Valley Oak – in the act of creation

Excerpts of a letter dated March 5, 2007

Dear Members of the Davis Board of Education,

I have heard you want straight talk from the stakeholders, so I offer the following as teacher and administrative designee at Valley Oak for eleven years, and I served as summer school principal at DSHS last year. I have taught K-12 since 1986.

I have worked and lived in various communities around the country, and have taught at every level in two states. Every school board in whose districts I have lived or worked was pressured by parents to secure what they believe is the best they can for their own kids. I suspect this is a biological urge we all share. In communities that are diverse, there is also a phenomenon they all share in that those who have the resources, sophistication and know-how to gather influence over process tend to find clever ways to articulate their needs, resulting in a shift of focus and resources away from those less richly endowed. Davis is no different, except that there is a somewhat famous self-perception of Davis leadership that Davis somehow is different. As I have watched your community (I do not live here, but in Sacramento County), I have found this particular blind spot, both in the town and district, to be particularly destructive in regard to the treatment of ethnic minorities, and I have watched this dynamic at work at Valley Oak these past eleven years.

Student teaching for me was in Greenwich, CT, one of the wealthiest communities on the planet, though they also have the “west side of town” with a concentration of working class, by a polluted river shared with New York State. That would be the other end of town from where George H.W. Bush grew up. That district supported the neighborhood schools in that part of town, an elementary and a middle school, with flexible, team-based curricular programming, inspired leadership, and dedicated teachers, creative and well-executed elements of program not widely distributed across the district. As a result, those students became virtually indistinguishable from their classmates at the high school. That district recognized the need for those concentrated services, and they would not have dreamed of redistributing students to less favorable, less supportive school environments. For the life of me, I cannot imagine how Davis leaders can so lightly toss around the prospect of closing the one site where needed programs for the Valley Oak demographic are being particularly successful. The only explanation I can offer is that influential sectors of Davis society have succeeded in defining the mission of the district so completely, so exclusively, that Valley Oak disappears from the greater public vision. It is very disturbing, not to mention sad, for us at Valley Oak to have become so invisible regarding our value as an institution.

Bill Storm, Science Specialist, Valley Oak Elementary