DEAR EDITOR:
During the past eight months I have been reading letters,
opinion columns, news stories, and articles about Gilroy High
School.
DEAR EDITOR:
During the past eight months I have been reading letters, opinion columns, news stories, and articles about Gilroy High School. It seems that every aspect of our school community has been attacked and criticized. Our administration has been challenged, our teachers have been used as political tokens, and our students have been pictured in a less than positive light.
I do not see a problem in discussing ways to improve Gilroy High, but we have not discussed any solutions. What is worse is that no one seems to describe the positive things going on at Gilroy High.
I am writing this letter as a member of our community and not just as a teacher at Gilroy High. Being an individual who was born and raised in Gilroy, I relate to our students. I was attending Gilroy High when it was entering a troubled period in the mid-1990s. During my junior year we had a shooting during school, and then in my senior year we had the after-school stabbing death of a student. It was the second semester of my senior year when the open campus policy of Gilroy High ended and the fence was built.
Even after all these events I have always felt that Gilroy High is a great place and a school that can provide anyone with a real challenge. The problem was that publicly our community did not have faith or trust in our school community. To me the most troubling thing was not reading all the negative letters, articles and news stories, but it was not seeing any positive letters or support from our community. As a student I was questioning whether Gilroy High had anything positive to offer, and if there was any hope for us. You have no idea what it is like when everyone seems to be saying negative things about you and no one defends the good things you do.
It is because of that negative feeling that I would like to apologize to our wonderful students for not writing this letter earlier. I made up excuses of how I wanted to avoid entering a political drama, and how I did not have time to write, but they were just excuses. I would like to share some of the great things going on at Gilroy High – and this is not to say that everything is perfect. I will focus on three areas: Academics, Athletics, and Campus Environment.
Academically, we have set goals and we are meeting them. Over the past three years our passing rate on the high school exit exam has increased from 48 percent to 52 percent and this year 69 percent.
Our test scores have been increasing to the point where we are close to the test scores of Live Oak High School, and they had a huge lead on us. We have seen an increasing graduating class over the past few years, and more of our students continue to go to college. In this graduating class we have 34 CSF Lifetime members, the most ever at our school. We continue to send our students to universities like UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, USC, UCSD, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, SJSU, Cal Poly, UCSB, and others. Not only does Gilroy High help our students apply to schools, but we have support programs (CALSOAP) to help students succeed in the challenging world of academics.
Aside from test scores and college acceptances, Gilroy High offers the most science elective courses in the area: AP environmental science, anatomy and physiology, vet science, horticulture, AP biology, marine science, chemistry, chemcom and physics.
We have great choir and band programs that enables our musically gifted students to excel. You can also find a nationally renowned journalism program.
As a staff we are still creating courses that will assist our students in meeting the academic needs of colleges and our state requirements. To meet the needs of the UC system and the state of California standards, our staff has selected specific learning tools, and we are seeing some impact with their use. Yet for all the work we put into our academics, all we seem to read is how bad Gilroy High is at meeting the needs of our students.
We have also seen an improving athletic program. If you look at the athletic programs offered this year you would be amazed. During my time here as a student we were not an athletic powerhouse. That is changing. Here are the Gilroy High teams that won the league title this year: girls tennis, field hockey, boys soccer and wrestling for the second year. Now here are the teams that made it to CCS playoffs: Field hockey, girls volleyball, baseball, boys soccer (second place), girls basketball (second place), and our back-to-back champion wrestlers. We had at least one sports team in the CCS playoffs this year in every season. We also had our first All-American and numerous league MVPs. Aside from the improved winning records, our student athletes demonstrated an endless desire, motivation, sportsmanship and sense of pride in their work.
If you walk on campus you can see the building of a new school spirit and it is demonstrated in our athletic programs. I have been impressed by how well our students have accepted the use of citizenship as an eligibility requirement. Our students are beginning to understand that Gilroy High is a place of learning and not a social gathering. To me this new school pride is evident in our intramural lunchtime tournaments.
We offer two indoor soccer tournaments all year, and one basketball tournament. In these tournaments about 110 students participate and still about 70 students do not get to participate because there is not enough time. Our students organize, play and clean up the gyms every day in order for these tournaments to take place. These students look forward to coming to school and they are taking pride in what they do.
We are in the process of establishing a new sense of pride and success at Gilroy High. We still have many things to work on, but we are improving. The major problem I have right now is that all of these negative comments, and our communities’ focus on political issues in education is going to be detrimental to Gilroy High.
If our community focus continues to be on the politics of education then we are going to miss a golden opportunity to get our students to feel like they own part of Gilroy High. It has been a few years since our student body has felt that their voice has weight at school, and that is one of the most empowering acts. The choices we make as a community will affect the effectiveness of GHS and how our Mustang spirit develops.
Jose H. Hernandez, Gilroy
Submitted Tuesday, June 1
