The state Attorney General’s Office has rejected a request from the Sausalito City Council to be briefed on anything regarding the state’s bias case against the Sausalito Marin City School District.
According to Sausalito Mayor Joe Burns, the A.G.’s office on Wednesday denied the city’s March 19 request for investigatory records and declined any comment on the city’s demand that the state hold a public briefing on the situation.
“Our request included a forum to discuss their steps and proposed settlement or at least allowance to let the district discuss the proposed settlement,” Burns said in an email. “Our request for transparency wasn’t only for the investigatory records, but included community knowledge of proposed solutions. Those were not mentioned by the AG response.”
The state, in a Dec. 11 letter and after a two-year investigation, concluded that the district was in violation of state anti-discrimination laws by operating what it said was a segregated school at Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, a TK-8 public school of about 100 students in Marin City. The state alleged that prior boards of trustees had directed an unequal amount of the district’s resources to Willow Creek Academy, a K-8 charter school of about 400 students in Sausalito that the district oversees.
Since the Dec. 11 letter, the Sausalito-Marin City board of trustees has been meeting in closed session weekly with legal counsel, state representatives and district Interim Superintendent Terena Mares to discuss possible remedies to the alleged violations. No details of those talks have been released, and none are available now, Mares and board President Ida Green said in a joint email Friday.
“The district appreciates and respects the community’s need for information with the Attorney General’s investigation,” the email states. “The district’s discussions are working towards an overarching agreement that will identify what the district will do in response to the Attorney General’s findings.”
In the absence of any promise of information, Burns said Sausalito now plans “to form a task force to consider how we will proceed as a body as it relates to the service of public education to our residents.”
The attorney general has also declined a similar request from Willow Creek officials. On the same day as the Sausalito letter was dated — March 19 — Willow Creek sent its own letter to the state, asking for a meeting to discuss the situation. The school has not yet heard anything back, said Kurt Weinsheimer, president of the Willow Creek board of trustees.
“Unfortunately, regarding the AG’s private discussions, we are as much in the dark as the rest of the community,” Weinsheimer said in an email. “We appreciate the Sausalito City Council advocating for the need of transparency and community input tied to the AG/District discussions and any proposed resolutions.”
Weinsheimer said he and other charter school officials “obviously agree with (Sausalito’s) need for a transparent and inclusive approach. As a school that has integrated the majority of students in both Marin City and Sausalito, we want to continue to be part of the solution and hope the district and AG will take us up on that offer.”
The Attorney General’s office declined to respond to any questions about the situation.
“To protect the integrity of investigations, we cannot comment on ongoing investigations,” the A.G.’s press office said in an email Friday.
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Some district residents have said they feared that the state and district officials are planning to engage in a legal procedure such as a consent decree, in which a judge issues an order based on a private agreement — and that the community would have no information or participation in any outcome.
Neither Mares nor Green would comment on any process being discussed, citing the state’s mandate of absolute secrecy and threat of a lawsuit or contempt charge.
“We continue to seek ways to involve the community and anticipate the community will have input in some way,” they said in an email. “The board will enter into closed session discussions (at the board meeting) on April 4 related to the AGO’s investigation. At this time, the district does not know if there will be anything to share on the 4th.”
The board meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday at Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, 200 Phillips Drive, Marin City.
Meanwhile, trustees voted Monday to retain attorney Sue Ann Salmon-Evans, of the law firm Dannis, Woliver and Kelley, to defend the district in a lawsuit filed March 5 by Willow Creek over the amount of money allocated to the charter school in the 2019-20 budget. Salmon-Evans, who has also served as attorney for the Ross Valley School District in a lawsuit by the Ross Valley Charter school against the Ross Valley district, is well-versed in the complexities of charter school law in California, Mares told the board prior to the vote at the special board meeting in Marin City.
Also Monday, the trustees voted to waive potential conflict-of-interest concerns over attorney Ed Sklar, of the law firm Lozano Smith, who is representing Marin County Superintendent of Schools Mary Jane Burke, another defendant in the Willow Creek suit. Sklar has previously represented the Sausalito Marin City School District, but Salmon-Evans, who attended Monday’s special board meeting, said she thought the waiver was acceptable. Salmon-Evans told the board she didn’t think conflict of interest would be a problem, adding that the board could revoke the waiver if they found that Sklar took a position that was adverse to the district.
Willow Creek is represented by the law firm Young Minney and Corr — the same firm that has represented Ross Valley Charter in its lawsuit against that district.
“With regard to the lawsuit, there is not much to report,” Weinsheimer said in an email. “Both the district and superintendent Burke have suspended conversations about funding and facilities, pointing to the lawsuit. We think this is unfortunate, and hope that they will soon re-open communication channels so we can resolve the issues outside the courtroom.”
Despite the conflict over the budget, Weinsheimer said Willow Creek and the district “have made strong progress” on a plan to continue collaborating on special education services for next year.
“We are also expecting, by Monday, to receive the district’s final proposal for providing WCA reasonably equivalent facilities under (state) Proposition 39,” he said. The latter is a state law that mandates public schools to offer “reasonably equivalent” facilities to charter schools.
Burns, meanwhile, reiterated his previously voiced support of Willow Creek, which has a student body about 40 percent white and the rest racially diverse. He has said publicly he supports combining Willow Creek and Bayside MLK, which is predominantly black, into one school system.
“As I have stated in public hearings, my personal belief is that the district has failed the residents of Sausalito in providing suitable public education, for decades,” Burns said in an email. “The district has not addressed a plan nor goal to provide an adequate level of service.
“There seems to be a lot of discussion about traditional school, geography of two communities, socioeconomics and racial equality,” Burns added. “But, I see a school (Willow Creek) that is delivering on its plan to provide suitable education regardless of community, affluence or race; yet that is the platform the district seems intent to defund and uproot. Willow Creek Academy seems to prove that results aren’t about money, race or campus location, but solely about leadership and ideology.”
