The story of Mountain Empire Unified in East County demonstrates the many challenges that rural school districts especially face — crumbling facilities, staffing shortages, transportation and more.…
Mountain Empire High School on Tuesday, May 21, 2024 in Pine Valley, California. The rural school district doesn’t have funding to repair or upgrade facilities at the school that are substandard and unsafe.
Since he was a toddler, this has been home for the redhead with a black cap and a frankness that makes adults laugh and think. Both of his parents work for the school district — his mom as an executive assistant, his dad as a maintenance technician. He has friends here; he appreciates his teachers. On a typical day, Townsend drives the bus for 220 miles — first picking up high school students and then, as their classes begin, heading to another end of the district to run a route for one of the elementary schools.
Mountain Empire is San Diego County’s largest school district by area, bordering Imperial County to its east and Mexico to its south. It serves 1,800 students across 660 square miles of rugged and mountainous terrain. And its story is emblematic of many of the challenges that particularly impact rural school districts.
The year before last, high schoolers lost three weeks’ worth of school due to wildfire evacuations, snow and high winds, as well as facility failures like power outages, water pump failures and water contamination. As the district’s director of transportation, Townsend isn’t supposed to drive the bus every day. But he must because he is constantly short on drivers; his mechanics and bus dispatcher also drive daily routes.
Students eat lunch in the cafeteria at Mountain Empire High School on Tuesday, May 21, 2024 in Pine Valley, California. The rural school district doesn’t have funding to repair or upgrade facilities at the school that are substandard and unsafe. The school was built in the 70s and has dividers that separate the gym from the cafeteria but can no longer be used because tracks are broken and too expensive to fix. The stage was taken out and is now used for storage.
“It’s not just that we’re a school. We’re an evacuation center for an entire region. And all of these things, to me, scream that we should put in resources,” Keeley said. Mountain Empire is one of the area’s largest employers and the community’s only licensed child care provider. For some students, it’s their only reliable source of food. And school is one of the only places where kids see their friends.
Some students live in trailer parks, sometimes without their parents. Some students have gone to school while living in tents, cars, camper shells or toy trailers, sometimes with no clean water or electricity. The school’s science lab has no working eyewash station or shower, a sink that doesn’t drain and gas lines that jut outside and have been deteriorating for years. The windows don’t open, the anatomy textbooks are 20 years old and the lab tables wobble and aren’t fire-resistant. An old, tattered and flaking fire blanket hangs on the wall.Mountain Empire’s facility problems aren’t limited to the high school.
Constantly having to put out such fires — from staffing shortages to facilities failures — has left staff with little time to focus on improving instruction, Keeley admits. “One of the things that I think we’ve lacked as a district is really just being focused — focused instructionally,” Keeley said.
Mountain Empire has the second-highest student absenteeism rate among county school districts. About 47 percent of all its students were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year, meaning they missed at least 10 percent of the school year. “I walk out and say, ‘Thanks for being here. Tomorrow starts at 7:25,’” he said. “I don’t say, ‘Where were you? Why are you late?’ Because we don’t know.”When his Redhawks football team bused down to the suburbs to play away games, the biggest shock for Mannix was seeing the other teams’ locker rooms — how clean and new they were.
For some kids in Mountain Empire, “this is all they know, and so they don’t complain,” Mannix said. “I’ve played sports my whole life, in town … And it’s like night and day.” Mountain Empire last raised $15 million with a bond that passed in 2018 by an 18-vote margin. That money has nearly all been spent — much of it on the middle school, where it could go further than at the high school, Keeley said.
“It’s not that their voters don’t want to support their schools. It’s that it’s more costly,” Hinkley said. And that doesn’t include any of the costs to replace dilapidated facilities at the district’s six other campuses, nor the $10 million needed to make its elementary schools suitable for transitional kindergarten.
Patrick Keeley, superintendent of Mountain Empire Unified School District, points out sinkholes in kindergarten bathroom that is unusable at Potrero Elementary School on Wednesday, May 22, 2024 in Pine Valley, California. by the Center for Cities + Schools found that the quintile of school districts with the highest assessed property values and bonding capacity per student have gotten nearly eight times the state bond funding per student as districts with the lowest property values.
That means Mountain Empire doesn’t get any state bond help, even though its bonding capacity per student lands it in the bottom 10 percent of districts statewide, according to the Center for Cities + Schools. It can only raise $9,925 per student, compared with a median of $26,287. Asked for comment, the state’s Office of Public School Construction, which oversees the school bond program, said Mountain Empire is already able to raise the bond money it needs.
After he left, Mountain Empire hired another intern who left just a month before the end of the school year. “He’s like, ‘I’m done. I’ll never teach again,’” Gonzales recalls. Teaching job candidates have turned down Keeley’s interview and job offers after they saw how far away the school is or how poor its facilities are, he said.
The staffing shortage also means the high school can’t offer as many programs as it would like, including advanced courses. Daniel took half as many Advanced Placement classes as he would have wanted. “All we got here is each other,” Mannix said. “It’s like we got this, whatever — rain falling on our heads, everything’s falling apart next to us — but all we got is each other.”premiered on a Thursday morning in June in the district’s small, plain school board meeting room on the high school’s campus.
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