Tonight’s school board vote is anything but routine. It’s
jam-packed with emotion and fraught with peril.
Tonight’s school board vote is anything but routine. It’s jam-packed with emotion and fraught with peril. And it has the Gilroy Unified School District Board between a rock and a hard place: Who doesn’t want to see a bunch of good kids who get decent grades, work hard at their extracurricular activity and shout out Gilroy pride get to go on a fun trip to Hawaii?
Let ’em go, it’s only three days out of school, the cheerleaders are good kids and, besides, look at all the class time athletes miss. Easy call, right?
If you look no deeper than that – as we did initially – it is an easy call. But after much debate, reflection and reading, the editorial board has come to a different conclusion.
Tonight, the school board should stick to its original vote, back Principal James Maxwell’s final decision, support Superintendent Edwin Diaz’s thoughtful recommendation and deny this request as a school-sanctioned field trip.
It’s not about the cheerleaders, it’s about what has to be done to change the culture at Gilroy High School and transform this community’s only high school into a place where achievement is expected and academics are truly the primary focus.
To a certain extent it’s true – and unfortunate – that the 11 varsity cheerleaders who want to go to the NFL Pro Bowl in Hawaii and perform at halftime with hundreds of other cheerleaders are sacrificial lambs in this process. They should not have been led down the primrose path.
But there is no turning back now, and if the school board opts to make “an exception,” what prevents the next “exception?” How will the principal and superintendent trust that the intent of a board policy and the direction to protect classroom time in order to improve Gilroy High School will square up with the actions taken by the school board? Are policies merely hollow words? Are the frightening statistics about mathematics and language proficiency levels at GHS something we should simply hope improves?
It is easy to argue that denying this request will not change the test scores at GHS or make the school meet the expected federal government improvement standards. In a vacuum, that’s true. But progress on this level only happens incrementally, it only happens when pieces in the overall puzzle are put in place properly, and it only happens when there is a strong will to change.
Those who refuse to view this as a more profound issue than a three-day trip are winking at reality. Fortunately, this entire community debate has focused attention on areas that need to be addressed. As letter writers have pointed out, athletes miss oodles of class time in 5th and 6th periods. That’s a huge problem, and the GHS schedule needs to be fixed so that students and parents have an option that ensures athletics do not interfere with core classes.
The school board has an opportunity to take a step in the right direction tonight and communicate to the public why this is so important. They can do so on the ground level with a real hot-button issue on the front burner.
Stay the course, let the cheerleaders know they are valued, but let the community know that the primary responsibility of the board and school district is to educate students – and that it’s imperative to back the words in a board policy with actions that support the goals and direction of that policy.
