Marin Voice: Don’t blame the district for Fairfax-San Anselmo Children’s Center issues

I am profoundly disappointed by the tone and content of the public comments shared at the Ross Valley School District Board of Trustees meeting on Aug. 30 regarding the lease termination of the Fairfax-San Anselmo Children’s Center.

At best, most of the comments reflected widespread misinformation and disinformation. At worst, I felt people were leveling outright lies aimed at vilifying a school district, current and former trustees, as well as current and former staff members.

It was unfair, considering that RVSD has been the center’s sole landlord for the past five decades and cleared a path for creator Ethel Seiderman’s vision to exist and flourish.

The speakers who are children or relative newcomers to the center can be excused for not knowing the 13-year history of RVSD’s numerous efforts (first initiated by Sharon Sagar in 2009) to help it move off the site of the closed Deer Park Elementary School. It’s not so easy, however, to give a pass to the group of public officials from Marin County and the towns of Fairfax and San Anselmo, who appeared not to know the history.

Instead of supporting their RVSD colleagues, some chose to join the raucous and bullying pile-on.

Statements made regarding the Fairfax-San Anselmo Children’s Center “not having enough time” to successfully implement a relocation plan fall short of truth. The long process has been documented in news articles written by the Marin IJ, as well as the District’s BoardDocs online meeting agenda database.

Keep in mind that county and town officials demanded that center students and staff remain for up to nine months in facilities the Marin County Office of Education has deemed unfit. I consider that to be inappropriate, irresponsible, reckless and outside the scope of their expertise.

These officials were clearly pandering to a base with their empty platitudes, false promises, “we’re all in this together” happy talk and their undeserved criticisms of RVSD’s leadership team.

If these elected officials genuinely wanted to help find a solution to this long-standing challenge, where have they been and what actions, specifically, have they offered to take?

Talk is cheap. In my six-year tenure as RVSD’s superintendent, that’s all I ever heard from some officials regarding the Deer Park property. Based on what I saw at the Aug. 30 meeting, nothing has changed. Our county, local towns and school districts deserve better.

Perhaps my greatest disappointment from the meeting was every speaker’s seeming unawareness that the Fairfax-San Anselmo Children’s Center is RVSD’s tenant, not a program hosted by the school district. Speaker after speaker appeared to admonish the board of its responsibility to “take care” of the center or to “find it a new home.”

I did not hear a single person (out of the dozens who spoke) acknowledge the center’s role or responsibility in taking care of and helping itself.

Lastly, as a proud grandparent of kids in the Ross Valley School District, I would very much like to see our district board, as well as the RVSD professional staff, devote more time, attention and resources to actual teaching and learning within the district’s five schools. They should spend less time, attention and resources on a tenant that, even after 13 years of knowing this time would come, seems incapable of proactive planning and independent, autonomous operation.

Every dime and every minute RVSD spends on the Fairfax-San Anselmo Children’s Center is one less dime and one fewer minute spent on the nearly 1,800 children who actually are the district’s responsibility.

Serving those children well requires intense focus and continuous commitment to many important factors, including and especially the recruitment and retention of highly qualified, competitively compensated teachers, staff and leaders. Such focus and commitment are significantly impeded every time the district’s tenant is on the board’s agenda.

The center’s lease ended on Aug. 31. The right thing for its supporters to do right now is stop scapegoating, start taking responsibility and move out of Deer Park.

Rick E. Bagley is the former superintendent of the Ross Valley School District.