Guest Opinion | Pablo Miralles: Vote for Lee, Cahalan and Fredericks for PUSD School Board

When I was in production for my film “Can We All Get Along?” I asked many long-time PUSD families, some three or four generations in the district, ‘Why were the schools re-segregated?’ 

There was no one answer. For some, it was the end of busing and commitment to integration. Some felt that there was a lack of financial commitment to public schools.  And for others, it was a belief that Open-Enrollment and Charters were to blame. I understood the first two groups of answers; but the last, ‘parental choice,’ required me to do some research. 

 What I discovered was a movement that had given amazing power to parents to decide where their children attend school, regardless of their neighborhood. The idea, at first glance, was a good one for me. And then the ramifications of this policy came into focus. 

Parents were making choices based on community perceptions of ‘good schools’ vs ‘bad schools’. Families with privilege and opportunity utilized the open-enrollment system and personal access to transportation to create demand away from the very neighborhoods where the majority of public school children live. 

These ‘choices’ meant that the children most in need of quality public education; homeless, foster, and English learners, became concentrated in the few schools being shunned by most families with means. This is the system championed by Betsy DeVos. Integration is, despite all the proof of its benefits to children and community, to be avoided.

 As low-birth rates and high costs of living create fewer and fewer school-aged children in the district, the subsequent need for consolidation and closures have laid bare the racial and socio-economic inequities created by over 30 years of ‘parental choice’. The need for quality schools for all of the district’s children, and not just those who can navigate an ‘open enrollment’ can not wait another 30 years. 

 This imbalance has become so stark that an Equity Policy was created for the district in 2017. Revised in 2019, the plan states that the School Board should make decisions that “ensure that equity is the intentional result of district decisions, the Board shall consider whether its decisions address the needs of students from racial, ethnic, and indigent communities and remedy the inequities that such communities experienced in the context of a history of exclusion, discrimination, and segregation.” 

Today we have three people running for the PUSD Board who I feel will make decisions that will follow the spirit of the District’s Equity plan. Please vote for Jennifer Hall Lee in District 2, Patrick Cahalan in District 4, and Tina Wu Fredericks in District 6. Our entire community is stronger when we support excellent, equitable, and well-funded public education.

Pablo Miralles is the award-winning producer/director of the documentary “Can We All Get Along?” which tells the story of the desegregation of the PUSD.