15 Feb WCCUSD OKs Plan to Merge Schools, Cut Positions

Faced with a $127 million deficit, WCCUSD leaders approved a plan to merge two schools, cut grades from several schools, and cut job positions. (Screenshot captured by Samantha Kennedy / The CC Pulse)

By Samantha Kennedy

West Contra Costa Unified officials unanimously OK’d a plan that will merge two middle schools, cut positions and eliminate grades from most K-8 schools as part of its plan to solve a more than $127 million deficit.

School board members voted at Wednesday’s meeting to go ahead with the original plan that district staff presented at the Jan. 28 meeting for the 2026-28 school years, with additional plans to try to prevent cuts to elementary community outreach workers and music classes.

Betty Reid Soskin and Pinole middle schools will merge onto Pinole’s site.

Community members first pushed back on the proposals at the last meeting due to concerns over transparency from the district. That prompted over a dozen last-minute listening sessions with more than 500 participants, but the district ultimately only budged on the elementary programming and vowed to see if there was enough interest to keep a Spanish for Spanish speakers class at Kennedy High School.

“None of this is easy, but our responsibility is to make decisions that protect the long-term health of our districts, while standing up for students and families,” said board member Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy.

The plan spreads across the two school years account for the bulk of changes the district has to make — next school year, that means $42.4 million in cuts and another $18 million borrowed from reserves and retiree benefits — but the board previously approved a plan for the current school year with $3.1 million in personnel reductions.

District officials say the move is necessary to stave off the state from taking control of the district’s finances. Board member Jamela Smith-Folds has been at odds with most other members over the cuts, continuously asking what the alternative would be.

“The first thing to do is to stop playing in the community’s face like there’s an alternative budget plan on the table to pay for promises the majority of you made,” Smith-Folds said, referring to agreements made with labor unions. “Stop doing that. Stop acting like we have seen not only this year’s proposal, but next year’s and the third year’s.”

How the district got here was through “the highway of politics,” not leadership, said Smith-Folds.

“Stop playing politics. You are playing with students’ lives, and it’s not OK. Stop doing it,” she added.

Community members have been vocal about how it’ll hurt school communities.

“Closing Betty Reid Soskin Middle School and eliminating all K-8s but West County Mandarin may look like a budget solution on paper, but in reality, it’s community damage,” said Kenitra Mitchell, who works at Betty Reid Soskin.

Hours before members approved the plan after a meeting that went into the next day and suspended their bylaws to extend the meeting, students dominated the discussion. Between leading chants like “When I say they don’t care, you say, ‘about us,’” students in elementary to high school told school board members that the cuts felt rushed and, in some cases, inequitable.

Relations between the community and district leaders, which have been strained since teachers and other staff went on strike in December, were noticeably tense — with a teacher saying the district stopped seeking interested students before a class had been cut and community members refusing to hold their comments on the cuts until the designated comment period.

“I know we’ve been asked to not talk about this until later, but I have a bedtime,” said Sarai R., a student at Betty Reid Soskin. “The school means more to me than just a place to learn. It feels like a second home to me. At this school, I feel safe, supported and truly seen by my amazing teachers.”

School merger and K-8 schools

Some of the biggest opposition was to the merging of the Betty Reid Soskin and Pinole middle schools to save around $900,000.

Betty Reid Soskin students will relocate to the Pinole campus, which the district said will allow for increased course offerings. The move also means that West County Mandarin, a K-8 school, will relocate to the Soskin site.

Students and staff said they were concerned that the merger would tarnish the legacy of Betty Reid Soskin, hurt students by moving them from a small student population to a larger one, and ultimately drive enrollment down.

“Not only are my students brilliant and passionate, but they say that his merger will cause them to leave our district,” said Cristina Kountz, who teaches electives at Betty Reid Soskin. “Without our program, they are lost.”

While K-8 schools will have their seventh and eighth grades removed and place those students in other current middle schools, West County Mandarin will keep its seventh and eighth grades.

Francisco Ortiz, president of the United Teachers of Richmond, questioned how transitioning K-8 students will be integrated into comprehensive middle schools.

“That hasn’t been answered,” said Ortiz

Some outreach workers, elementary music staff could be spared but funded differently

Elementary school community outreach workers, or SCOWs, were among the cuts proposed to the board at the Jan. 28 meeting, but staff said Wednesday they were going to try to walk that back as much as they could.

Gonzalez-Hoy proposed that SCOWs be funded through Title I funding or other one-time funds.

The positions would still receive layoff notices, but the job description would be modified to allow the rehiring of the employees on the different funding source, according to the district.

Elementary music teachers were also set to be cut, but officials said they could be funded through Prop. 28. Interim associate superintendent of business services Jeff Carter said that the cost of the teachers is $1.5 million, while the district receives a total of $4 million in funding.

Andrew Wilke, band director at Richmond High School, said that using Prop. 28 funding on the positions shouldn’t happen.

“You will not find teachers to do this job,” said Wilke. “You will not be able to coordinate the money between the schools.”