Making the case for neighborhood schools. 

State Administrator Damelio’s plan to close Lincoln Elementary School awakened some Vallejoans to the reality they have no elected school board that protects their interests. One writer complained that Damelio uses school board members like his lapdogs. Vallejo's school board members are powerless advisers to Damelio’s authority. However, Vallejoans and their school board created this situation.

Parents are right to complain about State Administrator Damelio’s plan to close well attended neighborhood schools in the heart of the city to establish them on Mare Island, an industrial area, and in Hiddenbrooke, an affluent fringe area. This plan is flawed, because it destroys the benefits cooperative neighborhood organizations bring to the city. Neighborhood organizations and institutions help the city to flourish.

Too often, scientists and government officials believe they know better than nature what is best for human survival. They try replace, rather than support nature’s ways. Remember how smugly science and society introduced cows’ milk baby formulas as a superior replacement for mothers’ breast milk. Decades later they learned this substitution harmed the baby and the mother’s health.

Now society embraces a similar faulty notion that government programs can replace the family role in society. Magnet schools and other public school gimmicks can bring benefits, but not if they replace neighborhood schools for elementary school-age children. Parents and the community have more opportunity to interact with students through neighborhood school programs. Therefore, closing neighborhood schools like Lincoln Elementary School and busing students to distant schools is more likely to increase unruly behavior.

Nature adopted the family unit as the best method for humans to nurture their young. Neighborhoods are an extension of family, a family of families. The family is the basic training unit for children. Therefore, it is no coincidence that students’ test scores vary according to the family unit’s status. Students’ average test scores are lowest and school violence highest where the percentages of dysfunctional and weak family units are highest. Divorce is a prime cause. As divorce rates soar, the quality of American public school education declines relative to other industrialized nations.

Another statistic is that students’ test scores decline as the percentage of men in a family, a group, a neighborhood or a city decline relative to the total number of males. A man is a male who completes his role as responsible father as part of his self-image and not from obligation.

Males give many excuses males give for abandoning their children financially and emotionally. They are racially oppressed. They don’t get along with their children’s mother. They don’t make enough money. They don’t have enough time. They do not care who assumes those duties as long as it does not encroach on their time and money. However, a man completes his responsibilities as father to the best of his ability despite those obstacles, because this is part of his nature. I do not exclude women’s role in rearing children. Nevertheless, most often it is the absence of responsible male conduct that harms children’s future.

Vallejoans have no direct or representative control over their public schools, because they shifted this responsibility to the state. As a result, they cannot preserve their city and neighborhood cultural values by telling elected school board members to hold onto certain culturally significant property and to keep neighborhood schools open. They cannot exercise their educational preferences for public schools. Instead, they can only express their parental wishes to a government official just as parents do who lost their children to government foster care.

A family suffers a stigma when it gives responsibility for its children’s welfare to others and so do cities. One can only guess how this situation subconsciously affects the self-esteem of Vallejo students old enough to understand what happened. Having their parents powerless to keep their neighborhood school open will affect them more.

You cannot place a money value on some cultural elements that affect a community’s vitality. Troubled families, troubled communities and troubled school districts regain direction and vitality by sharing responsibility in a cooperative effort to define and fix problems. Imposing one-person dictatorial rule over a school district is the worst strategy for this task. One person rarely has the insight about all those important cultural elements that affect a community. This is especially true when this person comes from outside the community with primary goals to improve administrative conditions and money matters.

Parents’ protest against the closing of Lincoln Elementary School is an example of the energy a vitalized neighborhood can bring to help solve community problems. It’s too bad more neighborhood organizations did not seek a solution for debt that preserved residents’ control over schools. Hopefully, Damelio will reevaluate the value of neighborhood schools and keep them open.

Kenneth Brooks is a freelance writer and speaker. Contact him at P.O. Box 882, Vallejo, CA 94590. E-mail to: opinion@ethicalego.com.

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