Well....this entry is gonna be long. So get ready.

The past few days have been quite a trip.

Wednesday afternoon, I went to the DCRP office just to pick up a reading assignment for my preservation class. I noticed my urban design professor in the office with Kaye Bock, the DCRP's student affairs officer and admissions coordinator as I left the office...

...and just as I passed the office I heard Kaye say, "oh there's Nick now" and she called me name. I turned around and walked into the office, greeted Professor MacDonald as she walked out, and said hi to Kaye, thinking that either a) something was wrong with my graduate school application, or b) something to do with BUSSA.

Instead, as you all probably heard already......Kaye told me that the DCRP had its first admissions meeting, and that I have been accepted into the Masters of City Planning program. Not only that....but she expressed how impressed everyone was with my application...that they know I'll soon be hearing from the other schools...and that they want me to come to Cal so much, that they're in the process of obtaining a diversity fellowship to pay for my first year.

......!

Let's just say I walked around the rest of the day with this downright goofy smile on my face.

I was riding high up till Thursday morning, when I read the San Jose Mercury News...

On Wednesday night, the President of the Mountain View-Whisman School Board, Ellen Wheeler, submitted a surprise proposal to close Mariano Castro Elementary School. Castro is the elementary school in my part of Mountain View, its population is over 80% Latino. Many of its students are English Language learners.

My cousins husband and his brother went there. My mom went there. I did not. Castro has serious academic issues that need to be addressed. But the school is a extremely important place for my neighborhood and its Latino community.

When it was determined that the MV-Whisman School District needed to close a school, everyone was kind of worried that Castro would be targeted. Things always seem to go down that way for the Latino community.

I was surprised and relieved that the School Closure Task Force overwhelming recommended the closure of Slater School. Castro came in a distant second.

But the school board, which my aunt was elected to last November, received a lot of pressure from Slater parents to keep their school open. It seemed that the board was having a good discussion, looking at ways to ease the closure of Slater and also help close the achievement gap of Castro students.

Then suddenly....on Wednesday night, school board President Ellen Wheeler submitted a plan to close Castro School. Apparently splitting up the Latino population is the best solution for everyone.....because it makes things easier on all the other schools......

As soon as I read that in the Merc....I started writing. By Thursday night this was sent to the school board:

Dear Board of Trustees,

Close Castro School?

I'm stunned. Wasn't it only last week that I heard President Wheeler quite passionately remind Trustee Roquero that the decision to close Slater had already been made after months of deliberation by the School Closure Task Force? The mere mention of Huff School elicited that response.

And here we are a week later, and I read this morning in the San Jose Mercury News that three of you have suddenly decided that closing Castro School might be a good idea. Up until this point, I have admired your resolve to look at the issues and solve the district's larger problems through this school closure. However, you've gone off mark with your latest proposal.

Regardless of your intentions, closing Castro School under these circumstances would be an act of institutionalized racism.

Things would be quite different if the School Closure Task Force recommended closing Castro after months of analysis. But that is not the case. Instead, we have before us a scenario where the school board, faced with pressure from Slater parents, has decided to throw out the task forces' recommendations and instead target the most ethnically diverse, poorest, and most vulnerable segment of our community. Do you realize how terrible this makes the Board of Trustees look? Do you realize how poorly this reflects the larger Mountain View community?

Shame on you.

Put yourselves in the shoes of a recently arrived immigrant mother. Take a walk down California Street. These people live very tough lives. Many of them will not have the time and resources to enter into this debate through e-mail and meetings like the Slater parents have. What you've done is unjust. You've placed this community in a corner. I hope their reaction far exceeds anyone's' expectations. That in the month you've given them to organize and present their case, they will succeed.

But it should have never come to this, a sick game where each school has to take turns publicly fighting you until you find the path of least resistance. You need to make your decisions based on what is best for the children and families of this district. Closing Castro School is not the solution. Instead, it will create a whole new series of problems.

Castro School is a pillar in the Latino community and the surrounding neighborhood. People rely on having that school nearby to walk their children there. It is a safe haven, a community center. Its presence is a stabilizing factor in the lives of these children and their families. The benefits of having a school in the heart of that neighborhood are immeasurable. The district needs to have a presence in the community that needs it the most. No matter how you spin it, closing Castro School is, in essence, an act of abandonment.

It makes little sense to close a school in a neighborhood with the highest density of residents and school children in the city, while areas with declining enrollment are left largely unaffected.

Closing Castro school is a cowardly way to deal with the issues its students face. You are foolish to think that you will solve the problems of Castro by getting rid of it. Like the old saying goes, doing so would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Instead of seriously looking at how to best serve the Castro School community you will split it up, make it less visible, less influential, and less statistically noticeable. That is completely unfair to those students.

I've studied and written about Mountain View history for most of my life. Time after time, the most vulnerable and fragile communities, the ones who were least likely to sue and speak up for their rights, have become the target of school closures and redevelopment efforts.

Do not repeat that terrible pattern. Do not close Castro School.

-------------------------------

So....yeah, maybe a little over-the-top. "shame on you." hehe. But my emotions were high. I used my e-mail as a rallying cry, and sent it to everyone else in Mountain View who I thought might care....including my cousin Lisa and her husband Oscar, a Castro-->Los Altos High--> Cal grad.

I then started talking with Oscar, Lisa, and Oscar's brother and his wife via e-mail. I proposed that we hold a meeting to get together with Mountain View's Latino political leaders to make sure that the Castro community's voice was heard by the school board as the proposal to close Castro was discussed. They all fully agreed and we started planning.

We met on Friday night. We met on Saturday night. And on Sunday morning, at my grandparent's house, basically every living Latino civic leader in Mountain View joined us. That sounds slightly more impressive than it was, because unfortunately, despite its large Latino population, the number of Latino political leaders in Mountain View has been disproportionately small.

Nevertheless, it was a momentous occasion. My grandparents' generation of Mexican-Americans was the last to truly mobilize and become a political force in the Mountain View community. They formed the Mexican-American Coalition, and succeeded in getting one of their own members, Joe Perez, elected as Mountain View's first Latino councilman and mayor.

The next generation, kind of dropped the ball. As a former member of the Mexican-American Coalition, Delia Ibarra, told us on Sunday, "I've been waiting 30 years for the next generation to come up! It's about time!"

So with Oscar and Lisa leading the meeting, Mesa de la Comunidad (MC) was formed. The 17 of us had an excellent discussion, and quite a productive meeting.

After we finished the meeting, basically the whole Mountain View part of my extended family went to the Spanish masses at Saint Joseph's and Saint Anthansius were Oscar gave a speech to each congregation urging them to get involved. Both masses were packed to standing room only. Oscar's speech went over quite well, even earning appluase at Saint Joseph's. We all passed out flyers at the end. Four generations of a Mountain View Latino family, from my grandpa Simon all the way down to his great grandchildren, Angelica and David.

I'm so proud of my family and what we did this weekend. I don't know where this will go. I don't know if we'll succeed in our goal to keep Castro School open. But I think we've planted the seeds of change.

This could be the start of something really good...