A school district exists for one reason \u2014 its students.<\/p>\n
Every decision it makes should be measured by a single question: does it benefit the children in our classrooms? San Jose Unified School District\u2019s recent move toward buying condos in downtown San Jose<\/a> fails that test.<\/p>\n Right now, students across our district are learning in classrooms with broken heating and air conditioning, and playing on cracked, aging blacktops that are overdue to be replaced. These are not luxuries. They are the basic conditions a child needs to learn.<\/p>\n We have the money to fix them. In 2024, voters approved Measure R<\/a>, $1.15 billion, to repair and upgrade our schools. I co-chaired that campaign because our kids deserve to learn in buildings that work. I also insisted on one thing first: a project labor agreement, so the work would be done by skilled workers in good-paying union jobs, built to the standard our children\u2019s schools deserve. Doing right by kids and doing right by the people who build their schools is the right thing to do and the right way to do it.<\/p>\n In March, the SJUSD board of trustees voted to close five neighborhood schools<\/a>. Now it wants to spend Measure R funds<\/a> to buy 337 condos in Silvery Towers. And to date, the district has not spent a single dollar of that bond to repair or upgrade a classroom our students sit in today. The HVAC is still broken. The blacktops are still cracked. Shouldn\u2019t repairing the schools be the priority?<\/p>\n This deal fails our children. Instead of condos, the district should be building employee housing on our own land<\/a>, an asset that would grow in value for decades, rather than buying units in someone else\u2019s building, saddled with condominium fees that only increase. And consider the building itself: in 2018, the U.S. Department of Labor found that Silvery Towers was built in part with forced labor<\/a>, with workers made to work without pay and held in captivity. The men who built it called it \u201cSlavery Towers.\u201d We should not spend our children\u2019s education dollars on a building raised through exploitation.<\/p>\n The plan is also backwards. When the district began planning its employee housing on Hillsdale Avenue<\/a>, it surveyed its own staff and learned they wanted larger, three-bedroom units, the kind of space a family actually needs. The district has not done a single follow-up survey to find out whether employees even want these units. We are being asked to spend the public\u2019s money first and ask the basic questions later.<\/p>\n