A Peninsula school district is proposing raising taxes to fund new facilities after it projected an enrollment spike prompted by the closure of a private school funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.
The Primary School, founded in 2016 and serving pre-K to fifth-grade students, will cease operations at the end of this school year, along with another campus in San Leandro. Most of the Peninsula school’s 400 students, many of them from low-income families, are expected to transfer to the Ravenswood district. The Ravenswood City School District has placed a $70 million bond measure on the June 2 primary ballot in San Mateo County to fund the construction of new classrooms, in part because of a 20% increase in expected enrollment. Those renovations were previously planned through a master plan from 2015, but will become more relevant as enrollment increases.
That enrollment jump comes in large part from the over 400 students displaced by the closure of the tuition-free private school that served East Palo Alto and the Belle Haven neighborhood in Menlo Park, near Meta headquarters, which was announced last April. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative did not return a request for comment about transition plans for students. But a spokesperson for the nonprofit told the Chronicle it is committing $50 million to help support students in the East Palo Alto, Ravenswood and Belle Haven communities…