If the 20-year saga of racial, socioeconomic and academic strife at a Marin City school is too complicated and confusing for many Marin residents to grasp, a new YouTube video on that topic could offer some help.
The documentary, “Desegregation, Unification,” was unveiled earlier this month by its creators: four students at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley. Through teacher, staff and administrator interviews, photos, animated graphics and insights from students at the school, the film tells the story of how Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in Marin City evolved through upheaval and transition amid the parallel rapid growth of Willow Creek Academy charter school in Sausalito.
“I think we all went into it, not really knowing how significant it would be to us,” said filmmaker Rose Paradise, a senior at Tam High, who produced the video along with fellow senior Evie Robson and juniors Cecelia Meade and Adrienne Murr.
“It was really powerful to meet the students (at Bayside), and be in the classroom, and get to know everyone,” Paradise said. “Their personal stories were really inspiring — and to understand that they really deserved better.”
The student team unveiled the video at the Jan. 9 board meeting of the Sausalito Marin City School District. Some of the trustees — such as board president Ida Green — appear in the film, along with Bayside MLK principal David Finnane and eighth-graders at Bayside MLK who agreed to be the film’s “stars.”
“This is a shining example of what an arts-integrated school looks like,” said district Superintendent Itoco Garcia, who is leading the current effort to unify Willow Creek and Bayside MLK, as well as comply with a desegregation order contained in a settlement agreement with the California Attorney General’s office.
Paradise and the other students said it took them almost two months to create the video as part of a special program at Tam High called AIM, or Academy of Integrated Humanities and New Media.
“It was very neat. After we did all of the research, it was very interesting to actually come to a school and not only read about it, but actually almost experience it, and meet the kids and put faces to the news articles,” said Meade, who designed and produced the animated graphics in the film.
Murr found the news reports about Bayside MLK “deeply upsetting to me because it just seemed like there was something wrong,” she said. “The biggest issue was that I didn’t really know about it; people in my specific bubble, nobody was talking about it.
“This (segregation and discrimination) is happening in our community of Marin; Marin City is part of our community, but oftentimes it’s under-looked,” she added. “This documentary gave me a chance to really understand the story for myself and to have a way to communicate the message to my peers.
“This needs to be talked about; it’s the 21st century, and this is still going on,” Murr said. “I was really excited about the opportunity with AIM to do something meaningful and to spread the message.”
Robson said she “didn’t know what to expect after reading the news reports in advance, but “the first day that we walked into the classroom, we knew that it would be something that changed our high school experience a little bit.”
