Parents Say Lunch, Recess Changes at San José School Leave Kids Hungry, Confused

When the school year began at Ruskin Elementary School in San José last month, students returned to a changed campus. Enrollment nearly doubled, from about 370 to more than 700, after a nearby elementary school closed.

Many Cherrywood Elementary students — from one of three Berryessa Union schools shuttered amid declining enrollment — transferred to Ruskin. Cherrywood’s principal, its Dual Immersion Mandarin Program and its teachers also relocated.

Now parents and their children are adjusting to what several describe as a chaotic, confusing transformation.

“My concern was trial and error, which is what they’re doing this year with our kids,” said Tina De Vera, a Ruskin parent for more than a decade who now has two children at the school. “There wasn’t a contingency, proactive plan put in place. So now they’re just going to try and go each day and see what works.”

A new principal for the larger student body has introduced new routines and protocols. Some of the changes have upset parents who never wanted the closures. Several said their children have been rushed through lunch to accommodate the additional students, and many worry about safety as traffic worsens during drop-off and pick-up.

“I’ve seen three students over the course of the beginning of the school year almost get run over at crosswalks,” De Vera said. Parents are making dangerous U-turns, she added. “Cars are just illegally blocking traffic so that they can let their kids run out of their cars onto the campus. There is no order.”

District spokesperson Perla Rodriguez said officials remain committed to promoting safe routes to schools. As a “Walk n’ Roll District,” Rodriguez said Berryessa Union partners with San José to teach safe walking and biking skills. San José will also conduct a formal traffic study this month at the district’s request.

“We remain committed to listening with care, learning from one another, and working side by side with all of our Ruskin families,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “Together, we will build a united community that honors the strengths of both schools and ensures the very best for our students.”

School lunches and growing pains

Several parents are also concerned about the allotted time for school lunches. They said their children have felt pressure to finish meals in less than 15 minutes after sitting down.

Justin Chaudoin, another Ruskin parent, said during the first week of school, his third-grade daughter came home hungry.

“She was like, ‘I’m hungry, I’m hungry, I’m hungry.’ Usually, that’s her ploy to get me to take her to McDonald’s or something,” Chaudoin said. But his daughter told him she didn’t have enough time to eat, and that the staff urged students to hurry. “She said, ‘It made me nervous and angry because I wanted to eat my food, and I couldn’t. And I didn’t know what was happening. They were just telling us to leave.’”

The California Department of Education recommends students have at least 20 minutes to eat lunch once seated.

In the school’s newsletter, Principal Tina Tong Choy wrote that Ruskin is now feeding more than 700 students in under two hours, and students who need more time may stay to finish their meals.

Another practice unsettling some parents is a recess protocol where students are told to “freeze” when the bell rings. Some children thought they were supposed to sit, squat or kneel.

“Anything that is not a norm for Ruskin and is a norm now should have been communicated ahead of time, especially things like this,” parent Jessica Bustos said.

Rodriguez, the district spokesperson, said routines for recess and lunch breaks are still new and evolving.

In the school newsletter, Tong Choy acknowledged “growing pains,” adding that what worked last year “may or may not work for our school community now.”

“This isn’t an overnight change, but one that gets better and smoother day by day,” she wrote.

Bringing Mandarin Immersion to a new home

Before Cherrywood Elementary closed, parents pushed to keep it open and preserve its Mandarin Immersion program, built from the ground up since 2018. Parent Karen Khasymska joined the push to keep Cherrywood open, collaborating with others on a paper arguing enrollment was strong and moving the program would disrupt its success and future district funding.

But when Cherrywood closed, she prepared to enroll her daughter at Ruskin for the second grade, encouraged that many classmates would transfer too. Her optimism faded when she learned her daughter would be placed in a “combination class” with first graders because other second-grade classes were full. She transferred her daughter to a private school.

“We wanted our public school to work out for us,” Khasymska said. “It was disappointing and certainly a lot of scrambling that first week. We had to consider a Plan B that we hadn’t thought we’d have to consider.”

Khasymska said she knows other Cherrywood families who turned to private schools. “Things are happening at such an accelerated rate or they’re not giving the teachers or school administration the chance to plan or think things through or look at their numbers,” Khasymska said. “I think there was just so much happening.”

Not all parents describe the same disruption. Former Cherrywood parent Chandan Bhat said the school year at Ruskin has been “so far, so good” for his third-grade son.

“He’s still in the Mandarin Immersion program. His teachers haven’t changed, his classmates haven’t changed, even the principal for Ruskin [was] the principal at Cherrywood,” Bhat said. “So in some sense, some things have changed, but a lot of the things are the same.”

Thanks to the program, both his daughter and son are learning Mandarin, achieving success in competitions and making him proud.

His main concern is the traffic, which he hopes will be addressed soon.

Rodriguez said Berryessa Union is now on a stronger financial footing and the budget has stabilized after closures and other fiscal measures. She said funding can fluctuate with state allocations and enrollment trends, but there are “currently no plans for additional closures in the near future.”

Across California, public school enrollment continues to decline due to lower birth rates, families moving out of state and rising private and home school enrollment.

That means more school districts will face the challenge of closing and consolidating schools — and doing so without breaking parents’ trust.