GILROY
– School board trustees approved Thursday a
”
neighborhood schools-based
”
plan for determining how students from eight elementary schools
will be cast into three middle schools starting next year.
GILROY – School board trustees approved Thursday a “neighborhood schools-based” plan for determining how students from eight elementary schools will be cast into three middle schools starting next year.
The unanimous decision moves Gilroy Unified School District one step further away from its former, more choice-oriented magnet school system. Starting this school year, GUSD began enrolling kindergartners in the school nearest to where they live.
Parents wanting more choice in determining which school their children will attend are pushing the district to allow for waivers to the new policy. The parents want the district to let elementary students remain with their current school’s peers when they head to middle school.
“This plan will be great in about five years when all the elementary students attend neighborhood schools, but it doesn’t take into account the current first- through sixth-graders who are being scattered to the wind because they’re stuck in the middle of a district policy change,” parent Stephanie Chisolm said. “If you absolutely won’t grandfather these kids in, they should at least have first priority to transfer into their school of choice.”
Chisolm has criticized the district for not taking the emotional needs of students into account when determining the middle school boundaries. She and other parents say pre-pubescent children require stability and that a major enrollment change would unnecessarily complicate their lives.
“If you talk to these children, their first priority is their friends,” Chisolm said.
District officials say that school capacity constraints and strict state guidelines concerning transfers between campuses make such a waiver policy unlikely.
“We need to research the state’s criteria for (enrollment) choice, but I know it doesn’t give us much leeway to use a priority system. If choice is allowed, there usually has to be a random process so everyone has a chance to choose where they’ll go to school,” Superintendent Edwin Diaz said.
Diaz said if the district allows children to be grandfathered into their school of choice and then implements the neighborhood schools policy, enrollment at some middle schools could exceed capacity.
“We’ll work the numbers, but we can’t go to a system of attendance area schools and then not let an attendance area student go to the school closest to where they live,” Diaz said.
The new attendance boundaries for the middle schools represent the best of 12 alternate plans all geared toward having enrollment capacities of 800 or less, socio-economic balance and residential proximity to campuses.
The middle school boundaries needed to be set before GUSD opens its newest junior high campus – Ascencion Solorsano – scheduled for late August.
Some parents questioned why the boundary plan places Luigi Aprea students – the district’s top performers on standardized tests – into Brownell Middle School, which faces state sanctions for not improving student performance two years in a row.
Student test scores were not considered when the boundary committee hammered out the enrollment options. GUSD officials also note that in the 2002-03 school year, 97 percent of Luigi Aprea sixth-graders voluntarily enrolled in Brownell for seventh-grade.
