West Sacramento is hardly alone when it comes to racially isolating charter schools. For a state like California, which enshrines diversity in a statutory balancing test that requires charter schools to “achieve a racial and ethnic balance among its pupils that is reflective of the general population” of their districts, unregulated school choice can be like putting out a fire with gasoline.Įlkhorn Village, a traditional public elementary school Although that freedom was once supposed to encourage innovation, the door it has opened has also made charters the latest flavor of school segregation.
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Or the privacy fence that cordons off Elkhorn Village Elementary School and blue-collar, immigrant Broderick from The Rivers, a 200-acre gated community of luxury estates built during the 2000s, with price tags topping out at $1 million-plus.īut representing the newest form of green line in West Sacramento are charter schools - publicly funded but privately operated academies that are free from many of the regulations governing public schools. Like the Deep Water Ship Channel, which has replaced the tracks as the de facto boundary between West Sac’s older, lower-income north and its newer, whiter, more middle-class subdivisions in the south. There were a lot of fights.”Ĭharters tend to isolate students by race and class through “election biases” - features that attract certain kinds of families at the expense of others.īorders, boundaries and barriers, man-made and natural, have been a way of life in this part of the lower Sacramento Valley since the Gold Rush days.
And for the first five years it was pretty rough. “It was very physically separated … until we combined high schools. “If you were from West Sac, you didn’t go over to Broderick and if you were from Broderick, you didn’t really come over to West Sac,” recalls Koerwitz, now a career and college readiness counselor for the 12-campus Washington Unified School District (WUSD). In those days, before her city’s 1987 incorporation out of four Yolo County port towns across the Sacramento River from the state capital, the Southern Pacific railroad and Sacramento Northern freight tracks formed a near-impassable no-man’s land that divided the northern, mostly Mexican immigrant enclaves of Broderick and Bryte from the southern, predominately white villages of rural Southport and “old” West Sacramento. “I GREW UP HERE WHEN WE WERE VERY SEGREGATED,” says Kerry Koerwitz, who’s spent 28 years teaching in West Sacramento’s public schools.
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The series is funded by the California School Employees Association, which is a financial supporter of this website.
This story is part of our “Grading Charter Schools” series examining the impact of privatized education in California.
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