A new package of charter school reform bills is moving through the California state Legislature — but its travels are bumpy at best. “This (package) looks like a veiled ban on charter schools,” said Jeff Knowles, a parent and board member at Willow Creek Academy, a charter school in Sausalito that is authorized by the Sausalito Marin City School District.

In an historic vote, members of the Dixie School District Board of Trustees agreed this week to shed what critics said was more than 150 years of name linkage to an era of slavery and racism of the Civil War South. The resolution calls for the change to take place before the start of the 2019-20 school year on Aug. 22.

Three former athletic coaches and a former college counselor at the Branson School in Ross were accused of sexual misconduct involving former students from the late 1970s to the early 2010s in a 17-page report released late Friday. The report is the result of a 10-month probe commissioned by the school last June and done by investigators Nancy Kestenbaum and Clara Shin of Covington and Burling LLP.

Faced with budget ultimatums from Marin County and the state, the Larkspur-Corte Madera School District board of trustees voted 4-1 this week in favor of eliminating or reducing hours for 13 non-teaching — or classified — positions. Along with a smaller list of reductions in hours for teachers approved by the board last month, the move will result in a total trim of $1 million to the district’s $20.4 million 2019-20 spending plan.

Willow Creek Academy charter school in Sausalito has sued the Sausalito Marin City School District and Marin County Superintendent of Schools Mary Jane Burke to block the district’s plan to cut $1 million from the charter school budget for the 2019-20 school year. “Unfortunately, we have reached the point where the district must be held accountable for its unwillingness to engage in dialogue and its unjust treatment of so many of our district’s students,” Weinsheimer said in the statement.

A recall drive was announced Tuesday against Dixie School District board member Marnie Glickman, a leader in the movement to change the name of the district. “Trustee Glickman’s failure to act in the best interest of the Dixie School District as an elected fiduciary and trustee has caused her constituents, district staff and fellow board members to lose trust in Ms.

After several years of budget crises and deficit spending, the Tamalpais Union High School District board of trustees this week locked up a multi-part plan to get back in the black. Trustees on Tuesday voted 5-0 in favor of almost $3 million in cuts to the district’s $91.6 million spending plan for 2019-20.

“I was eager when the (November) elections ended to come to the table of brotherhood,” district board President Ida Green said before about 250 people at an emotional public meeting last week at the district’s TK-8 school in Marin City, Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. “But as soon as we were sworn in, we were hit with a letter from the AG’s office.”.

After meeting four times since October, a special Novato Unified School District committee is recommending the district not close any of its eight elementary schools — even though enrollment is declining and some school buildings are not being used to capacity. “The positive impacts on the instructional program and school culture (of maintaining existing elementary school size) outweigh the negative impacts on facility capacity and operating efficiency,” the 25-member committee said in a statement, issued at last week’s district Board of Trustees meeting.

After 5-1/2 hours of testimony, talk and debate, Dixie School District officials rejected petitions for 13 new names Tuesday, agreeing to take the matter up again at a later date. “You have a moment here,” board member Marnie Glickman said, objecting to the delay and promoting her favorite of the 13, the Live Oak Valley Elementary School District.

In a stunning turnabout, the San Rafael Board of Education voted 3-2 to deny a one-year contract extension for Superintendent Michael Watenpaugh. The vote, which came in dramatic fashion Monday after weeks of strong and vocal lobbying by concerned parents, means Watenpaugh, 59, who earlier Monday announced he planned to retire, will leave when his contract ends on June 30 of this year.

Faced with dropping enrollment and the future loss of $2.1 million in tax revenue, Mill Valley School District officials will not be reversing their earlier decision to eliminate transitional kindergarten in the 2019-20 school year. “The district and the board members all support high-quality early childhood education,” Interim Superintendent Raquel Rose said Monday.

Just a few weeks after Ross Valley School District and Ross Valley Charter finally settled their 10-month-long space feud for the current school year, the two sides are again embroiled in a tug-of-war on the same issue for the 2019-20 school year. “We have two (space allocation) processes going on at one time,” said Ross Valley School District Superintendent Rick Bagley at Tuesday’s board of trustees meeting in San Anselmo.

Latino parents in the San Rafael City Schools district joined the outcry this week against approval of a new three-year contract for Superintendent Michael Watenpaugh. The effort, seen at several recent school board meetings since December, was previously mostly led by white parents in the district — until Monday’s meeting of the San Rafael Board of Education at Terra Linda High School.

When 20 of Marin’s more accomplished published poets were judging more than 1,200 entries in last year’s high school poetry contest, they had no idea where a particular soul-stirring rhyme might have come from. It could have been crafted inside a sun-filled classroom on a tony, meticulously landscaped Marin campus.

With high stakes riding in Tuesday’s Election Day, and concerns about voter suppression rampant in other areas of the nation, youth groups in Marin City are doing their part to raise the public profile of the importance of exercising the right to vote. “When I grew up in Georgia, our families discussed the importance of voting because of segregation and (because of) the Civil Rights Voting Act that passed in 1965,” Felecia Gaston, founder of the nonprofit youth group Performing Stars, said Wednesday.