Dear Editor,
We were elected to the Gilroy City Council because you trusted
us to protect our way of life, prepare for growth and keep a sharp
eye on the budget. And those are the reasons we support connecting
Caltrain and BART through Measure B.
More than 50 percent of us who live in the South County commute
outside of the area to our jobs. Most of us head to jobs in the
north.
BART extension good for Gilroy, vote yes on county Measure B
Dear Editor,
We were elected to the Gilroy City Council because you trusted us to protect our way of life, prepare for growth and keep a sharp eye on the budget. And those are the reasons we support connecting Caltrain and BART through Measure B.
More than 50 percent of us who live in the South County commute outside of the area to our jobs. Most of us head to jobs in the north. But the Bay Area’s current commuter rail system doesn’t serve Gilroy residents as well as it should. From Gilroy there is no easy and convenient way to travel to jobs to the north and east. We can take Caltrain to jobs along the Peninsula (if the limited number of trains suit our schedules), but to get to work in Fremont, we have to pay some of the highest gas prices in the country and contribute to traffic backups. South County’s working families deserve better.
Measure B funds the operation of a better system. It secures money to operate and maintain a BART line that would come south from Fremont into Milpitas, San Jose and Santa Clara. And – this is where it is key for our community – the extension will connect to Caltrain in downtown San Jose and Santa Clara. That connection opens up parts of the Bay Area to Gilroy rail commuters. We need affordable, reliable transit to our jobs and Measure B provides that to the entire county.
We know that Santa Clara County will continue to grow. But we want to protect the way of life we love in Gilroy. That’s why we live here. Protecting Gilroy means responsibly planning for growth, not limiting transit options and putting more cars on the road. It means providing the working families who live here an affordable commute. It means voting yes on Measure B to connect the rail systems the rest of the Bay Area already relies on, making them effective for those of us who live in the South County as well. The BART extension already has local and state construction money. The federal government won’t match those local dollars unless there is a revenue stream to fund operating the line. Measure B creates that revenue through a 1/8-cent sales tax. But, to protect the pocketbooks of the families that live here, that sales tax won’t go into effect until federal construction money is secured.
An independent federally-approved auditor examined the proposal and found that Measure B covers the costs of the extension. Measure B is smart for our budgets. Opponents will try to tell you that the Valley Transportation Authority could fund operating BART by running more like San Francisco’s MUNI.
Well, we don’t have to tell you that Santa Clara County isn’t San Francisco – we have wide open spaces that require our buses and trains to travel further to get to our population centers. It costs more to run a system that way, but frankly, we like Gilroy and Morgan Hill and San Martin and all of the space between them. We need Measure B to provide integrated transit that works for the South County families and protects our way of life. Join us in voting yes.
Cat Tucker and Perry Woodward, City Council members, Gilroy
Tammy Vickroy, Gilroy
26 percent dropout rate for high school students in Gilroy bogus
Dear Editor,
Here we go again … the July 18 headline “1 in 4 four students drop out in Gilroy.”
In the mid-’80s, our new superintendent of schools brought in consultants to study Gilroy High School faculty racism, ineptness, i.e. lack of student achievement (all students were not qualified for Stanford and UC entry!), dropouts and more.
The consultants came up with a four-year dropout rate of 33 percent for the class of 1984. This was my class, and I had done my own dropout study with a figure of 13.8 percent.
The consultants were asked to define “dropout.” They replied that in 1980 there were a certain number of freshmen. Four years later there were 33 percent less students.
We asked, “But what about the G.E.D., alternative school diplomas, military, marriage and most significantly, students who moved away?”
The superintendent’s response was, “We have to stick with the data given us.”
The Dispatch article notes that the dropout rate will probably improve “when the data is cleaned up.” Duh.
The person best qualified to know the status of missing students was the school secretary – she received requests for GHS transcripts from the schools where our students had moved. Unbeknownst to me, she had also done a dropout study of the class of ’84. Her figure: 13.2 percent.
Roger Anderson, Gilroy
