The Morning After: Processing Last Night's Board Decision to Close Letitia Carson Elementary and Cheldelin Middle Schools

The Morning After…

Map showing Letitia Carson Elementary and Cheldelin Middle School

Last night’s Board Meeting and the 6-1 vote to close both Letitia Carson and Cheldelin just left me in shell-shock. You can watch the 6+ hour event here at your leisure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkOx574dL3k

After the vote, I sat in my chair, one that I sat in for the last 6+ hours, just with a blank stare. This just happened. By a 6-1 (re)vote, the Board just decided to close both schools.

I was slow to get up, fighting tears, filled with the tension of anger and grief, only to have it exposed once I stepped outside with the rest of the community grieving. Teachers were crying, hugging in the parking lot. Fellow parents from the Save Corvallis Schools coalition were holding back tears. My 17-year-old daughter came with tears in her eyes (which she has cried less than 1 time in public), as her group of Crescent Valley High School friends exited the overflow room, and once I saw her, I broke. “F**K!”

I didn’t break because they are closing the “brick-and-mortar” schools that the Board accused us of prioritizing over staffing positions. I broke because I watched 6 people make a decision that just instantaneously and negatively impacted the school, the neighborhood, and this city that I love. A school that we have been a part of every year since 2013. A neighborhood that we called home since 2012. A city that we began planting roots in since 2008.

“Oh, Mike, you over-react! You are catastrophizing. Kids are resilient. Change happens, and we call that growth!” One Board member shared how he went to 3 different schools when he was in growing up, and it was so good for his development. (Most do 3 schools – elementary, middle and high)

I went to 3 different schools between kindergarten and 2^nd grade, and 5 schools total between K through 8^th. High school was the only time I was at a school for 4 years (or more, as I like to joke with my kids…best 5 years of my life!)

Sure, changing schools can be good for kids, build social skills that force them to come out of their comfort zones. Expose them to new ideas, bring cross-pollination of new topics and skills. But we must remember that people rarely change schools voluntarily. If it isn’t from promotion (elementary to junior high), changing schools usually occurs through disruption, usually instability. I grew up in a broken home – raised by my Mom when my Dad decided early on that he wanted to start a new family, and we struggled to find stability. My Grandparents became a cornerstone for my Mom to start rebuilding her life, and they were the closest thing to stability that I experienced during my childhood. I changed schools so frequently that I would play games like changing my name at each school – Michael, Mike, Mikey, Eller, but as I reflect, changing schools so often wrecked me. Of all the schools I went to through 8^th grade, only 1 was a neighborhood school, and I was only there for 1 year. I built some great friends that I walked to school with, played sports with, and got in trouble with. But I was never there long enough to build a friendship that lasted more than 2 years, and none of those elementary and junior high friendships are present today.

This was one of the reasons my wife and I chose to stay in Corvallis and raise our family. That our family would grow up with other families. We worked hard and made choices so we could live where we could walk with our kids to school.

For many of the kids in our community, these schools were their cornerstones. And now, the morning after, our District Superintendent, communicated via email his sympathy:

For our families in the Cheldelin and Letitia Carson communities, I recognize that this news is deeply challenging and carries a significant emotional impact for your family and your child. This decision will disrupt cherished routines, change established friendships, and affect the school community you have built your lives around. I want to sincerely acknowledge the sadness and frustration this decision brings, and I want to assure you that the students remain our central priority as we navigate this change.

I am a huge proponent for doing hard things. I strongly believe in the cyclic mantra that “tough times create strong people, strong people create easy times, easy times create weak people, and weak people create tough times.” But that is a characteristic of human fallibility, and to be honest, most of the “hard times” that I have to go through are self-inflicted either by a poor decision, over-extension, or signing up for long trail race thinking I will get in shape before race date. But as adults, as leaders, as parents, we should not be intentionally looking to cause hard times for those that look to us for guidance, but rather to guide them through hard times.

Last night, I watched the Board dismiss all the concerns that the community has expressed during this consolidation process. I watched Board members, many of which have focused their careers on human development and advocating for those who aren’t always represented, fail to ask deeply if there was a better way. Oh, there were long monologues on convictions, personal stories, campaigning blurbs, but only two of the 7 paused long enough to reflect on the question “how did we get here?” How did we get in this scenario that we are closing 2 northeast Corvallis schools, both located just over a mile from each other? How did we select the elementary school with the highest poverty percentage and numbers than any other school, yet outperforming 4 other elementary schools out of the 7?” Perhaps influenced by public comment ad nauseum, but the 2 Board members admitted that they caused it. They told the District Superintendent what the criteria were, and he gave them exactly what they asked for. It wasn’t until they were in the 11^th hour that they publicly admitted that this was their leading, and they realized now that they could have done this better because they aren’t the experts.  What looked like a possible rising tide of optimism that there may be opportunity for the District and the Board to do this right, engaging staff, students and community, to come up with a comprehensive proposal, the tides quickly retreated as the louder Board members began bargaining and bullying with those that opposed the initial vote, demanding what will it take to pass this proposal because they are here to give the “community a decision”.

    Map showing Letitia Carson Elementary and Cheldelin Middle School

I watched 3 Board members make amendments, with weak, non-committal language added like “investigate” here, “seek” there, ignoring the initial convictions that they earlier vocalized was preventing them from voting for this in the first round. Before going to vote, several Board members turned to the community and condescendingly, accusing them of caring about buildings more than people, saying they know what the kids in the District really need. In two separate instances, two Board members got angry with the community, telling them to leave (perhaps justified, but read the room) for expressing emotion and distraught over what is unfolding right in front of us and not being able to stop. And in less than 20 seconds, they voted 6-1 to close these schools. Shell-shocked.

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The Save Corvallis Schools Coalition, as well as hundreds of other parents, staff and community members, pointed out to the Board why this proposal won’t work. We even met with the Superintendent and Director of Finance to discuss this, raising the concerns about where the gaps are and what the projected impacts will be that are not being considered in this proposal. We didn’t bring this information because we are nay-sayers, or because we were experts (although many of the parents are expert data analysts in Human Behavior and sociology fields) or because we just want to save these particular schools. We brought this to their attention because we are problem solvers, and we will take action to advocate and enable our community to thrive, even if that means getting a few people ticked off when we rattle their cage. Sorry, but not sorry, because that is the role of responsible adulting. 

And tonight, less than 24 hours after the 6 of the Board members voted yes, our message hasn't changed. As a community, we firmly believe that this proposal is not a solution but a problem for all Corvallis schools. I do feel that  the Board chose to stay with a bad proposal to save face, but more on that thought later.  Unfortunately, I feel that our community advocacy is just getting started, but it had to start with the closure of a school* that I really loved.

(* By “school", I mean the students, the staff, the culture, the memories - not a building, just in case some members of the Board needed me to repeat that again).

But I will take this time to recognize one Board member. Huge THANK YOU to Judah “the Lion” Largent for standing up for his convictions, not giving in and compromising when pressured or baited. Thank you for offering your time to meet with families that may need help navigating this disruptive time.