School choirs will be allowed to perform in churches and tablets will be piloted in a biology classroom thanks to decisions made at the Gilroy Unified School District board meeting Thursday. A group of parents also gathered to express their frustration that the list of under performing elementary schools was given to parents late and has caused some parents to move their children to Luigi Aprea, the only “performing” elementary school in the district seven weeks after the school year started.
Enrollment changes come seven weeks into classes
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 allows parents to transfer their children to another school in the district if the school that corresponds to their address is an under performing school.
This year, Luigi Aprea Elementary School was the only elementary school in the district not designated as an under performing or “Program Improvement” school. In order to keep class sizes in compliance with teacher’s contracts, some of the elementary school students are being moved to new classrooms with different teachers after seven weeks of instruction.
At least 60 students will be transferring to the school Monday, actions that meant the district had to open an additional three classrooms at the campus, said GUSD Superintendent Debbie Flores.
Parents were not notified that their child was attending a “Program Improvement” school until after the school year started.
In her superintendent report, Flores explained that the district received a notification letter listing the “Program Improvement” schools within the district late, meaning that parent’s learned their child was attending a Program Improvement” school after the school year had started.
Choir Update
School trustees chose to allow public school choirs to perform in churches for the rest of this school year and said they understand the importance of acoustics, in a statement read by Board of Education President Jaime Rosso following the closed session of the Thursday board meeting.
After decades of hosting choir performances at various local churches, GUSD made a quiet internal administrative decision to stop doing so, since it might be a “separation of church and state” issue.
The decision was made last February but came into affect this fall leading President and Treasurer of the CHS Choir Booster Club, Raquel Bonino, to create an online petition that received 749 signatures in the roughly 24 hours between Wednesday night when it was created and Thursday evening.
New school facilities with good acoustics will soon be available. The Rucker Elementary School multipurpose room is scheduled to open in December and will have a stage, a special sounds system and acoustical panels throughout the building, Rosso said.
The GHS Student Center, which can seat up to 1,000 people, will go through renovations this summer and installing acoustical panels throughout the building will be part of that process, Rosso added.
“When these two buildings are completed there will be adequate facilities in our district for choir concerts,” he said.
Verizon Wireless Pilot at GHS
Board trustees unanimously approved a pilot program that will place Samsung 4G LTE tablets with unlimited data plans into the hands of every student in one of Maria Moran’s biology classes at Gilroy High School.
“When I mentioned the tablets, they were so excited,” Moran said. “It’s bringing something they love to the classroom.”
The program could go into affect as early as November and would mean the first-year teacher would use the tablets for the rest of the school year in one of her two biology classes.
Verizon Wireless will be studying which apps the students prefer and how they use the tablets. Teachers and district employees will want to know if the technology really improves student learning.
Gilroy was one of four schools in the western United States chosen to participate in the program. Moran’s classroom will join classes in eastern Washington, New Mexico and Southern California in piloting the new technology.
For Flores, introducing tablets to the classrooms means providing home access to Internet to students from lower socioeconomic classes.
School Resource Officer
School trustees voted to pay half the salary of the School Resource Officer (SRO), a decision that would involve the district picking up a bill of $88,118 annually.
GUSD and the City of Gilroy had shared the cost of the resource officer, who addresses security issues at district schools, on a 50-50 basis. In May of 2011, the district suffered a serious financial crisis, due in large part to funding issues in the state of California and the city funded the officer for three years.
“He does a lot of things that I think are pretty unusual for an officer like sitting down and counseling a student,” Flores said. “He knows a lot of the kids names. He is not a stranger, like if we called the dispatch.”
Board of Education Vice President Mark Good expressed some concerns about the details of the contract, but the board voted to resume paying half of his salary and chose to figure out the details of the contract at a future meeting.
