The opinion of the Napa Valley Register
No one disputes that middle school is hard; few dispute that Napa Valley Unified has done a less than perfect job in helping some of those sixth to eighth graders navigate that challenging phase of life.
On its face, the Mayacamas Middle School charter looks like the answer: smaller classes, more nimble teaching methods, and a nurturing environment for a population that desperately needs it. But the petitioners just haven't done what they need to do to convince us they have everything in place to be successful. The Napa County Office of Education, last year, set out a list of conditions Mayacamas needed to make to win conditional approval. An updated petition, submitted in January, had more issues identified by staff that need to be addressed.
If a teacher asked a student to redo an assignment — and that student returned a paper with more errors — the teacher would likely mark it an "F," and lose no sleep over it. That's certainly an option here, but since there are many vulnerable students here who had nothing to do with this, we suggest a different option: make Mayacamas do the work and then — and only then — approve the charter.
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We acknowledge the petitioners have said they did, in fact, do that homework. They said they didn’t include it in the updated petition because it’s not normally required. If that’s true — and we have no reason to believe it isn’t — that’s just one more convoluted and weird thing that’s happened with this process.
So, let’s remove the gray and make things black and white: the NCOE board should determine what conditions its staff has laid out that are vital to Mayacamas’ success — the ones that can be logically done now — and demand its petitioners fix them by its next meeting. If questions still remain in April, the county education board should close the book on this for good.
The editorial board researches, interviews stakeholders and discusses issues of importance to Napa County residents. Its written opinions are the institutional views of the Napa Valley Register and is not beholden to interest groups, public officials, or its own advertisers. Its larger goal is to provide clear-eyed analysis of these issues to help make our county and region a safe, equitable, peaceful, and just place to live and work.