Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) and the University of California, Riverside (UCR) announced Friday a $134 million science and technology high school expansion project was being shelved.
“Leadership has changed in both organizations, and with that comes an opportunity to think more expansively about our approach to partnership in service of Riverside’s students,” RUSD Superintendent Sonia Llamas said in a May 22 press release. “Our focus is on connecting the dots across our schools, partners and community.”
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For more than a decade, RUSD had discussed expanding its fifth through 12th grade science and technology-based school by building a new high school campus, called the STEM Education Center, on UCR’s property.
According to the release, the schools have opted to move away from the project and instead create a group to “assess opportunities for expanded STEM programming” districtwide and connect students with UCR’s resources. RUSD and UCR will bring together collegiate leaders from different areas of expertise, the statement added, to focus on strengthening “the supports that help students” transition into higher education.
“UCR remains deeply committed to our partnership with Riverside Unified and to expanding high-quality STEM education for students throughout our community,” Chancellor S. Jack Hu said in the release. “This collaborative move will allow us to work with RUSD to explore how we can leverage the experience in STEM education to broaden opportunities across more schools.”
The announcement came three weeks after The Riverside Record first reported the project had been stalled since last June due to a breakdown in communication between the two schools.
According to minutes from a Riverside STEM Academy Foundation Board of Directors meeting, Assistant Superintendent Orin Williams said the district had submitted all the necessary paperwork to begin construction, but the university held them back due Hu’s hiring.
Since then, the project remained in limbo.
At a December 18 RUSD Board of Education meeting, Williams said the district had spent about $1.5 million to finalize an environmental impact report for the project. Williams also presented possible alternatives to the board in the event the university chose to back out of the deal.
Liz Pinney-Muglia, RUSD’s public information officer, said in a phone call with The Record the money spent on the environmental report could not be recovered.
However, she said the district was planning to discuss how to best reallocate the funding originally set aside for the project while keeping the Riverside STEM Academy in mind.
Pinney-Muglia said this could include focusing on long-term maintenance projects districtwide.
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What a colossal waste of resources on a project that never made sense from its onset. This can be squarely blamed on the RUSD Board at the time: Kathy Allavie, Brent Lee, Angelov (or whatever his first name is these days) Farooq, Patricia Lock-Dawson, and Tom Hunt. Noemi Alexander carried on their tradition. All also were responsible for the bait and switch that occurred when they chose to build 3 new schools (including the Casa Blanca and Eastside schools) versus fixing the older schools in the District AFTER Measure O passed in 2016. They chose this, and rigged the Stem Academy lottery to favor immigrant families, because of their steadfast belief in DEI and deception over merit and transparency.
In order to expand STEM instruction district wide, other programs will need to be merged, cut, or scaled back because the district’s resources are finite.
For example, Lincoln and Raincross alternative schools should probably be merged. They seem to serve overlapping demographics. And many of them could even be mainstreamed back into the normal high schools and the virtual school.
The Summit View home-based program and Riverside Virtual school are cost effective since most of the burden is placed on the parents, but they could also be merged to streamline operations without reducing services.
The most prominent waste of money is the ever-expanding admin class, who work at headquarters rather than at school sites helping with day-to-day operations. RUSD needs to reduce admin bloat, not increase it.
Another waste of money, controversially, is English learners that show no signs of improving. This is sadly a home culture problem, not a school district problem, and no amount of money thrown at it will solve it. RUSD should spend the minimum required by the state. They should not spend extra money on it to make themselves look more compassionate or whatever image they are trying to project.