Appeals from the parents of two former Nicasio School students asking the Marin County Board of Education to reverse a decision last spring to deny enrollment to their children were rejected last month.
One parent criticized the decision about her child as insufficiently considerate of the special circumstances around her son, an interdistrict transfer student whom she believes the school had long wanted to remove—a claim the school denied.
Nicasio School, where roughly half the students in its kindergarten through eighth grade program have transferred in from other districts, turned down three re-enrollment requests from transfers because of capacity issues in the classroom comprised of third, fourth and fifth graders. If all renewal requests had been accepted, the classroom would have exceeded its current cap by three students.
But the school did allow five other transfer students into that class, prioritizing them because they had siblings at the school. Renewal requests for the other classrooms were all approved.
At the same time, however, a substantial structural budget deficit spurred the school to deny all new transfer requests. School board members were worried they might need to reduce their classrooms from three to two in the future, and did not want to accept transfers they later might be forced to deny.
Hearings for the two appeals to the education board were held in closed session on Aug. 9 for privacy reasons, so the deliberations were inaccessible to the public and media.
One parent, through an intermediary, declined to comment on her appeal. But another parent, Sharron Drake, an Inverness Park resident, shared her letter of appeal and many other documents related to the matter.
Ms. Drake believes the basis on which the school made its decision on the three transfer students, who have attended school in Nicasio for years, did not comport with her reading of school policy, particularly the favoring of students with siblings.
In fact, she argues that the decision to deny all three requests arose from a wish to remove her son specifically. She says the district had provided a litany of special education services to her son, some of which she believes were unnecessary and a way to lay the groundwork to unjustly remove him from the school. But at the end of the day, board members found another way to deny him enrollment, she said.
“We have tried to entertain discussion this year with the board regarding the interdistrict transfer policies with regard to class size and special education capacity limits because they appear to be targeting Everett directly with the intent to remove him from school due to his differences,” Ms. Drake wrote to the board in May.
In documents filed as part of the appeal process and provided to the Light by Ms. Drake, school officials claimed they followed proper procedures and denied that Everett was ever discriminated against, providing him services they say were required based on his evaluations.
School board president Jason Snell did not comment by press time. The principal, Christy Stocker, resigned this summer, and has been replaced with an interim principal. Ms. Stocker did not respond to an email seeking comment. Mary Jane Burke, the superintendent of Marin County schools, said she could not comment on the appeal because it was a closed-session matter.
Ms. Drake enrolled Everett in kindergarten at Nicasio in the fall of 2012, seeking out the small school because she felt the student body—about 50 or so kids—and multi-grade classroom suited Everett, an intelligent boy for whom social situations can be tough.
In February 2015, during second grade, the school evaluated Everett for special education services. Ms. Drake says she was shocked when the district outlined four different types of services for her son, and she asked if they could be modified. She says she was told they could not, so she signed off on the recommendations in June.
That very day, she says, Ms. Stocker, the principal, told her that Everett would probably not be readmitted the following fall because of new special-education program caps that the board would likely approve at a meeting scheduled for that night.
Providing special education services is expensive, particularly for a small district like Nicasio. Last May, those services were cited at a board meeting as a significant expense and part of the reason the school is now struggling with a structural budget deficit.
The special-education program caps were approved in June 2015. In an email to board members around that time—and in response to a letter to the board from Ms. Drake—Ms. Stocker said she was only trying to be honest when she told Ms. Drake and her husband, Matt Gallagher, about the forthcoming caps after Ms. Drake signed the papers. She said she wanted to make clear that their child could still enroll in the coming school year, but after that she could make no promises.
“My motivation for sharing this [information with Everett’s parents] was to assure them that this would not impact his 2015-16 attendance. However I told them that I wanted to be transparent and up front with them that the revised policy would affect how we look at all renewal requests in subsequent school years.” Since the school was already over capacity for special education for 2015-16, Ms. Stocker said it would very likely be over capacity the following year.
Yet Everett’s parents and the district disagreed about how many services he needed. Ms. Drake and a special-education lawyer she hired to help her decipher the issues, believed Everett—whose most recent state test scores had him “above standard” in language arts and math—needed far fewer services then he was being offered, based on his evaluations. When Ms. Drake tried to rescind her approval of the recommendations—in order to hire private services instead—the principal told her the school would file a complaint against her so it could provide them without parental consent. The school said it was Nicasio’s legal duty to provide them.
“We were distressed at the prospect of having litigation filed against us (which I am told could cost us as well as the District around $60K) and we were shocked that the District was fighting so hard to have this expensive service with the school,” Ms. Drake wrote to the Light.
In the end, Everett wasn’t denied enrollment because of the special education caps, but because of a lack of classroom capacity. In her appeal, Ms. Drake argued that the district did not follow its transfer policy in that decision, and was instead maneuvering to deny her son enrollment.
Ms. Drake’s reading of the transfer policy asserts that the district should have first determined if a specific grade had more students than other grades—in fact, the fifth grade had several more students than third and fourth—and to first focus on balancing grades. She said the policy requires transfer students to be chosen by a lottery, and does not allow prioritizing those with siblings.
She also emphasized that at a March 2016 board meeting, school board members had approved a revision to the policy to allow classrooms to exceed existing caps. The revision was meant “to accommodate interdistrict transfer students similar to Everett who have had their entire academic [career] at Nicasio School,” Ms. Drake wrote in a letter to the board in May.
She also argued that, in fact, Everett should be not be considered a transfer student, as his original application for enrollment noted that a parent works in the district and a state law allows them to claim residency. She also noted that the policy currently posted on the school website says that parental employment in the district provides a basis for claiming residency.
Supporters of the family, including the parents of Everett’s friends and a former teacher of his who recently retired, Point Reyes Station resident Laura Rogers, sent the county education board letters urging a reversal of the decision.
“I respect and understand how difficult it was for [Nicasio’s school board] to determine which children stay and which children would leave,” Ms. Rogers wrote. But, she went on, “The best and crucial fit for him is within the small, personal, safe and familiar environment of Nicasio School.”
In a rebuttal it submitted to the education board, the school district disputed Ms. Drake’s interpretation of transfer policy, pointing out that the policy singles out both renewals and siblings as criteria for prioritizing transfer students.
School officials also said the policy stipulates that the district should fill each grade to a target only “when possible,” and that prioritizing renewals with siblings trumped that goal.
As for residency, the rebuttal stated that the school had always admitted Everett as an interdistrict transfer.
The district also denied assertions that it wanted to load Everett with special-education services, arguing that the latter were appropriate based on his evaluations, and in any case that the issue was not relevant to the decision to deny him enrollment.
“Nicasio respectfully submits that the parents’ dispute over the appropriateness for the district placement offer is beyond the scope of this interdistrict transfer appeal hearing,” Ms. Stocker wrote.
Ultimately, the county education board sided with the district. The board’s vice president referred the Light to Ms. Burke for comment, but she declined due to the closed nature of the proceedings.
Ms. Drake wrote to the Light, “It is very frustrating. I don’t think that they sufficiently weighed the special circumstances in our case, nor does it seem that they considered the strong evidence of discrimination.”
Now Everett is attending West Marin School, where classes are by no means large—his class this year will be slightly smaller than it would have been at Nicasio—but the student population is more than double, and there are no multi-grade classrooms.
“West Marin is a wonderful school, and Everett is off to a great start there” Ms. Drake said. “But Nicasio is where he started, he has forged friendships there. So much is said about the Nicasio School community being a family, and this is like coming to the table at Thanksgiving to be told you’re not part of that family anymore.”