The Salem-Keizer School District is proposing to close six elementary schools in 2027: Brush College in west Salem, Candalaria and Liberty in south Salem, Richmond in southeast Salem, Englewood in northeast Salem, and Cummings in Keizer.
Candalaria caught my eye because my daughter, Celeste, went there many years ago. I can’t recall exactly when. Must have been the late 1970s and/or early 1980s. How she ended up there has some relevance for the current vociferous debate about the proposed closures, given how strongly parents and students are opposed to their school being closed.
My first wife and I moved to Salem from Portland in 1977 after I got a job with the State Health Planning and Development Agency. We bought a house on Hillview Drive (you could see the lights of Fred Meyer from our driveway!). It was in the Salem Heights elementary school district, where Celeste went to first grade.
I recall her coming home from her first day at school with tears in her eyes. When my wife and I asked her what was wrong, she said “we learned colors, because some kids didn’t know their names.” Celeste had been going to a Montessori preschool. She was excited about going to real school.
But obviously there was a big gap between what our daughter knew going into first grade and what quite a few other children in her first grade class knew. This bothered us. It didn’t take long for us to learn how to play the Salem Heights parent game. Some teachers were better than other teachers. We were able to get Celeste into classrooms with those better teachers, by and large.
Eventually we moved to the Candalaria elementary school district.
This was a higher income area than Salem Heights, so the students at Candalaria were better prepared. This doesn’t mean that lower income students are less intelligent or motivated. It just means that having more money means that more parents can afford a high quality preschool and offer their children more educational opportunities — books, encyclopedias, and such (yeah, back then encyclopedias were a thing in the pre-internet times).
So I’m totally sympathetic with current Candalaria parents fighting hard to forestall the school’s closure. I came across the image above when searching for a photo of Candalaria. And in a October 11 Salem Reporter story by Eddy Binford-Ross about parents grappling with the proposed school closures, I read:
Troy Hickman and his wife, Erin, surveyed public and private schools across Salem before landing on Candalaria.
“We felt like the community and the educational outcomes from Candalaria, in a public school, (were) unrivaled, ” Hickman said. All three of their sons are currently enrolled at the school.
Candalaria is the best-performing Salem-Keizer elementary school, or one of the best, by various state testing metrics, but that didn’t save it from the proposed closures list. These students are currently slated to attend Salem Heights Elementary School next year, which has a third grade reading proficiency score that is 25% less than Candalaria’s.
…Hickman said they may consider pulling their students from Salem-Keizer if things don’t change.
“We’re definitely going to put everything on the table, because (education) is our top priority and if it’s not the district’s top priority, I need to reassess where it’s best for my children to thrive,” Hickman said.
I feel for the Hickmans and other Candalaria parents. Some people probably believe they are elitist, a charge that could have been leveled against me and my wife when we chose to move into the Candalaria school district in part because we felt that our daughter would get a better education there than at Salem Heights
All I can say is that my wife and I were avid Democrats who believed in diversity, equal opportunity, and all that good liberal stuff. And we also believed in having our daughter attend the best possible elementary school. The Hickmans are upset because the Salem-Keizer School District doesn’t consider educational outcomes as one of the criteria for deciding which schools should be closed.
Sure seems like it should be, along with other criteria. School closures are never popular, but sometimes they can’t be avoided. The school district is between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Whatever the school board does will have significant negative consequences. I’ve simply tried to explain why I have a lot of sympathy for Candalaria parents, since I used to be one.
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