Vowing to support “all students and families” in its jurisdiction, trustees of the Sausalito Marin City School District extended the timeline for creating a unification plan by six weeks, to the March 12 board meeting.

The unanimous vote on Thursday, at the first board meeting of 2020, came after trustees affirmed their devotion to serving all the approximately 500 students under their oversight and to ending the 20-year divisiveness between the district’s two schools. The district includes Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, a traditional TK-8 public school in Marin City, and Willow Creek Academy, a K-8 charter school in Sausalito.

“I really think that we need to move to one school,” said trustee Bonnie Hough, one of several board members to speak on the matter. “I really hope that our Willow Creek parents, that Sausalito residents, can make that jump, and come together with Marin City and be one. I really hope that people will see beyond whatever their concerns are and merge, and make this the most incredible school that it can be.”

Trustee Josh Barrow, referring to the zip code for two communities, said it was “a question of, do we feel a responsibility to all the students and all the families in 94965? And I can definitively answer ‘yes.’ Those are our constituents. Those are the people who elected us into office. How could we not be responsible for every resident in 94965?”

Superintendent Itoco Garcia said the decision to extend the timeline beyond the earlier target of late January was reached over the holiday break by members of the unification task force that represents both schools.

“The time extension is primarily designed to give time for the unification surveys — parent, student, staff and community — we developed over the holiday to be administered,” Garcia said in an email Thursday. “For us to conduct some student focus groups, and for us to provide guidance to the only two work groups who have yet to submit a report — facilities and transportation.”

Garcia said he remained hopeful about reaching agreement on a plan.

“I’m excited that many of the work groups that (made) presentations at the Dec. 17 town hall are committed to remaining together and continuing to support the unification process even after submission of their final reports,” he added. “A true testimony to the spirit and engagement the community has with this process.”

The district, which has a $10 million budget, is required to desegregate Bayside MLK within five years under a settlement with the state Attorney General’s Office. The unification plan is running in parallel — but on a separate track — to the desegregation plan.

Both tracks have the same idea: to get more diversity, equity and equal access to academic excellence among the populations of Bayside MLK, whose 120 students who are predominantly black or Latino, and Willow Creek, which has about 380 students and is about 40 percent white.

The impassioned testimony from the trustees came after a district resident accused them of favoring Bayside MLK over Willow Creek. Sausalito resident Phil Kerr made the accusations in an opinion piece that ran Jan. 3 in the Independent Journal and which was also discussed Thursday night.

“I just read a statement from the district lawyer stating that ‘the district has no fiduciary duty to WCA or its students’ and that this district board, led by Debra Turner and Ida Green, ‘simply has no duty to even consider sharing its discretionary funds with WCA,’” Kerr’s opinion piece states.

“With these statements Green, Bonnie Hough and Turner have officially turned their backs on the students that they promised to represent,” the piece states. “They have taken the official position that most kids, including the majority of low-income students, the majority of English learners, and the majority of the kids from Marin City are no longer their concern. Eighty percent of families have chosen to attend an integrated thriving public school at WCA. This board, elected to serve all students, is saying that these students are less than equal.”

Kerr was referring to the approximately $3.5 million in “excess” property taxes the district realizes after it allocates all the per-student funding to students at both schools. In the past, up to about $1 million of that excess was shared with Willow Creek for facilities and maintenance under terms of a five-year memorandum of understanding.

However, the MOU expired last year and was not renewed amid the two-year probe by the state Attorney General’s Office that ultimately led to the settlement last August. Willow Creek subsequently sued the district, claiming it deserved “full and fair funding” under state law. That suit is still pending, even as the unification talks are under way.

Barrow said that even though California’s charter school laws mandate different legal, financial and oversight obligations for charter schools than for traditional public schools, “it doesn’t abdicate us of our higher responsibility.

“(Kerr’s piece) asked us what is our agenda? Personally, my agenda, sitting here on this board, is to improve the academic outlook for all students in this district, in the 94965,” Barrow said.

Board president Ida Green said the 20-year dispute over the allocation of financing and resources for the two schools was separate from the “moral responsibility I feel for every child, like any parent would.”

Turner, meanwhile, hopes the district will “find a way to put aside divisiveness that’s like hot burning embers in everyone’s hands,”  she said. She pointed to some of the student art and film projects that were presented earlier in the evening.

“Hope takes courage,” Turner said. “And I find courage with some of the presentations that we’ve seen here tonight.”