according to CAM officials. No other site has been offered because the district does not have the space needed for the programs, district and CAM officials said.

Of the 175 children served by the programs, 65 are from Marin City and the remainder come from other county communities but mostly from San Rafael's Canal district.

Trustees say if the district takes over the preschool programs these youngsters will be excluded because the district can no longer afford to transport them, board president George Stratigos said.

School officials have said they expect preschools to continue next year but that it is likely they will not be provided by Community Action Marin. Trustees maintain the programs have failed to provide children with the skills needed to be successful in the district's primary grades.

The trustees have set ambitious goals for raising the academic achievement levels - now among the worst in the state - for its 350 students, and they believe CAM programs are handicapping their desire to make the district, as it was put by Stratigos Wednesday, "the best district in the county."

The board president said his vision of a perfect preschool "is not one that looks like a ghetto school" but rather one that is more upscale, "that may cost $10,000 a year" for children from the well-to-do and nothing for low-income children who could "attend on government grants."

Theller says she "is perplexed" by the district's growing disenchantment and estrangement with her organization.

Theller noted an evaluation of the program last year by the state Department of Education that gave good marks to the programs.

"Children are offered an exceptional variety of activities and materials to enhance their growth and development," states the evaluation. "In their interactions with children, staff is warm and caring, helping children to understand and respect one another by modeling this behavior themselves."

Theller said the programs deal with "the entire family; it is certainly a lot more complicated than the school district wants us (the public) to believe."

Disenchantment with the programs seems, at least in part, to have originated at a California School Board Association meeting on preschool last year, where trustees say they learned that the children sent to them from the preschool programs didn't, for example, have as an extensive of a vocabulary as was expected.

Trustee Tom Clark has said the afternoon school programs have failed as well.

"No one gets more tutoring than these (after-school) kids - and it's not working."

Theller said she found this particular criticism curious since, she said, it is the district, not CAM, who is running the after-school program.