GILROY
– Gilroy Unified School District is one step closer to knowing
how students from its eight elementary schools will be cast into
three middle schools when its newest junior high – Ascencion
Solorsano – opens its doors next school year to incoming
sixth-graders.
GILROY – Gilroy Unified School District is one step closer to knowing how students from its eight elementary schools will be cast into three middle schools when its newest junior high – Ascencion Solorsano – opens its doors next school year to incoming sixth-graders.
A special committee, which includes district administrators, parents and city staff, has settled on one proposal for dividing Gilroy into three sections feeding into the middle schools. The boundaries strive for school enrollment capacities of 800 or less, socio-economic balance and residential proximity to campuses.
The boundaries, which are not equal in the amount of acreage they cover, align with major thoroughfares and geographic features of Gilroy.
“None of the alternatives are perfect, but this version meets those objectives better than any of the other proposals we considered,” said Juanita Contin, GUSD director of student enrollment.
Three original boundary alternatives and their roughly half a dozen revisions were considered by the group, which has been meeting since this fall. None of the boundary options, including the one the group is endorsing, found favor with parents who want their kids to go to junior high with the peers they know from elementary school.
“I’m happy they did not split up all the schools like some of those other maps did, but the public should know this (boundary proposal) is not necessarily going to keep kids in second and third and fourth and fifth grade together,” GUSD parent Stephanie Chisolm said.
Keeping kids who are currently attending elementary schools together is complicated because the district hasn’t always enrolled students at their neighborhood schools. This year was the first time incoming kindergartners were placed in the school nearest to where they live, but last year’s students were allowed to remain at their school of choice.
“I think the district should just grandfather this in like they did when they switched to neighborhood schools,” Chisolm said.
Contin said phasing in the middle school boundary policy is not realistic.
“Populations are always in flux,” Contin said. “We have chosen the plan, though, that keeps most kids together. It also has the safest traffic patterns and it has the best (socio-economic) balance.”
The committee will hold a community forum on the topic at 6 p.m. Jan. 30 in the district office, 7810 Arroyo Circle. It will take comments from that session and make the recommendation to the school board in February.
The boundary proposal sends students who live east of Santa Teresa Boulevard, from roughly First Street to Day Road, to South Valley Middle School.
Students south of First Street and north of 10th Street and Uvas Park Drive will attend Brownell. Brownell students will also come from areas west of Santa Teresa Boulevard, from Uvas Creek in the south to roughly Sunrise Drive in the north.
Ascencion Solorsano students will come from the remaining areas, including a section of town north of 10th Street and south of Sixth Street, between Monterey Road from the east and Orchard Drive from the west.
The downtown section of students were included in Ascencion Solorsano’s boundaries to balance socio-economic status, enrollment consultant Tom Williams said.
“It’s hard to tell kids who play together on the same street that they can’t go to school with each other, but we divided that area so only one street (Eighth Street where it is intersected by Orchard Drive) is split up,” Williams said.
The Ascencion Solorsano boundary is expansive in acreage but will not produce a glut of students since land east of Highway 101 is mostly industrial and agricultural and has very few homes, the district said.
Committee members say the expansive boundary will not pose commuting problems because most Solorsano students, the group figures, would be driving to school due to the school’s outlying location. In addition, the Solorsano boundary is designed so families can use major thoroughfares on their way to school.
City traffic engineer Kristi Abrams, who served on the committee, was pleased the group used Uvas Creek as natural boundary between Solorsano and Brownell attendance areas.
“People don’t realize that two feet of water moving at two feet per second can move a car,” Abrams said. “We don’t like people crossing that channel, especially after it rains.”
The boundary proposal comes as the district works to align the curricula and policies of each of its middle schools.
Next year, all elementary schools districtwide will house kindergarten through fifth-graders only. Middle schools will house sixth- through eighth-graders, except for Solorsano, which will house incoming sixth-graders and Eliot Elementary School students.
Eliot school is scheduled to be demolished and rebuilt next school year.
