In October, eighth-grade teacher Julie Cassel asked her class at West Marin School to pen letters to elected officials in protest or defense of the anticipated closures of nearby ranches and dairies in the Point Reyes National Seashore.
At the time, speculation was intensifying about the outcome of settlement negotiations between the park service, environmental groups, ranchers and the Nature Conservancy—talks that would decide the future of agriculture in the park. Rumors were stirring about the consequences that would follow for the families who live and work there.
One of Ms. Cassel’s students, 14-year-old Sam Giacomini, felt looming upheaval as he composed his handwritten letter to State Senator Mike McGuire.
“I wrote about the families that would lose their homes,” Sam told the Light last Monday. “And I asked him to help us fight the environmentalists.”
By January, after years of mediation and legal wrangling, an agreement was reached. Twelve out of 14 ranches on the Point Reyes peninsula will be shuttered as ranchers forfeit their leases in exchange for million-dollar buyouts, displacing the many workers and families who live there. Seven ranches in the northern reaches of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, including the Olema Valley ranch where Sam’s family lives, will be offered 20-year-leases.
The ranch closures will force destabilizing moves that unsettle parents at work and children in school. They are flooding fragile households with worry and stress, as an estimated 30 students in the Shoreline Unified School District face the specter of losing their homes in the coming months. It’s a seismic hit to a school district just 470 strong.
“It’s a powerless feeling not knowing how to support the families that live on the ranches,” said Ms. Cassel, who has taught at the school for 13 years and was once a student there herself. “Finding out after it’s all done is such a slap in the face.”
As part of the eighth grade’s persuasive-writing curriculum, Ms. Cassel encouraged students to examine the complexities of the ranch closures and to exercise their First Amendment rights by writing to a public official of their choice.
“I didn’t tell them which side to choose or who to send their letters to,” she said. “But it’s different from the typical assignment because they’re living it.”
The letters that ensued reflected the poignant apprehension of a group of 13- and 14-year-olds wrestling with the profound loss that might befall them.
“There was a lot of unease about losing friends or losing housing or losing their sense of place,” Ms. Cassel said. Of her 20 students, every single one wrote a plea asking that the ranchers and workers be allowed to remain.
About half of the eighth-grade class comes from ranch families in West Marin, and a quarter live on properties directly affected by the legal settlement. One such student is 13-year-old Romeo Hernandez, who lives on the McClure ranch, where his grandfather worked as a foreman for more than two decades. Romeo’s mother, Yezenia Hernandez, also attended West Marin School as a child. Now, she and her husband, Louis, are raising their four sons in the place where she grew up.
Yet that home may soon vanish. Although the family intends to fight their eviction, Ms. Hernandez has begun scouring rental listings, only to discover that most modest two- or three-bedroom homes in West Marin would consume far more than half of the family’s income, a burden most landlords find disqualifying and one they could not sustain.
A two-bedroom rental she found in Inverness was asking $3,500 a month—a significant leap from what she currently pays for their three-bedroom home on the ranch and far out of reach for a single-income family of six.
With Louis unable to work while he undergoes cancer treatment, the family relies on Ms. Hernandez’s paycheck as a preschool teacher in San Anselmo. A home in this price range would deplete roughly 80 percent of her take-home pay. Ideally, she said, they would not spend more than $2,000 on rent.
But with few options on the market, the family may have to make wrenching choices. Ms. Hernandez said that higher rent would be worth it if it meant that Maximus, Lorenzo, Mason and Romeo “could stay in a school system that has really been there for us.”
Families like hers depend on an extensive support network within the district. At West Marin School, the family advocate, Glenda Mejia, has helped arrange doctor appointments, secure prescription glasses and coordinate social services.
“It’s been a hard couple of weeks and very overwhelming for all of us,” said Ms. Mejia, who grew up in the Central Valley while her husband was raised in Inverness. “All I can say is that I’m here to support them in any way that I can.”
Teachers, staff and parents—some of whom once shared classrooms with Ms. Hernandez—have rallied around the family.
That continuity is not lost on Ms. Cassel, who says her own childhood in West Marin feels close at hand. “There are all these moments at school where I flash back to being 9 or 12,” she said. “It all feels so interconnected here—like a family. It’s devastating to see people being ripped away from that.”
Housing insecurity, particularly acute for ranch residents, can ripple through every domain of life, rattling children’s academic and emotional well-being.
“It’s this constant mental and emotional tax,” said Adam Jennings, Shoreline Unified’s superintendent. “And right now there’s a lot of uncertainty and fear.”
Housing on agricultural land remains one of the last affordable frontiers in West Marin’s increasingly prohibitive housing market. It offers a vital lifeline for the area’s laboring class, which has been predominantly Latino since the 1970s. At Shoreline Unified, 61 percent of students identify as Latino, a near inversion of the broader West Marin population, which is roughly 70 percent white.
In 1988, when she was 10, Lourdes Romo arrived from Jalisco with her mother and three siblings to join her father, who worked on a dairy on the point. She remembers the red clapboard schoolhouse on the Historic B Ranch where she was raised, and afternoons spent sitting with Scotty Mendoza, the ranch’s matriarch, flipping through Sears catalogues. With no common language, they communicated through gesture alone: Scotty would point to magenta bedspreads or flowery window treatments, Lourdes would nod, and Scotty would send away for whatever caught her eye.
Ms. Romo described the feeling of uprootedness that came with leaving behind mother tongue and motherland—a feeling familiar to many immigrants split between the here and the back there, between the push to assimilate and the pull to preserve parts of themselves they left behind.
Growing up at a cultural crossroads, Ms. Romo matriculated through West Marin School, where she said “they immediately put me into the classroom with no English, nothing. It was torture.” Later, at Tomales High, her friends were the children of other Spanish-speaking immigrants, many raised on neighboring ranches on the peninsula.
“It was very segregated,” she said. “They didn’t know what to do with us.”
Support systems that now serve Spanish-speaking families were scant back then, she said. She recalled spending hours in a cramped classroom with only a few other English learners—a group that now makes up nearly a third of the district’s enrollment.
Yet students have been disappearing from Shoreline for decades, a consequence of diminishing birthrates, an aging population, a lack of affordable housing and a growing school choice movement. Since 2000, the district’s student population has plunged by 42 percent, from 811 students to 470 last year.
When students leave public schools, districts receive less state and federal money. Losing too many students can strain budgets, which come with fixed costs.
Shoreline relies on about $1.7 million in federal impact aid to offset property tax losses, given that 40 percent of assessed property within its boundaries lies on tax-exempt federal land. A small portion of that funding—$39,000 in 2024, although it varies yearly—hinges on the number of students living on federal property; if fewer than 3 percent of the district’s students reside there, the funding decreases.
As families vacate ranches in the park, Shoreline may lose that financial support.
For now, the district’s priority is helping students most at risk.
“Imagine trying to explain to a third grader that next year it is possible that half your class will be gone,” said Thomas Tyson, a West Marin School alumnus with a daughter at the school. “I don’t know how to have that conversation. I can’t imagine what the conversations around the dinner table are like for those who live out there.”