Families in Southeast San Diego are celebrating after San Diego Unified School District leaders announced Bethune K-8 School won’t become an elementary school after all.
Bethune was one of four transitional kindergarten through eighth grade schools set to lose its middle school grades in the next two years. In a letter to families sent Sept. 12, district leaders said middle schools provided more electives and the courses students need to prepare for college.
At a community meeting Wednesday night, teachers highlighted Bethune’s strengths, including Spanish language classes, a leadership program and sports.
Teachers there get to know entire families, Spanish teacher Desiree Rauterkus said in an interview. She teaches most of her students two or three years in a row.
“The kids know us. The families know us. We don't need that time to build those relationships that other schools would need at the beginning of the year,” Rauterkus said. “That's the benefit of a K-8, and I think developmentally, 11-, 12-, 13-year-olds, they need that.”
Superintendent Fabiola Bagula told community members that principals of three TK-8 schools – Audubon, Fulton and Golden Hill – expressed concerns about their middle school students in 2023. The area superintendent shared those concerns.
Bagula said she’d had doubts about whether Bethune should be among the schools losing its middle school grades.
“Somehow, in all the conversations, it became all or nothing,” Bagula said. “And I was like, ‘I don’t know about that.”
Bagula said she’d like to see the school add a second foreign language option so more students could work toward college admissions requirements.
At the end of the meeting, she announced middle school grades would stay at Bethune.
“I learned a very important lesson as your superintendent, which was to listen to my instinct,” she said. “I said, ‘No.’ I should have stayed with the ‘no.’”
Attendees cheered. Parents wiped away tears. Teachers hugged each other.
“I'm so happy that we get to have the middle schoolers staying,” third grader Ava Wilcox said. “I'm also happy because I get to go to middle school here because they're letting it stay.”
Jonathan Nagtalon’s daughters graduated from Bethune. The school has what the district wants for its middle schools, he said.
“It’s excellent news,” he said. “I've never sat in a meeting where you basically go through all that emotion, hear all the wants and needs, basically have to go ahead and prove your case, and at the very end, realize that this is what we need.”
