South Bay School District Copes With Recall, Frustrated Parents

CUPERTINO, CA — Deepa doesn’t believe that her son, who attends a public middle school in Cupertino, had experienced mental health issues prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. A few weeks ago, while in remote instruction, the sixth-grader turned his camera off while the teacher was talking and, according to his mother, started “running around the house, saying he’s going to harm himself.”

Deepa's son ended up in the hospital after a self-harm attempt. It was the sixth time he had been in the emergency room since the beginning of the school year, which at the Cupertino Union School District has been entirely virtual.

After relaying the experience to Patch, Deepa, who asked that her last name be withheld, repeated it to the school board at a meeting on Feb. 25 in a plea for the district to reopen schools. She was one of nearly 60 members of the public who commented on the board’s reopening plan during a two-hour stream of speakers. The virtual meeting, with its intensity heightened because of an effort by a group of frustrated parents to recall all five board members, stretched well past midnight and drew 650 attendees.

“My son’s doctors are convinced that COVID isolation or distance learning is one of the major contributors," Deepa told the board. "The reason I’m sharing such a personal story here is that I know we are not an exception.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested that schools with “strictly implemented mitigation strategies” have been able to successfully reopen in-person instruction. Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a $6.6 billion package that gives funds to school districts that reopen for in-person instruction.

Across the country, parents fear the unknown mental effects on their kids caused by isolation over the past year. And recall efforts of school boards centered around cautious reopening plans are not unique to Cupertino. But in a few ways, this affluent South Bay suburb represents a case study of the national conversation over how and when to reopen schools as exasperated parents who chose to settle in Cupertino for its schools decide to pull their kids out of public schools and put them into private schools that offer in-person instruction.

District Issues

Nestled along Silicon Valley’s southwest corridor, Cupertino is perhaps best known as the site of Apple Inc.’s spaceship campus. But it also has a highly touted school district that entices families with young children.

Public School Review ranks Cupertino Union School District as the 10th best district among more than 1,000 school districts in California, based on students’ math and reading proficiency test scores from the 2017-'18 school year. The district’s average test ranking is in the top 1 percent of California public schools, and 21 of its 25 schools rank in the top 5 percent of all public schools statewide based on test scores, according to the site.

Cupertino is also home to a large immigrant population. According to the U.S. Census, 53% of its residents are foreign-born. And the school district leans heavily toward students of color: 73 percent of students are Asian and just 16 percent are white, according to the district’s website.

Deepa, who emigrated from India, chose to settle in Cupertino nine years ago with her husband. “We bought this house, and we came here for schools,” she said. “We could’ve bought a much bigger house elsewhere, like Sunnyvale or Santa Clara. We chose this district specifically for schools.”

But in contrast to its high-performing students, the school district was running out of money even before the pandemic. After a 2014 statewide change to fund districts based on a per-student formula, Cupertino became one of the lowest-funded districts in the state despite serving as the largest elementary school district in Northern California; the district also has schools in Los Altos, San Jose, Santa Clara, Saratoga and Sunnyvale.

A graph in a “State of the District” presentation in October illustrated the problem. The district doesn’t get enough in property tax revenue to qualify as a basic aid district — one that gets to keep excess property tax money — and it doesn’t receive much in “high needs” funding from the state because of Cupertino’s high cost of living.

A continuous drop in enrollment that is expected to persist through 2029 means the district will receive fewer state dollars. And with its current parcel tax funding expiring in 2023, a parcel tax ballot measure last year that would have brought in $4.3 million over the next eight years failed to garner the necessary two-thirds support.

To have more 17,000 students across 25 schools in six different cities, then, is to deal with diverse needs and viewpoints, making implementation of big decisions such as school reopening more difficult than in smaller districts, according to board member Sylvia Leong. Furthermore, educators in Santa Clara County weren’t eligible to be vaccinated until late February, making it hard for the district to estimate when teachers might gain immunity.

“Any solution always requires funding. And funding is a challenge,” Leong told Patch.

The Recall Effort

But bureaucratic issues won’t placate the parents who argue that the board has delayed putting forth a reopening plan while neighboring districts have acted quicker. School districts in Los Altos, Los Gatos, Palo Alto and Saratoga announced plans to reopen before Cupertino's. About 44 percent of 11,300 parents who responded to a survey presented at a Jan. 7 board meeting said they wanted to return to some kind of in-person learning.

“What I hear from those at the meetings is that schools are opening all over the world, so what’s the matter with you? Why aren’t you reopening?” board member Phyllis Vogel told Patch. “That’s the frustration. They just feel that we aren’t moving fast enough. I guess they want to bring people in who will move faster.”

Vogel, who has worked in the district since she began teaching there in 1963, said she takes the recall effort and parents’ concerns seriously but will not apologize for advocating a more conservative route to reopening.

“That was a decision that we made,” Vogel said. “We wanted to move cautiously, and we didn’t want to open and close again and have to reopen. That’s a concern I had — and still have.”

Over time, that decision has turned board meetings into heated back-and-forths between teachers and parents. At the Feb. 25 meeting, Kai Brown, president of the Cupertino Education Association, accused a “vocal minority” of parents of “bullying the board and the administration into a rushed reopening” that would put teachers at risk while companies such as Google and Apple have not compelled employees to return to the office.

Parents quickly pounced on Brown’s remarks characterizing them as “bullies” and called the comments shocking, false and uncalled for. They pointed out that not all parents in Cupertino are employed by high-tech companies that let them work from home.

In an interview after the meeting, Brown told Patch that the term “bullying” was “a poor choice of words” and that he didn’t intend to sow as much division as he did.

But Brown pushed back against the narrative that the teachers union is preventing reopening and said that it is important for teachers to be vaccinated and feel safe about returning to the classroom. Brown said that Cupertino is probably “in the middle” out of all the districts in Santa Clara County in its reopening pace. He added that as the father of a 10-year-old, he understands the concerns parents have about their kids’ social isolation.

“We’ve had the same people who spoke at the board meeting speak at every board meeting,” Brown said. “Part of it is just COVID fatigue. It’s been tough on everyone. It’s legitimate that people are scared for their childrens’ well being. Oftentimes fear leads to anger, and anger leads to hatred.”

Leong said that the district’s stakeholders should stop seeing each other as enemies. “We have to go back to the fact that we’re all on the same team,” Leong said. “What’s important is staying on the same team, whoever we are, and doing what’s best for our students, our kiddos — seeing each other as all working towards that same goal.”

Lori Cunningham, another board member, became emotional when talking about the specter of a recall. She said that she shares parents’ frustrations but stressed that improving COVID-19 metrics indicate the district is “on the cusp” of achieving what parents are asking for.

“I sympathize with and I empathize with everyone looking for control in a situation that felt out of control from the beginning of the pandemic for all of us,” Cunningham told Patch. “I think [a recall] is one area where parents feel like they can be in control. I understand and I empathize with it, but by the same token, I don't think it helps kids, and more specifically, I don’t think it helps our kids.”

The board decided at the meeting on a tentative plan to have students return beginning April 5 for 75 minutes to 2 1/2 hours a day for part of the week and for an expanded hybrid schedule to be implemented following spring break on April 26.

In a town hall meeting a week later, Superintendent Stacy McAfee-Yao announced that the hybrid model would allow students to be in the classroom for up to five hours a day and that the plan for this fall would be for a full five-day-a-week return.

Frustrated Parents

Still, parents protested. They’ve held two rallies over the past few weeks, one in front of Fremont High School and the other at the corner of De Anza Boulevard and Stevens Creek Boulevard. They don’t believe the board has done enough.

Every passing day that they see their children suffering from isolation, parents said, is one day too many. For some, the district’s decision to reopen came much too late.

Anila Godhania pulled her 8-year old son out of the district in January. She said his teachers were phenomenal in adapting to virtual learning. But her son, who used to love going to school, slowly became unmotivated. His grades fell. He went from “giving it his all” to just being “detached,” she said.

After a teacher suggested that her son would do better with in-person learning, Godhania took the advice and enrolled him in a private school that was fully in-person. Within a week, her son was back to himself, doing his homework without her asking and making new friends. The decision, to her, was a no-brainer — even if she had known that her son’s school would reopen in April, she said.

“Three to four human months is like five years” to a child, Godhania told Patch. “I could not wait a single day. It just didn’t make sense. The board was not making any progress. There was no communication that this was going to happen. So there was nothing to wait around for, really.”

Jenny Rojas, whose fifth-grade daughter attends L.P. Collins Elementary School, is moving out of the state entirely to Denver, where her daughter will attend the Denver School of the Arts. For Rojas and her husband, who both have master’s degrees, education of their daughter was a key in their decision to live in Cupertino.

“We knew that Cupertino has a lot of families from India, from China, who are very school-oriented and education-oriented,” Rojas told Patch. “We thought, ‘My daughter is bright. She can deal with it.’ That’s how we decided to be there.”

But as the pandemic wore on, Rojas noticed her daughter’s personality changing. She would tell her mother that she hated virtual schooling and that she didn’t want to be in front of the computer anymore. Rojas, who works as a medical interpreter, said she has heard firsthand from local parents about their children suffering from anxiety, bulimia, anorexia and even attempting self-harm.

“I don’t want that for my child,” Rojas said. “I can always pay for private tuition in the future. But if my child were to commit suicide, how are you going to get your child back? I think the board is not seeing the big picture properly, and they are not seeing what is coming to our teens and our children: how it’s shaping their brains, how it’s shaping the way they interact. And it scared me and my husband so much that we made the decision to move to Colorado.”

Other parents are begrudgingly trying to stick it out because they still value the district’s quality education or their children have made lifelong friends that they aren’t willing to give up.

Gilli Yahalom and her husband are Israeli immigrants whose daughter is in the third grade at Christa McAuliffe School. As tech workers, they have the option to move around. “But we are choosing to stay here because of the high quality education level,” Yahalom told Patch. “That’s what keeps us in the Bay Area. That’s what makes right now difficult for us to leave because we really want to keep her in this specific school.”

Yogi Sikri said his son, a seventh-grader attending Miller Middle School, has “lost hope” because of the isolation. Sikri has considered going the private school route but understands that his son’s friends are at the public school. He feels helpless because he wants to send his son “wherever he can get social interaction.” He’s been taking his son to a socially distanced swim class and karate club just so he can see other people.

“Every day that is passing is critical,” Sikri said. “I feel that we are being kept hostage because the kids want to be with their friends. Their friends are in school. They have relationships that they have established for the last 10 years or more, and they just don’t want to lose that. So even going out somewhere is not an option.”

Losing Students

It’s these parents whom Jerry Liu, the school board’s president, hopes will come back around. Liu is “incredibly concerned” about how many families have left the district this year. To date, Liu projected that the district has lost more than 2,200 students. There is no breakdown of why parents decided to leave, but the figure is much more than the district’s usual trend of a couple hundred students leaving a year. Because the district relies on per-student funding, the loss hurts financially, too.

“This is like four elementary schools that have disappeared,” Liu said. “We already had an enrollment issue before, and this is another four years’ worth of drops in one year.”

(After this article was published, Liu said the 2,200 figure he used was wrong and based on a forecast estimate. He added that the superintendent confirmed at a board meeting that the actual loss of students was much less. The district will review its enrollment details at an upcoming meeting.)

Out of the four school board members interviewed by Patch (the fifth, Satheesh Madhathil, didn’t respond to a request for comment), Liu was the most critical of how he and his colleagues have run the district during the pandemic.

“I feel like we haven’t offered as good a choice for the families who would like to have their children return,” Liu said. “I think the choices have been more one side than the other. Earlier in this pandemic, it was really driven by necessity, by what science tells us. I’m not so sure that’s the case now.”

When parents tell him about their kids’ struggles, Liu can sense his resting heart rate increasing on his Apple Watch. Liu knows the educational value of the district is important to parents; he himself moved two miles when his oldest daughter was about to start kindergarten so that he could send her to Cupertino’s public schools. Liu worries that the district is losing parents who are active in the school community. While acknowledging that teachers need time to prepare, Liu said that parents have “very fairly” brought up the point that the board has had an entire year to plan for reopening.

“I’m not going to sit here and say the board has done everything perfectly right in the past,” Liu said. “I think the important thing is to focus on what we do going forward here.”

Liu urged parents backing the recall effort to think about the long term. The best the district can do for now, he said, is to maximize the amount of time students can have in-person instruction beginning in April, rather than the short-term possibility of sending them back immediately but for just one hour a day. Regarding funding, Liu is optimistic about a new parcel tax passing this year, as well as Cupertino collecting enough property tax in the near future for the district to qualify as a basic aid district.

“I would remind people we have a culture of valued education,” Liu said. “We have a great teaching staff. Part of when you come to a place like this — yes, you have a great school district, but you’re buying into a community.”

Liu added that it isn’t fair that some parents can afford to send their children to private schools while others have to “live with what we give them.” But fair or not, a sense of community for some parents comes second to the development of their children.

“I don’t see how public schools are going to recover,” said Godhania, the parent who sent her eight-year-old to private school. Godhania considers herself lucky to have gotten her son into a private school. She said she has friends on waiting lists, “kicking themselves” that they didn’t make the decision earlier.

“Cupertino is a place where parents really focus on their kids’ education, and the last thing a parent wants to hear is the kid next door is not behind and your child is falling behind,” Godhania said. “There’s only a certain window of time when children can catch up.”