Fairfax San Anselmo Children’s Center Hoping to Stay at Deer Park

Will the get to stay at its venerable Deer Park location?

For more than 25 years the center has been providing low-income families with day care, after-school programs and family-support services at the former Deer Park Elementary School in Fairfax—a property it leases from the .

But last spring the district, faced with increasing enrollment and dwindling funds, began eyeing the option of reopening an elementary school on the property. That spelled trouble for the center, as the district opted to terminate the center’s lease two years early.

According to district Superintendent Eileen Rohan, “RVSD provided FSACC with a written termination of lease notification in June 2010. The notification sent in June 2010 provided the FSACC with a two-year notification of termination, effective June 2012. The original lease offered a 15-year term, due to expire in June 2014.”

“As of now, we have to be out by June 2012,” says Heidi Tomsky, the center’s executive director, “but we have requested that the district rescind the termination.”

Tomsky thinks there is good reason to believe that the district will renew the center’s lease. In the first place, reopening a school at the site never got much traction locally. The Fairfax Town Council opposed the idea, and the school board itself—after it had provided the notification of its intent to terminate the center’s lease—voted late last summer to work toward expanding the district’s existing campuses instead of opening Deer Park.

Then came last November’s elections, when voters —a bond issue that brought the district $41 million to renovate its elementary schools to accommodate additional enrollment. That effectively took the Deer Park issue off the district’s front burner.

“The RVSD currently does not intend to develop either of the district's properties at Deer Park or Red Hill with Measure A funds,” says school board president Chris Carlucci.

That makes Tomsky hopeful a new lease agreement can be reached. “We’re currently working with the school board to relook at the lease decision given that they’ve decided not to reopen the site as a public school in the near future,” she says. “Our preference would be to stay here and continue to work with the school district to provide care to children in this area.”

The state’s budget abyss makes life tough for all the parties. “Governor Brown has proposed some pretty severe cuts and changes that would more than negatively impact our ability to provide services to low-income families,” says Tomsky.

According to Tomsky, Brown’s proposed cuts include a 35 percent reduction in funding across the board to all state-funded childcare programs; reducing the maximum family income for eligibility; and eliminating support for the older children currently covered—those ages 11 and 12.

“We’re already a nonprofit,” says Tomsky, “so having a 35 percent cut to our entire budget would make it nearly impossible to continue to run. We would have to replace those dollars with something else. We have a donor base but it’s nowhere near the $350,000 that would be cut if Governor Brown’s recommendations were to go through.”

“It’s harsh,” she says, “because it’s again putting the economic woes of our state on the backs of the most vulnerable. Everyone needs to do something, that’s reality. But look at spending at the state level—I’m sure there’s more waste up there than any of us have down here on the ground floor.”

The school district has also had to make , because of concerns about the state budget that remain unresolved. The district's budget issues have added a layer of complexity to the negotiations with the children's center.

So what happens if the center and the district can’t agree on new lease terms?

“If we have to move then we’ll have to look at sites that will meet our needs,” says Tomsky, “and there aren’t any in this area that we’ve been able to identify, which would mean that the service would no longer be available to the families in the area.”

“There’s no other service like this in the Ross Valley area,” she says, “so if we end up having to leave then all the families that live here that are dependent on the service will no longer have that available. It would be unfortunate. We’ll serve other families in another area, but…”

Tomsky says the service the children’s center provides is hard to come by. “Within the county there’s a waiting list for all state-funded programs,” she explains. “There are over 900 children waiting for childcare that are eligible for it. We’re not the only service in the county, but there just aren’t enough to meet the need.”

For more information on the Fairfax San Anselmo Children’s Center, visit fsacc.org. The school district will consider the lease at its June 28 meeting.