In late 2010, San Diego Unified leaders began officially rolling out a new way to get parents and families more involved in schools. It was called the cluster council system.
The term cluster referred to the collection of elementary and middle schools that fed into each of the 16 traditional high schools open at the time. This new system created a group for each cluster comprised of parents, teachers and administrators that met regularly to weigh in on the direction of schools and discuss their problems.
At a board meeting that year, Nellie Myer, then the district’s deputy superintendent of academics, described the system as a school reform model that “empowers teachers, site leaders, students and parents to help improve student achievement.”
She pitched a utopic list of possible benefits. It included everything from increasing student attendance to improving achievement and addressing safety concerns. It wasn’t crazy. Research has long shown community engagement is one of the keys to increasing student achievement.
District officials promised to support the cluster groups. Administrators would be required to participate and help each unique community in whatever way best fit its needs. The superintendent would even be graded on whether she developed a plan to help them flourish.
For a while, the cluster councils seemed to work. The groups met and planned events – from rummage sales to arts showcases to movie nights – and helped push for new programs at their schools.
But 15 years later, the system has almost entirely deteriorated.
In the early 2010s, every district had a cluster council. Today, only six of the district’s 17 clusters have a functioning council.
Some district leaders say the model was doomed from the beginning and favors communities with more resources. But for others who were involved in cluster groups, district officials’ failure – or disinterest – in supporting the system is to blame.
The Halcyon Days
The cluster council push was part of a much-touted district initiative called Vision 2020. It was a suite of reforms spearheaded by former school board member John Lee Evans that promised to usher in a “quality school in every neighborhood.”
Mike Snyder, a parent of a San Diego Unified grad, saw how it all worked firsthand. In his former role as the head of the Madison cluster council, he was something of a poster child for the cluster council system.
During his time with the group, the cluster successfully pushed new initiatives, like a program that prioritized science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. It also threw events that brought together schools from across the area, like the Clairemont Day at the Bay – a yearly festival attended by thousands that was essentially an interactive marketing pitch urging Clairemont residents to keep their kids in local schools.
“We did some amazing things at Madison,” Snyder said. “My thinking was, ‘I’m helping some kids today. I’m bringing in some programs that are going to make a difference in their lives.’”
But the Madison cluster council’s halcyon days were numbered. It’s been inactive since 2020.
That story is a common one. At the height of the initiative, each cluster stood up its own council group. District spokesperson James Canning wrote in an email that this year only six clusters have held meetings: Clairemont, Mira Mesa, Scripps, Henry, La Jolla and University City. A website for the Clairemont Community of Schools, though, says meetings are on hold due to declining attendance.
But not every cluster council shut down because of low attendance. Keashonna Christopher was born and raised in southeastern San Diego and helped lead the Lincoln cluster group, while it was active. She also worked as a counselor at nearby Porter Elementary, where she also attended school.
Christopher said district officials didn’t always participate.
“Anytime there was a hard conversation, we noticed administrators stopped coming to meetings,” Christopher recalled. “It should be no surprise that parents in this neighborhood want the best for their students and good conditions at their kids’ schools and good learning outcomes. It’s almost like the message that the community was getting was, ‘How dare you hold us to the standards that we’re supposed to work by?’”
The Lincoln council had one of the rockiest relationships with administrators. When controversies arose, the community often took to cluster council meetings to vent their frustrations. That was the case when community members discovered a Lincoln High educator had a historical “No Coloreds Allowed” sign hanging in his classroom and when allegations of misspending surfaced that later proved to be largely true.
In the Lincoln cluster council, volunteers booked spaces for meetings, sent out invites to community members, coordinated appearances with administrators and even purchased water and snacks for attendees coming straight from work or with a child in tow. It added up, Christopher said.
That heavy lift is part of why the cluster council has been on hiatus for months. But a lack of district support contributed to the group’s breakdown, Christopher said.
“If there are communities with the means and resources to do that every meeting, then it works out, fine,” Christopher said. “But we need support from community partners, like administrators and area supes.”
The five clusters with active councils all share one obvious trait: they have fewer low-income students than the district average.
None of the eight poorest clusters, which include Lincoln, have active councils. The clusters that are active also tend to be disproportionately White; the problem of cluster councils, it turns out, mimics the age-old achievement gap.
Not everyone involved in clusters has felt unsupported.
Megan DeMott has volunteered with the La Jolla cluster for about a decade. Though they’ve built a core group of volunteers, it still hasn’t been easy to keep it running. DeMott said she coordinates each meeting, sometimes spending time on weekends to put together agendas.
But she’s always been able to rely on district officials. School principals, as well as the area superintendent overseeing the cluster, attend each meeting. She can even text them between meetings should issues arise.
“Clusters really have to be parent led and run, because it’s not [district officials’] job. There has to be interest,” DeMott said. “For people to say, ‘The district’s not responsive and it’s not open and this and that,’ I’m not buying that at all. They have a voice, they just aren’t using it.”
What District Officials Say
According to district policies, fostering the cluster council system actually is part of district officials’ jobs. The policies instruct the superintendent to “develop a cluster management strategy that will be supportive of democratic clusters in the improvement of schools.” As part of that strategy, the guidelines encourage district staff to get involved in a support role rather than to issue directives from on high. They also instruct staff to be responsive to “each unique community.”
Deputy Superintendent Nicole DeWitt said, in practice, the district’s approach is more laissez faire. It’s up to community members to form cluster councils and set up meetings, though local principals and area superintendents are expected to partner with them.
Besides, she added, cluster councils are just one avenue for community involvement. Parents can still join multiple different organizations, like PTAs and school site councils or larger district committees.
“If a cluster is interested in hosting parent cluster meetings, we support them, but if they are more interested in participating in committees and other parent volunteer opportunities at their individual school sites, we support that decision too,” she wrote in an email.
From the get-go, a basic tension has plagued the model. To its early boosters, the system was a much-needed opportunity to decentralize decision-making, funneling some of the power held by those at the top into the hands of community members. Some were skeptical of that more expansive role and wanted the councils to operate in more advisory-like capacity.
But even the boosters sensed a precarity in the model. If it devolved into a bunch of “BS talk about clusters,” that didn’t actually empower community members, then “the cluster idea is doomed,” said then-Trustee John de Beck a decade and a half ago.
Richard Barrera, the district’s longest-serving trustee, never agreed with that part of the thinking.
“That concept was always problematic to me,” Barrera said. “The idea that we were going to have unelected people who may or may not have been representatives of even the consensus opinions within their own cluster make the kinds of decisions that the elected school board was responsible for, I never supported that idea.”
What also troubled Barrera was the inherent imbalance in many of the cluster structures. While clusters north of the Interstate 8 were often filled with parents, those in the poorer parts of the district Barrera represents were often largely collections of principals. It’s no surprise to him that the system has now devolved back into the reality that existed prior to the district’s introduction of the more structured system.
That’s why Barrera thinks investing in the cluster system as a tool for parent engagement shouldn’t be a district priority. To him, it never was an effective outlet for community engagement. He even thinks the board may need to stop grading the superintendent on their cluster strategy.
“The district obviously should be, you know, putting resources and energy into engaging parents. But I’m not sure the best use of district resources is for cluster support,” he said.
To some of those who were most involved in the system, like Snyder, the fact that so many cluster councils have fallen apart is no surprise. In his view, the district never cared about the system.
“The district wanted to push a narrative, which is that they wanted to have community involvement. They put it in Vision 2020 – it’s all about community involvement – but that was just a checkbox,” Snyder said. “There were incredibly vibrant, vocal groups prior to Vision 2020, that are gone. The district didn’t just go backwards and eliminate all the work we did, they actually went back 10 more years and wiped out the whole cluster groups, period.”
For Veri Chavarin, the president of San Diego Unifed’s Council of PTAs, the complaints about the district’s wilting cluster system are just one more example of a familiar refrain: that San Diego Unified has a community input issue.
“There’s an intent to partner with parents, but the way it’s done is not centered around ‘How do we work with parents and make sure they come to meetings and participate?’” Chavarin said.
That’s why she thinks getting family engagement right means taking the extra steps needed to meet families where they’re at. And while managing a cluster system in a district of nearly 200 schools is a daunting task, Chavarin believes that massive size makes them even more important.
Christopher, the counselor and Lincoln cluster volunteer, said her community misses its cluster. When she’s out at the grocery store, for example, people sometimes approach her and ask when it will restart.
The fact that it was comprised of people who’ve long lived in the community inspired trust. The forum provided people a space in which they could really be listened to, Christopher said.
Her goal is to get the cluster restarted as soon as possible, so the community can once again have the direct conduit to school and district leadership it once had. To make that happen, Christopher said the cluster group needs greater support from the district that – as the policies lay out – speaks to Lincoln’s “unique community.” Despite her experiences, she’s eager to work with administrators and hopeful about the prospects for collaboration.
“We’d love to have them come to the table to ask, ‘How can we help?’ Not tell us what they want it to look like or feel like, or the topics we should talk about,” Christopher said. “That’s the top-down stuff. We get that all the time. We want them to partner with us on what parents and community members need, so they can have confidence in their schools and help build a strong district.”