At the rally at City Hall, PTA Director of Legislation Nancy Krop addressed the Council. “We talk about numbers. We talk about a hundred children. A hundred of our students living in the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park. We’re talking about one of eight students at Barron Park Elementary School losing their homes,” Krop said. “But what is behind those numbers is a child. A child who dreams. A child who has hopes for tomorrow. A child who believes that adults can fix things … Every number is a child.”
Erika Escalante, a long-time Buena Vista resident who graduated from Gunn and became her family’s first college graduate, called the mobile home park an “affordable and safe place to live and to raise our children. I want my son and all the children at Buena Vista to have the same access to education and opportunity I had,”
In their research study on the children and families of Buena Vista, Drs. Donald Barr and Amado Padilla from Stanford University found that there were 67 families with 129 children and all school age children (101) were enrolled in school. Despite a 29.3% drop out rate among Hispanic high school students in Silicon Valley, and 27.6% statewide, not a single Buena Vista student had dropped out of school. “The children liked going to school and they liked their teachers”, said Dr. Padilla. “And all of the parents had attended parent teacher conferences.”
At the closure hearings Dr. Padilla testified that “The people (of Buena Vista) take care of each other. It is a community that watches over its children.”
It’s All About the Children!
* Photos by Richard Man. Additional pictures are available at his website.