For years Richmond’s Stege Elementary School community has asked the WCCUSD to rebuild the school, which last summer was declared unsafe and shut down just weeks before school started.
Now they’ll get their wish. The West Contra Costa Unified School District, which initially said it could only afford to remodel the more than 80-year-old building, says it found the money for a full rebuild.
It’s a long-awaited victory for Stege Elementary School students, staff and community members. The district originally promised to redesign Stege at the start of the 2020-21 school year, but that never happened.
Now, a complete rebuild is set to start soon, with the new campus scheduled to open by fall 2027, according to district staff. Alten Construction will be rebuilding it.
“It’s about time, and the children deserve it,” said Guadalupe Enllana, the board member representing Area 2, which includes Stege.
The board unanimously approved increasing the budget for the Stege Elementary project from $43 million to $61 million during the last board meeting of 2024. The board had previously approved $43 million to modernize Stege, but it wasn’t enough for a complete rebuild.
After backlash from the community and demands for a rebuild instead of remodeling, the district found $18 million to cover a complete rebuild.
The district is using money remaining from other building modernization projects that have been completed, said Melissa Payne, interim associate superintendent of facilities. It’s a funding strategy the district has used since 2016.
“I stand here with a commitment on behalf of our entire team that we are listening, that we want to work together, and that we will,” Payne said during the December board meeting.
While thanking the board for the project, community members expressed frustrations about how long it took the district to get there.
Frustrations about school equity, academic performance remain
“This is about equality,” a community member said during the public comment period. “If the students at Stege were not Black and brown, the school would have never deteriorated. This isn’t an issue of funds, this is an issue of will.”
According to district officials, Stege Elementary, built in 1943, has the highest population of Black and African American students in the district. Nearly 39% of students were Black or African American in the 2022-23 school year, and 34% were Hispanic or Latino.
The school has also struggled with low performance for the last decade. In the 2017-18 school year, it was one of the lowest performing schools in the state. More recently, 3.4% of students in grades three through eight met or exceeded English standards in 2024, about 5 percentage points lower than the previous year. Last year, 18% of students in those grades met or exceeded math standards, up nearly 8 percentage points from 2023.
As groups, African American and Latino students statewide have had the lowest percentage of students meeting or exceeding math and English standards for the last decade. Last year nearly 37% of Latino students and about 30% of African American students met English standards. About 24% of Latino students and nearly 18% of African American students met math standards.
The school was also at the center of a lawsuit that was filed in July by civil rights law firm Public Advocates. It alleged the school district failed to remedy issues in the required timeframe for nearly 50 complaints filed by teachers, students and parents since June 2023. The bulk of the complaints were about poor building conditions at Stege Elementary.
The complaints said Stege had moldy walls, inoperable windows, classrooms reaching more than 90 degrees without ventilation, and broken floor tiles. Lead and asbestos were also found after the district hired an environmental firm to test building materials.
Building conditions at Stege Elementary were never improved, even as district officials “repeatedly” acknowledged conditions at the school were “dangerous,” the lawsuit says. The closure of the school was announced on July 23, four days after the lawsuit was filed, and hazardous materials were detected during the removal of window panels.
However, in October a Contra Costa County Superior Court judge declined to issue an order directing the district to remedy anything outlined in the lawsuit, stating that the remodeling plans made the lawsuit “moot.”
Students and staff found out not long before the 2024-25 school year started that they were being relocated to DeJean Middle School.
“I think this has been long-awaited, and I really hope that the process moving forward will be transparent and all inclusive to the greater community,” Enllana said. “I think it’s really going to take community buy-in not just from students and parents, but the greater community.”
