2,600 students well over 1,800 capacity; three-year wait for
Christopher High School to open
Gilroy – Gilroy High School’s stretch marks are definitely showing.
With an enrollment hovering above 2,600, it’s obvious the 10th Street school has far outgrown its original design capacity of 1,800. By the time the new high school opens in three years, teens will be spilling out of the already squeezed-tight facility.
These days Gilroy High is mainly a field of portables, the Band-Aid applied to deal with the burgeoning population. And in the fall two more were added.
Steve Brinkman, Gilroy Unified School District assistant superintendent, said he hopes they can hold tight and stop at two portables, but either way he knows Gilroy High is going to be extremely cramped when Christopher High opens its doors.
“But we’re going to try and tough it out until 2009,” he said.
A few changes, such as moving the Associated Student Body into the new student center and a new program at Gavilan College wherein high school students attend the community college full-time, will free up some classroom space.
Still, the school will continue to grow while the community waits out the construction of the two-story Christopher High. That the campus is crowded during lunch is apparent but does that jam-packed environment seep into the classroom and have a negative impact on education?
Sal Tomasello doesn’t think so.
“Personally I didn’t see it having an impact,” the Ascencion Solorsano Middle School principal said. “The quality of education is impacted by the classroom teacher. I think it comes down to the adults on campus and how they address the needs of the kids. What happens outside the classroom, in terms of the overcrowdedness, I’m sure there are some students who get lost in the shuffle.”
Tomasello, who spent 25 years at Gilroy High as a teacher and administrator, experienced the high school’s growth spurts first-hand. He was there when the new school opened in the 1970s, moved from its former location where South Valley Middle School now stands. He remembers when they added a building on a campus that was considered non-permanent – it’s still there.
But Tomasello does think the lunch issue needs to be addressed.
“My personal philosophy is I always believed there needed to be multiple lunches to be able to feed all students in timely manner,” he said.
He pushed for the change during his tenure at GHS. He even visited Morgan Hill’s Live Oak High School to witness the success of their double-lunch program. Split lunches not only ensure the children are all fed, but they also help with disciplinary matters, Tomasello said.
All three of the district’s middle schools have multiple lunch-hours, giving administrators more room for discipline and allows them to split up students who are causing problems.
Christopher High will sit on a 40-acre plot of land in the northwest side of Gilroy and will be constructed by the Fremont-based firm Bunton Clifford and Associates, Inc. Construction for the first phase of the school, which will house 900 students, is expected to cost $47 million and will be funded by Measure I, the $60 million bond approved by voters in 2002.
The new high school will eventually cap out at 1,800 and will include athletic fields, an aquatics center and a practice football field. The district is not yet sure if students will be phased in by grade, following the lead of Sobrato High in Morgan Hill, which started off with freshmen and Solorsano which began with sixth-graders.
