The school beat out about 330 other continuation schools across
the state
Gilroy – When Richard Red stepped onto the Mt. Madonna High School campus four years ago, he immediately smelled the apathy.
Gang and drug issues were common and the students simply weren’t coming to the continuation school prepared to learn.
“When I came here there was this idea that Mt. Madonna was a do-nothing school,” said Red, who has taught social science at the alternative site for the past four years. “The school used to be, you showed up, it was something to do other than stand out on the street.”
But Red said that has changed drastically, thanks to a dedicated team of administrators and teachers. In the past, teachers weren’t active instructors and it was what former Mt. Madonna principal and teacher John Perales dubbed a “packet school.”
Translated, that means it was what most continuation schools are, more of an independent study site where students completed packets and handed them into their teachers than an academic institution. But Perales, now the principal at South Valley Middle School, said he helped push for more involved instruction that mimicked a comprehensive high school.
Also, another change is that once students turn 18 they attend school under a contract. And if they don’t abide by the agreement, they’re gone.
Red thinks those disciplinary and academic improvements were the catalyst for the school’s significant increase on the Academic Performance Index.
The 39 students tested managed to attain a 700 on the state assessment, a 113 point improvement over last year. In the past two years, they’ve netted a 235 increase.
After the scores were released in August, teachers told their students the good news. They could have cared less about the 700 figure, but when Red mentioned “you scored higher than the high school they all got a really big kick from it.”
Gilroy High School barely missed the 700 mark, receiving a 693. Still, the state department of education says that because schools like Mt. Madonna only test a small amount of students the results are “less reliable and therefore should be carefully interpreted.”
Also, because the school serves students who didn’t make it at a traditional high school many Mt. Madonna students are seniors and the state does not require that seniors take the API. Although students are placed at the alternative site for a variety of reasons, most end up on the campus because they chose not to attend class and were flunking out of school.
Perales said the stories behind these students’ failures are complicated.
“You name it there was a reason that they were there,” he said.
After seeing Mt. Madonna’s score and noticing the low APIs achieved by other California continuation schools Red and Phuong Vu, a math teacher, decided to find out exactly where their students ranked.
They downloaded the California Department of Education API results and compared Mt. Madonna’s score to more than 330 other sites across the state. And what did they discover?
“It turns out that we came in third,” Red said. “That puts us in the 99th percentile.”
