Bell schedule debate: Where do we go from here?

Under one American flag, at the Feb. 2 district board meeting, sat a community divided over a bell schedule. Its divisions had roots in what many now believe was a flawed process. But that was not how these divisions were seen that day.

“To see a group of parents walk in here and harass and essentially bully anybody who disagrees with them [is] the most demoralizing thing you have ever experienced,” said senior Marcus Emery in a voice that would have been inaudible had the crowd not stilled. “I just want to express how absolutely terrifying it is knowing that essentially our school’s future lies in a small group of people who happen to know district attorneys.”

He paused.

“And that’s absolutely disgusting.”

Emery’s comments were the talk of the school the next day, but was he accurate? 

Last spring, a  Schedule Advisory Committee (SAC) was proposed to come up with a new bell schedule that would reduce student stress. Its job was far from easy: It had to minimize conflicts between extracurricular activities and classes, increase student access to teachers beyond class time and better align Saratoga High’s bell schedule with Los Gatos’s bell schedule so that teachers could instruct at both schools. Membership in the committee was open to all: students, teachers and parents. 

But the SAC received few applications, according to district superintendent Bob Mistele. Although the composition of the 26-member committee was varied, with representatives from both schools, it lacked any Chinese-American parent despite well over 25 percent of the school’s student body being of Chinese heritage. Though there is nothing to suggest that Chinese-Americans parents were singled out for exclusion, some of these parents were upset they weren’t included.

Furthermore, many parents were unaware of the committee’s formation and its charge to revise the school’s schedule. According to one Chinese-American parent who wishes to remain anonymous, many parents did not receive the email soliciting applications to join the committee last spring, and she found out about the committee only last November, well after it had first convened in September. 

 In addition, the SAC had few mechanisms to receive public input during its proceedings. 

The Chinese-American parents had to wait for the SAC’s formal recommendation for a chance to provide their input.

 

The build-up

After five months of meetings, research and discussion that included consideration of recommendations by the National Institutes of Mental Health and the American Academy of Pediatrics, the SAC came to a unanimous agreement in early January.  

Although the public release of SAC’s proposed schedule for 2016-17 was scheduled for the board meeting of Jan. 12, the SAC shared its proposal with board members and teachers the preceding Friday. 

Over that weekend, opposition to this proposal developed on a pre-existing WeChat group that communicates primarily in Chinese and has about 200 members from the Saratoga community — a small fraction of the Chinese-speaking population of the community. This chat group includes at least one board member: Katherine Tseng. Hundreds of messages were posted on this chat. 

There was an urgent call to action, with the board meeting just a few days away.

 

The first board meeting

When the SAC’s schedule was publicly released at the Jan. 12 board meeting, parents from the WeChat group who opposed it sought an opportunity to speak, with packets of typed talking points in hand. 

One parent, waving a sheaf, came to the podium and declared that most in favor of the new schedule were unaware of the reduction in instructional minutes. “I asked [my son],” she said, “‘Do you realize your instruction time will be cut?’ [And he replied,] ‘Oh, really? I didn’t realize that.’”  

SAC members in the audience were stunned. It seemed to many, like music department chair Michael Boitz, that the protesting parents had been prepped and coached.

The WeChat parents voiced several concerns, but did not share all their concerns. Some were privately concerned that an 8:40 start time would interfere with their work schedule. Others believed that it would worsen student stress, since a late start would lead only to a later bedtime  — and a later bedtime would cause greater stress. Another concern was that the bi-weekly schedule would impact students’ after-school activities. Still others worried that 25-minute daily tutorials were too short to make up tests or labs, and would even be inadequate for a student to get help from a teacher. 

The WeChat group’s main public objection, however, was that the schedule’s instructional minutes — according to their calculations, reduced from 60,350 to 54,825 — did not meet the state’s requirement of 64,800 instructional minutes. The district disputes these parents’ calculations.

The protesting parents were unswayed, and the board’s two Asian-American members, vice-president Cynthia Chang and Tseng, expressed support for the parents. Tseng voiced concern about the new schedule and asked for “a dialogue” between the administration and community members. 

Mistele said he did not have the luxury to wait until February to make a decision, and that it is not the board’s purview “to agree or disagree on staff schedules.”

 “Unless there is a will of the board,” he said, “I plan to move forward with this recommendation.”

When the board conducted an advisory vote on the schedule, its three non-Asian members voted in favor of the SAC schedule, and its two Asian-American members voted against it.

The parents who opposed the SAC schedule were disappointed. They felt their voices had not been heard and that the decision-making process had been opaque. The SAC felt that the schedule it proposed, after months of unpaid labor, was unappreciated by a few vocal, misguided parents. Some parents continued to argue their case with teachers, accompanying them to their cars after the meeting. These teachers felt beleaguered.

But the dejected parents were not done.

 

The complaint

After the board meeting, the disappointed parents weighed their options. An email thread was formed among both Chinese and non-Chinese community members. They felt that Mistele had been dismissive of their and Tseng and Chang’s concerns. 

Some of the parents may have even considered legal action against the district. Boitz said a GoFundMe account was created for this purpose, an act he described as plain and simple “lunacy” by parents who were set “on winning” the bell schedule battle at all cost. The Falcon was unable to verify  this account. 

Some parents expressed their concerns about the SAC schedule’s instructional minutes to the California Department of Education, according to emails shared with The Falcon.

One week later, this referral forced Mistele to reverse himself: As a compromise, he said Saratoga High would share the same schedule as Los Gatos next year.

“While there was no lawsuit, people from Saratoga had contacted the California Department of Education, subjecting any schedule change to scrutiny at the state level,” Mistele told The Falcon via email. “Such scrutiny could have resulted in delays and our losing our window of opportunity to make any change for 2016-2017.  I did not want to undo the progress we had made.” 

Few could have predicted the chaos his decision would leave in its wake. 

 

 The uproar

Some students responded passionately over social media to Mistele’s reversal on the bell schedule. A stream of red profile pictures, lined with either the words “Students for ‘The Old-New’” or “I stand with the SAC” flooded student’s Facebook pages. A Facebook group was created by junior Ryan Westman to keep students updated, while junior Max Vo created a student petition on Change.org, which had garnered over 800 signatures from teachers, students and parents as of Feb. 6.

Some teachers were supportive of the students’ protests, with English teacher Ken Nguyen, math teacher P.J. Yim and Spanish teacher Bret Yeilding signing Vo’s petition. It was widely perceived that the music department, headed by Boitz, refused to perform at the Electives Night on Jan. 25 in its own protest of the Los Gatos schedule. For his part, Boitz said his department’s lack of participation was not a form of protest. 

“There was little point in performing because parents [are] most interested in the band schedule, which was unable to be finalized due to the sudden schedule changes,” Boitz said.

While many of those who support the SAC schedule felt that a vocal minority thwarted the will of the majority, parents who oppose the SAC schedule think they are not in the minority. The district, they say, incorrectly assumes that community members who did not show up at the Jan. 12 meeting are in full support of the SAC schedule. 

On Jan. 22, parents created an online petition with the slogan “Kids come first! Reject Saratoga High School New Schedule!” This petition had close to 700 supporters as of Feb. 6.

No one knows for sure how much support either side has.

 

The great divide

The conflict is widely seen to have spiraled into a clash of cultures. As the bell schedule turmoil developed, a white-Asian divide seemed to be developing, though only among adults.

The Falcon obtained an email sent to the district by an Asian parent in which he said he was disheartened and ashamed of the recent actions taken by those who oppose the bell schedule, whom he described as “Asian Supremacists.” He said that he previously opposed the SAC bell schedule, but only because he fell victim to fear-mongering, and that now he truly believes that the SAC schedule would be best for students. 

He also claimed that at least two board members were closely involved in fomenting the opposition to the SAC schedule at the Jan. 12 meeting. (The Falcon contacted Chang for comment; she declined to comment and said all board members were directing all media questions to Mistele.) 

This Asian parent’s largest concern, however, was not the bell schedule: It was that the district would group all Asians together and that he and his family would be treated as outcasts because they were of Asian heritage. 

He wanted to scrub away the divide, but the divide only seemed to grow bigger. 

 

The second board meeting

On the evening of Feb. 2, a large crowd of teachers, student and parents streamed into the school library. As the seats filled up, tension grew. Senior Farbod Moghadam patted his friend’s back, muttering something about exercising his political voice. 

Voice: That was the theme of the evening. It seemed that the community’s voice would finally be heard. 

Mistele and Chang were among the first to speak. Mistele informed the audience that the district had asked the California Department of Education whether the SAC schedule complied with the state’s instructional-minutes requirement, and that his decision to adopt the LG schedule was a “compromise.” He said he was open to establishing a tutorial center, as some parents had sought, and that he was willing to modify the schedule to align it with the community’s wishes in the future. He was conciliatory, but also insisted that if he could redo the process, he would do it the exact same way. 

Chang added that everyone at the meeting had the students’ “best interests” at heart. There were dissenting murmurs. A teacher mumbled, almost inaudibly, “She’s so full of [expletive].” Then, seeing a Falcon reporter take notes, she quickly added, “Don’t print that!”

As the floor opened to the public, Mistele said he had not yet heard back from the California Department of Education. Robinson said he would take into consideration all opinions offered. Chang, agitated, asked if Robinson was trying to “refine” the LG schedule. Robinson said there is a possibility of “slight changes.” 

During the meeting, parents, teachers and students voiced opposition to Mistele’s switch to the LG schedule. One speaker who was heavily applauded, in spite of Chang’s pleas for silence, was parent Andrew Krcik. It wasn’t the decision that bothered him, he said. It was the process. 

“By listening to just a subset of the parents and not to all of the parents, I don’t think it was fair,” Krcik said. “If you are going to take parent input, take everybody’s input. My input wasn’t heard, and if they had taken input from all parents, there would have been a strong support for the first recommendation.” 

The head of the District’s Teachers’ Association, Los Gatos teacher Janis Rogers, described how her view was similarly “discredited.” She revealed how, after the meeting on Jan. 12, a few parents followed her to the parking lot and told her, “You don’t know what it’s like to be a parent!” As a parent of children who have attended schools in the district, Rogers was stunned. She went on to say that parents who opposed the SAC schedule were “bullying” the district. 

Not everyone agreed. 

“I don’t see the bullying part,” parent Elisa Chen responded. “I also attended the last board meeting at LG, and I think that at that time, people just applauded and raised their hands.” 

The Feb. 2 board meeting adjourned much more quietly than the previous one.

 

Where the community stands

The shouting has died, passions have subsided and the town is quiet. 

Though Mistele has not yet finalized a bell schedule for 2016-2017, there is a sense of finality in his silence. Students are asking teachers when the California Department of Education will respond, and teachers are telling students that it sometimes takes months. It is unlikely that the district will adopt the SAC schedule, they say; teachers and students are reconciled to following the LG schedule next year.

Principal Paul Robinson is saddened by some of the comments made online and at board meetings. He is disheartened by the strong disagreements, but he remains optimistic, as is his nature. 

He hopes the divisions will heal.

“Change is hard. Sometimes we don’t realize how hard it is until you actually make the change,” Robinson said.  “I hope we can all set aside the personal interests that hinder us from moving forward.”