Redwood City School District’s North Star campus changes on pause

Three concerns with North Star were at the core of Wednesday’s discussion. Administrators argue that students heading to North Star in the third grade have caused vacancies at other schools and caused disruptions, admissions testing to get into North Star can be distressing for students who don’t qualify and leads to the perception of elitism and students from Bayside schools appear to lack access to North Star and either the knowledge of its benefits or the ability to commute there.

Superintendent John Baker said the concerns were unforeseen when the school was formed about 25 years ago to provide students who were going unchallenged academically in their grade level with a more enriching environment. The program was placed at the McKinley Institute of Technology just outside downtown Redwood City, and since its inception, it’s earned national recognition as a National Blue Ribbon School and has been ranked one of the best schools in the state.

By early 2020, a North Star Academy Forward Committee was formed and tasked with helping identify how feelings of division could be addressed after some raised the concerns during the district’s 2018 Planning for Our Future process.

Four solutions were presented after years of collaboration among the committee members, the community, administrators and the board. The campus could become a kindergarten through fifth grade school, feeding students into McKinley Institute of Technology. It could remain where it’s at but only serve students in the sixth to eighth grades or move to the Bayside to serve sixth to eighth graders there. Or some grades could move to the Bayside while serving kindergarten through eighth graders.

None of the ideas gained full support from committee members and some members advocated for establishing a program similar to North Star on all district campuses but Baker said the idea was financially infeasible.

No formal decision was to be made during the meeting but the board ultimately agreed significant changes to the school should be paused and any closing of the school was out of the picture, siding with the dozens of parents who showed up to the board’s meeting, in person and virtually, to speak out against all the suggestions and to implore the board to leave North Star as it is.

One of those parents, Cameron Hoffman, said in a phone interview that the focus on changing North Star has been a waste of district resources and an abdication of responsibility by those in charge of leading. During the meeting, she suggested the board instead consider adopting a program, titled Shine, that would begin readying students in neighborhood schools to enter North Star, starting in the first grade.

“Most importantly, Redwood City’s neediest young learners in all our neighborhood schools would benefit, or at a minimum, if we want to bite it off in pieces, let’s start with Shine at all three Bayside sites, not just North Star at one of them. Let’s meet everyone’s needs,” Hoffman said.

Instead of making sweeping changes to the school, Trustee Mike Wells also suggested the district pilot a few ideas to determine which worked, sharing his strongest concern for how the district handles the intake process.

Ultimately, Wells raised concerns that the board didn’t have enough information to properly weigh the tradeoffs of selecting any of the four suggested solutions. He also argued that some concerns may need to be addressed at a broader level rather than being focused on North Star.

“Every change that we make is going to have an influence on what the right decision is on the next one,” Wells said. “I’m not really optimistic that even once we have all the details out that we’d ever be able to say that one is the exact right one. … They’re always going to have knock-on effects and it’s really hard, as much as we think about what those knock-on effects might be, to be certain we know what they all are.”

Baker said the district’s short staffing levels would limit any possibility of new or additional work being done on the issue but agreed to move forward with three ideas that would have been enacted regardless of which option the board selected.

Those changes include hiring more Spanish speaking staff at North Star with a staff member serving as a liaison to the three Bayside campuses, conducting greater outreach to families so they understand what North Star is and how to enter its programming and proving universal testing to all second graders while working to ensure students at all campuses are receiving adequate programming.

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