This summer is going to be a busy one for Jean Southland, the
new principal or
”
head of school
”
at Silicon Valley Flex Academy a public charter
sixth-through-12th-grade school opening this fall in Morgan
Hill.
This summer is going to be a busy one for Jean Southland, the new principal or “head of school” at Silicon Valley Flex Academy a public charter sixth-through-12th-grade school opening this fall in Morgan Hill.
“Starting a new school takes a lot of work,” Southland said. She left her job as a sixth-grade teacher at Charter School of Morgan Hill to lead the second Flex Academy to open in the Bay Area – a San Francisco high school just finished its first year.
“I’m ready to move and do something different. It’s the best of both worlds,” she said.
The school is planning for 250 students to start Sept. 6, though it’s tentative because a temporary building permit hasn’t been secured from the city of Morgan Hill yet, Flex’s executive director Mark Kushner said. He hosted another community meeting at the school’s temporary site – Community Christian Church at 305 W. Main Ave. – June 14 and introduced Flex’s first teacher hire: Gilroy High School English teacher Veronica Andrade.
Andrade was Gilroy High’s 2009-10 Educator of the Year and highly touted by Kushner; as GHS’s journalism adviser, her newspaper class won a prestigious national award.
The school blends online curriculum in a classroom setting, where most learning is done on a laptop while teachers and aids are available for questions, discussions and some traditional classroom activities. The Santa Clara County Office of Education approved Flex’s charter to open up to three schools in the county; a charter school is different from schools in MHUSD in that any student in Santa Clara County may attend (there are no neighborhood boundaries) and it isn’t required to follow the California Education Code, giving the school more freedom in hiring practices and structure of the school day for example.
Flex Academy uses K12 Inc. online curriculum – a company that Kushner is vice president of – and does follow the state’s standards in terms of content; so high school students graduate with the credits needed to apply to a California State University or University of California college. Flex students work at their own pace, and their progress can be accessed online by parents at any moment throughout the day. Also, the school offers a broad variety of elective courses such as web design, marketing, psychology and personal finance.
Andrade and Southland both have several years experience in unified, traditional public school districts and while Southland said the model is good for some students – her children attended Live Oak High School – Andrade said the 100-year-old framework is outdated.
“I have been out of high school for nearly 15 years and yet the same methods that were used to educate myself as a teenager are still being used. It’s ridiculous. The world is not the same as it was, 10 even 20 years ago but yet our schools are the same as they were 100 years ago,” Andrade said.
“Flex may not be for everyone, but neither is a traditional school.”
Before a crowd of more than 150 parents and adults sitting in the pews at the church Tuesday, Andrade said she feels fortunate to be a part of Flex.
“Flex allows me to really help the students further than I can in a traditional classroom. I have 36 students in one class and to get to the student who’s struggling and keep the advanced student engaged, it’s hard. Kids get left behind,” she said.
Today’s student has access to smart phones, technology and information like never before, Andrade pointed out, and, “as such, they learn differently. They are more visual because they are constantly stimulated by media. A traditional model has yet to adapt to that,” she said.
All 250 spots at Flex have been filled, though there is a waiting list. By this fall or as late as January, Kushner hopes to move the school to a permanent building near Cochrane Plaza and perhaps increase enrollment to 500 students. The space needs to have an open floorplan, similar to the library setting which is how the first Flex school in San Francisco functions.
For now, as Morgan Hill Flex parents welcome the needed alternative to over-populated options at Sobrato and Live Oak, they say, the pews at Community Christian Church will be removed each week to accommodate desks until Flex finds a permanent home. Tuesday night, parents met to form a parent association and plan summer get-togethers before the first of 180 days, likely to start after Labor Day, Kushner said.
Southland said her experience teaching at Nordstrom Elementary for seven years and her time at Charter School were both “very positive,” but Flex can dedicate more time to student development, and another option in the area is never a bad thing, Southland said. “Budgeting is so complicated these days, so to have flexibility in learning and the opportunity to take classes that traditional schools can no longer afford, it’s really exciting.
“We are all continuing to look at how we can best educate our kids to prepare them for the future whether it’s our traditional schools, Charter School or Flex Academy.”
