Melillo: San Jose school district’s move to buy condos is betrayal of voter trust

A school district exists for one reason — its students.

Every decision it makes should be measured by a single question: does it benefit the children in our classrooms? San Jose Unified School District’s recent move toward buying condos in downtown San Jose fails that test.

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.

We have the money to fix them. In 2024, voters approved Measure R, $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’s 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.

In March, the SJUSD board of trustees voted to close five neighborhood schools. Now it wants to spend Measure R funds 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’t repairing the schools be the priority?

This deal fails our children. Instead of condos, the district should be building employee housing on our own land, an asset that would grow in value for decades, rather than buying units in someone else’s 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, with workers made to work without pay and held in captivity. The men who built it called it “Slavery Towers.” We should not spend our children’s education dollars on a building raised through exploitation.

The plan is also backwards. When the district began planning its employee housing on Hillsdale Avenue, 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’s money first and ask the basic questions later.

Housing for our teachers and staff is critical, and I want to solve it the right way, with a real plan. But you do not serve students by stepping over their schools to buy part of someone else’s building.

The board should halt this purchase. Walk into the schools with the broken HVAC and the crumbling blacktops, and start there. Spend the money voters approved on what they approved it for — our kids.

We closed five schools and have not even begun to fix the ones still open. Our students shouldn’t have to pack a board meeting or hire a lobbyist. Before we spend a dollar downtown, we owe each of them an answer: when will it be their turn?

Michael Melillo is a parent of two students in the San Jose Unified School District, former co-chair of the Measure R campaign and a candidate for SJUSD Area 4 Trustee.