Behind one rural school district’s fight to keep students safe – San Diego Union-Tribune

There are certain things Mannix Gonzalez will remember from his four years at Mountain Empire High School.

Rain hitting his head in class. Showering in his shoes because the locker room drains overflowed. School canceled for water pump failures, drinking water contamination and wildfire evacuations. The wind wearing away the school walls to little more than thin plywood.

All his life, Mannix attended school in the vast Mountain Empire Unified School District in rural East County.

Since he was a toddler, this has been home for the redhead with a black cap and a frankness that makes adults laugh and think. Both of his parents work for the school district — his mom as an executive assistant, his dad as a maintenance technician. He has friends here; he appreciates his teachers.

But Mountain Empire’s facilities have been failing for years, and failing them.

“Our experiences are: We don’t get to come to school because it’s windy. Our experiences are: There’s E. Coli in our water, so we got no school,” he said.

Mannix wanted people outside his small, rural community to see what was happening to him and his schoolmates. So last December, he began making a documentary about his school’s conditions and the toll they have taken on students and staff.

Since he graduated in June, Mannix has joined the U.S. Forest Service. But he hopes his film will somehow help his alma mater.

“I want to spread awareness, raise money — obviously rebuild the high school,” he said. “Just bringing the attention and getting the funding that everybody truly deserves.”

‘I just do what I gotta do’

Around 5:30 a.m., seven school buses rumble into the predawn darkness. Behind the wheel of one is Chuck Townsend, Mountain Empire’s transportation director, ready to begin his daily double route.

On a typical day, Townsend drives the bus for 220 miles — first picking up high school students and then, as their classes begin, heading to another end of the district to run a route for one of the elementary schools.

Long stretches of open road overlook the wide valley, painted golden in the light of sunrise. Kids wait for him outside convenience stores whose windows advertise liquor deals, at a vintage car wash station, on dirt roadside corners. He steers the bus packed with dozens of kids up hills, down winding roads, around piles of boulders.

In a way, many of Mountain Empire’s struggles trace back to these buses — its facility failures, funding deficits and whether students get to go to school at all.

Mountain Empire is San Diego County’s largest school district by area, bordering Imperial County to its east and Mexico to its south. It serves 1,800 students across 660 square miles of rugged and mountainous terrain. And its story is emblematic of many of the challenges that particularly impact rural school districts.

On top of grappling with chronic absenteeism, student poverty and staffing shortages at rates even higher than those of many San Diego County urban and suburban districts, Mountain Empire must also deal with more immediate, sometimes emergency-level dilemmas like keeping school buildings from falling apart, and getting its kids to school.

The only way many students can get to school from so far away is if the district drives them — many families don’t have the means. As a result, Mountain Empire is one of the only local districts that has for years provided free busing for every student.

But out here, the harsh landscapes can bring fire, rain, snow and winds that can top 100 miles per hour. If the conditions are too dangerous to safely transport students, even for just one campus, school can be canceled for everybody.

The year before last, high schoolers lost three weeks’ worth of school due to wildfire evacuations, snow and high winds, as well as facility failures like power outages, water pump failures and water contamination.

The universal busing service is one of the main reasons Mountain Empire struggles to pay for resources it needs, district leaders say. The district spends more than $2 million on transportation each year, more than 7 percent of its budget — money it can’t use to repair school buildings, hire teachers, offer more competitive pay or provide more student programs.

Mountain Empire expects significantly more deficit spending over the next two years. Last school year, it was the only district in the county that filed a qualified budget certification — a move that means it’s not sure it will be able to pay its future bills.

As the district’s director of transportation, Townsend isn’t supposed to drive the bus every day. But he must because he is constantly short on drivers; his mechanics and bus dispatcher also drive daily routes.

“It takes its toll,” said Townsend, who works at least 11 hours a day. “Everyone’s hurting for drivers, so I just do what I gotta do.”

‘What’s the actual mission of a school?’

Two years ago, at the end of August, the disasters came one after another for Superintendent Patrick Keeley and his staff.

On Monday, the high school’s transformer blew, shutting off the electricity and forcing Keeley to cancel school.

On Tuesday, after it was fixed and restarted, a resulting surge in water pressure overwhelmed the campus’ outdated water system and shut off water — so he canceled school again.

On Wednesday, the Border 32 fire ignited 25 miles away that would go on to consume 4,500 acres. Keeley had to cancel school for the rest of the week.

That evening, evacuees poured into the high school — a designated evacuation center — as students were in the middle of their after-school program. The Red Cross didn’t arrive until late that night, Keeley said, so school staff scrambled to serve evacuees food from the cafeteria. He slept that night on the floor of his office.

The high school gym served as the shelter for evacuees — but it has no air conditioning, so they were sweltering. Some used oxygen tanks or wheelchairs, Keeley recalls. Later, Red Cross workers admonished Mountain Empire for its facilities, saying they’re inadequate to serve as an evacuation center.

“It’s not just that we’re a school. We’re an evacuation center for an entire region. And all of these things, to me, scream that we should put in resources,” Keeley said.

Out here in this vast rural land, the Mountain Empire schools offer a key community hub and gathering place. The district’s small size — the high school has about 420 students — can make it feel like everybody knows each other. For some students, it’s given them a chance to lead, rather than be just one among thousands of students.

“What’s good about this school is that you’re able to be someone here, because it’s so tight,” said Daniel Delgado, who graduated with Mannix in June. He’s been class president and part of student government, yearbook and soccer. Now he’s a freshman at San Diego State.

Mountain Empire is one of the area’s largest employers and the community’s only licensed child care provider. For some students, it’s their only reliable source of food. And school is one of the only places where kids see their friends.

“When I think about, ‘What’s the actual mission of a school or school district?’ I think of all the other parts of what we have to try to do,” Keeley said. “It starts to make it seem like education is the 10th or 12th thing on the list.”

Ellen Horowitz knows that feeling. She runs a donation pantry for her English students out of her classroom, handing out sleeping bags, deodorant, shoes, shampoo and food. She once fed a student dinner for a year.

As in many districts, there is a wide spectrum of wealth within Mountain Empire. Some families live in sprawling houses; others crowd into trailers. A fifth of the district’s residents live below the federal poverty line. And nearly two-thirds of the district’s students are low-income, though even that’s likely an undercount, teachers say, since they know families who choose not to self-report.

Some students live in trailer parks, sometimes without their parents. Some students have gone to school while living in tents, cars, camper shells or toy trailers, sometimes with no clean water or electricity.

One girl couldn’t do her homework at night — she lived in a tent in a field, and her family had to conserve their lamp’s battery, one teacher recalls. And two sisters cared for their younger siblings, all in a one-bedroom apartment, the eldest sister working multiple jobs. The two still passed their classes.

“We understand it’s very hard for them to get through every day,” Horowitz said. “How are we supposed to teach them how to write an essay? How are we supposed to teach them chemistry?”

‘Thanks for being here’

Evelyn Nusic can only do chemistry experiments with her students using things you’d find in a kitchen — vinegar, baking soda, oil, soap. Any more advanced chemicals would be too dangerous.

The school’s science lab has no working eyewash station or shower, a sink that doesn’t drain and gas lines that jut outside and have been deteriorating for years. The windows don’t open, the anatomy textbooks are 20 years old and the lab tables wobble and aren’t fire-resistant. An old, tattered and flaking fire blanket hangs on the wall.

“It would be quite easy to start a fire in this room,” Nusic said.

Mountain Empire’s facility problems aren’t limited to the high school.

At Campo Elementary, students have been drinking bottled water for eight years, Keeley said, because the water is contaminated with nitrate.

At Potrero Elementary, an entire portable building has been taped off — its roof is caving in and its toilets are sinking due to water intrusion. And the school’s only designated ADA pathway is not accessible at all, thanks to a steep slope, cracks, bumps and tree roots.

“We have so many safety issues, so many concerns, so much stuff to handle — but you also want to be there to help the teachers and the staff, to go and say, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could put a TV right here?’” said Jacob Mann, the district’s facilities director. “Yeah, it’d be awesome — that’d make the learning environment so much better. But I don’t have water at a site right now.”

Constantly having to put out such fires — from staffing shortages to facilities failures — has left staff with little time to focus on improving instruction, Keeley admits. “One of the things that I think we’ve lacked as a district is really just being focused — focused instructionally,” Keeley said.

The facilities and other challenges, like student poverty and absenteeism, all serve as serious barriers to learning. In 2023, 71 percent of Mountain Empire students who took state standardized tests failed them in English, and 83 percent failed math.

And the poor facilities discourage some students from going to school at all, students and staff said.

Mountain Empire has the second-highest student absenteeism rate among county school districts. About 47 percent of all its students were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year, meaning they missed at least 10 percent of the school year.

Absenteeism is high also because just getting to the school bus stop in the early mornings can be difficult. In the winter it can mean waiting in rain, snow or 20-degree temperatures. Mannix’s friends who live on a reservation have had to walk a mile just to get to their bus stop.

“Sometimes they get up early, and they walk the whole thing,” he said. “But if it’s raining and it’s cold and windy, they’re not coming to school, because they don’t want to walk that. Like, that sucks, you know?”

When high school students are late to class — and they often are — Principal David Rios avoids questioning them.

“I walk out and say, ‘Thanks for being here. Tomorrow starts at 7:25,’” he said. “I don’t say, ‘Where were you? Why are you late?’ Because we don’t know.”

‘Like night and day’

When his Redhawks football team bused down to the suburbs to play away games, the biggest shock for Mannix was seeing the other teams’ locker rooms — how clean and new they were.

“When we would go to other schools, we’re like, ‘Yo, whoa, this is what they got here?’ You know? Like, ‘This is cool’ — like, ‘This is luxury,’” Mannix said.

Perhaps more than any other Mountain Empire students, it’s the athletes who see how much nicer other schools’ facilities are down the hill — new buildings boasting high-tech labs, bright green turf fields, state-of-the-art athletic complexes and more.

For some kids in Mountain Empire, “this is all they know, and so they don’t complain,” Mannix said. “I’ve played sports my whole life, in town … And it’s like night and day.”

In California, the main way districts pay for building and renovating schools is by getting voters to pass local bond tax measures, which require at least 55 percent voter support.

Some districts are more successful than others. For example, San Diego Unified has passed four bond measures totaling $11.5 billion within 14 years, money that has paid for brand new campuses with award-winning designs and facilities like theaters, college-style quads, high ceilings filled with natural light, parking garages, recreation areas, renewable energy fixtures and gyms designed for several kinds of sports.

Mountain Empire last raised $15 million with a bond that passed in 2018 by an 18-vote margin. That money has nearly all been spent — much of it on the middle school, where it could go further than at the high school, Keeley said.

The district tried in March for another bond that would have raised $20 million for the high school. But it failed by 4 percentage points.

Voters in the district generally lean conservative. And many are low-income and likely can’t afford the higher taxes, Keeley said.

There’s another reason it’s harder for rural districts to pass bonds, said Sara Hinkley, program manager at UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities + Schools: Rural districts tend to have far less commercial property wealth to draw on for bond revenue than their urban and suburban counterparts, so it costs them more per taxpayer to fund school facilities.

“It’s not that their voters don’t want to support their schools. It’s that it’s more costly,” Hinkley said.

Even if voters had approved Mountain Empire’s bond, however, it wouldn’t have been nearly enough to fully rebuild the high school campus.

The most the district is ever allowed to raise at a time in bond money is $45 million. But the high school would cost at least $47 million to fix, per the state’s estimate; one architect recently sketched out a complete rebuilding cost closer to $65 million, Keeley said.

And that doesn’t include any of the costs to replace dilapidated facilities at the district’s six other campuses, nor the $10 million needed to make its elementary schools suitable for transitional kindergarten.

All told, the district has estimated it will take more than $170 million to replace and upgrade schools to make them suitable for students’ safety and learning.

“No matter what, we cannot generate the funds locally, even if we were maxed out,” Keeley said. “Our kids deserve better. Some school districts are passing bonds, and those bonds are putting in turf fields … and pools and theaters. I’m just trying to get clean and reliable drinking water and a building that is structurally sound.”

State aid disparities

Without a bond, one of the district’s only options is to ask the state for help.

California gives districts some bond money to help them build better facilities. But that aid is contingent on their raising money first through a local bond measure. Then, if there’s state funding available and the district meets certain criteria, the state will match what it’s raised.

Rural district leaders and education advocates have criticized this setup as inequitable, pointing out that it has steered more funding to students in urban and suburban districts, which have more property wealth in their boundaries and can therefore raise more bond money.

In the decades since the state’s school bond program began, a recent study by the Center for Cities + Schools found that the quintile of school districts with the highest assessed property values and bonding capacity per student have gotten nearly eight times the state bond funding per student as districts with the lowest property values.

Districts like Mountain Empire that can’t pass a bond can ask for a 100 percent state match by applying for a program called “financial hardship.”

But Mountain Empire doesn’t even meet the criteria for that, because districts must have a bonding capacity of no more than $5 million or already be at 60 percent of their capacity. Financial hardship only really works for “very, very tiny” districts, Hinkley said, since the criterion looks at bonding capacity overall, not by student.

That means Mountain Empire doesn’t get any state bond help, even though its bonding capacity per student lands it in the bottom 10 percent of districts statewide, according to the Center for Cities + Schools. It can only raise $9,925 per student, compared with a median of $26,287.

Mountain Empire is now appealing to the state, asking for financial hardship despite not meeting the criteria. A state panel will hear its appeal in October.

In November, California voters will decide on a new state bond, Proposition 2, that would add $10 billion to the state’s nearly-depleted school facilities bond fund.

The measure would not significantly change how the state doles out bond funding, but it would incrementally change the state match in some cases and raise the bonding capacity needed to qualify for financial hardship from $5 million to $15 million — which still wouldn’t help Mountain Empire.

Asked for comment, the state’s Office of Public School Construction, which oversees the school bond program, said Mountain Empire is already able to raise the bond money it needs.

“Although Mountain Empire’s attempt to pass a local bond measure earlier this year failed, Mountain Empire does have adequate bonding capacity to obtain local funding through a local bond measure, and the school district successfully passed a local school bond in 2018,” a department spokesperson said in an email.

‘No nice, fancy school’

There was one math teacher job that Amanda Gonzales, who runs the high school’s math department, could not keep filled last school year.

The turnover started when one of her teachers left for a job in the suburbs. Not only would the teacher make more money there, she would also save money on gas since her new school is much closer to her home, Gonzales said.

The best Mountain Empire could find to replace her was a teaching intern, Gonzales said. The intern didn’t last two months into the school year.

After he left, Mountain Empire hired another intern who left just a month before the end of the school year. “He’s like, ‘I’m done. I’ll never teach again,’” Gonzales recalls.

Districts all over the state need more teachers and school staff, but vacancies are especially tough to fill in rural areas like Mountain Empire.

On top of offering lower pay than that offered by surrounding urban and suburban districts, the district needs to somehow convince teachers to make the long commute up to Mountain Empire’s schools. The district’s easternmost school, Clover Flat Elementary, is more than an hour’s drive from downtown San Diego without traffic. Even the high school is close to that.

Teaching job candidates have turned down Keeley’s interview and job offers after they saw how far away the school is or how poor its facilities are, he said.

“They’re not at no nice, fancy school, you know, where they have something to hold on to,” Mannix said. “They don’t live up here. And so they don’t want to drive that 45-minute drive to come to … something that’s falling apart.”

The constant teacher shortage means Mountain Empire often relies on inexperienced and improperly authorized teachers to staff classrooms.

Only three-quarters of Mountain Empire teachers were known to be properly credentialed and authorized for their teaching assignment, based on state data for the 2022-23 school year — a rate that’s lower than nearly all other county districts. At least 11 percent of the district’s teachers either taught on an emergency teaching permit or lacked a required authorization.

The staffing shortage also means the high school can’t offer as many programs as it would like, including advanced courses. Daniel took half as many Advanced Placement classes as he would have wanted.

“When the teachers don’t want to come here,” he said, “I and the students see, well, if they don’t want to come here, why should I want to come here?”

But many staff do stay, either in spite of or because of the district’s many challenges. Generations of graduates come back to help sustain it — Keeley estimates a fifth of his staff are alumni.

Among them is Keeley himself, who can still point out the exact elementary classroom where his mom worked as an aide, and who fondly recalls playing basketball in high school and summers when he and his friends trekked out over the hills to camp in the bushes. He worked for decades in larger districts, then came back to give back to his community.

“All we got here is each other,” Mannix said. “It’s like we got this, whatever — rain falling on our heads, everything’s falling apart next to us — but all we got is each other.”

‘It’s not too late’

Mannix’s documentary premiered on a Thursday morning in June in the district’s small, plain school board meeting room on the high school’s campus.

In the audience were many of the people keeping the district alive: Keeley, Mann, Rios, Townsend. Daniel came. So did Mannix’s mom, his granny and his girlfriend, who also graduated in June.

Mannix prefaced his project with a slide presentation. He showed a photograph of four elementary school girls smiling — his little cousins.

“These are my future Redhawk family,” he said. “I want them to just deserve a real, actual high school experience — not like, ‘I’m learning in class, and rain’s hitting me in the head,’ or ‘We had to stop because of a water pipe,’ or ‘E. Coli’s in the water.’”

The room guffawed when one student in the film said of the school bathrooms: “They literally have prison toilets.” It fell quiet when others said they were embarrassed and ridiculed for their school.

“It may be too late for me, but it’s not too late for you and your family,” Mannix said in a voice-over in the film. “Please help me get this campus fixed for the next generation to come.”

You can watch Mannix’s full documentary at this link.

Originally Published: August 25, 2024 at 5:00 a.m.