Sausalito Marin City School District fiscal pinch draws AG’s scrutiny

More than five years after the state issued a desegregation order against the Sausalito Marin City School District, authorities have demanded information on the district’s compliance.

In a Feb. 22 letter to the district’s legal counsel, Deputy Attorney General Garrett Lindsey said that he was concerned about the district’s recent “qualified” budget standing. The qualified status meant the district was not sure it could pay its bills.

Lindsey asked for updated data on at least 10 issues — including student referrals for discipline issues, suspensions and special education services — for information about the district’s plans to reconfigure its two campuses in Sausalito and Marin City.

“We have concerns about compliance with certain Judgment requirements,” Lindsey wrote in the letter, referring to the desegregation settlement.

A copy of the letter, sent on behalf of Attorney General Rob Bonta, is online at shorturl.at/uyI45.

The district trustees addressed the budget problem last month through layoffs and a plan to move the middle school students from the Marin City campus to Sausalito to save money on the costs of running two campuses. The steps closed a $1.4 million budget gap for 2024-25 and brought the district’s budget out of qualified status.

However, more reporting and tracking remains to be done if the district is to address the state’s segregation judgment in 2019, Superintendent LaResha Huffman told trustees at the March 14 board meeting.

As part of its settlement with the state, the district agreed to desegregate its two schools — at the time, a charter school in Sausalito and a traditional middle school in Marin City — within five years. Although the district acted on the settlement by unifying the two schools in 2021, the aftermath has been rocky.

A precarious budget, falling enrollment and near-constant personnel changes have led to things slipping through the cracks, Huffman said.

“We need to have more effective systems to keep track of compliance,” Huffman said. “We need to see that we collect the data we need to inform the state.”

Huffman was hired at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year. That was after the trustees declined to renew the contract for former superintendent Itoco Garcia, who oversaw the significant upheaval and rebuilding efforts after the 2019 settlement.

Huffman said she was working to get all the data and reports to the state by a series of deadlines this month.

“Our current staff is doing a lot of work in gathering information from previous years,” she told trustees at the board meeting last week. “They want data from 2021-22, 22-23 and 23-24.”

Meanwhile, Jason Cave, the project manager on the district’s elementary school construction in Sausalito, said it will cost about $183,000 to rework the architect’s renovation designs to accommodate the middle school students. The campus currently serves students from kindergarten to fifth grade.

Cave said the money would cover modest modernization work, such as raising heights of cabinets and countertops, for the taller middle school students. He gave trustees a potential draft map of the new Sausalito campus showing the middle school classrooms in a separate section, with common areas shared by both middle and elementary students.

“Some of our parents have lost faith in the middle school,” Huffman said, adding another reason for transferring the other children to Sausalito.

The trustees said they were not settled on which grades to move to Sausalito from Marin City. Huffman had proposed to have third through eighth grades at Sausalito and transitional kindergarten through second grade at Marin City.

Trustee Lauren Walters said it would be better to have first through eighth grade at Sausalito and keep only transitional kindergarten and kindergarten at the campus in Marin City.

“I think it would be a bigger transition for kids to separate from each other at third grade than it would between kindergarten and first grade,” he said. He said children in the very early grades tend to bond more tightly and it would be less disruptive to keep them together starting in first grade.

Lisa Bennett, the board president, said she was concerned about removing so many children from the Marin City campus. She said she envisioned an early childhood education center at the school.

“I didn’t want to completely vacate this campus,” she said. “There’s a lot of history there.”

The district intends to hold a public forum to get community opinions on the upcoming campus reconfiguration. The event date was not available.

The district is scheduled to break ground on the new elementary school in early April. The new school will be built with funds from Measure P, a $41.6 million measure voters approved in 2020.