A man who dedicated his life to education will be honored
posthumously when Gilroy’s new accelerated high school opens
bearing his name, district trustees said.
Gilroy – A man who dedicated his life to education will be honored posthumously when Gilroy’s new accelerated high school opens bearing his name, district trustees said.
T.J. Owens Early College Academy is the clear choice among trustees interviewed by the Dispatch.
The Gilroy Unified School District board of trustees is set to approve the naming at a meeting Thursday.
Owens is a former Gavilan College counselor who died while serving as the district’s board president in October 2005.
“We feel that T.J. Owens is a fit” with the accelerated high school, trustee Pat Midtgaard said. “He had a lot of connections to Gavilan College and did quite a bit of teaching there. It would be an appropriate way to honor our fallen board president.”
The board opted at a meeting last week to decide the academy’s name through a trustee vote rather than create a subcommittee to generate names and make a recommendation.
The last time the district named a school – Las Animas Elementary School – it created a subcommittee.
The process took about 10 months, involved numerous violations of state open meeting laws and – after receiving 44 suggested names from the community – ultimately recommended the new school’s name remain the same – Las Animas.
At the January meeting that named the elementary school Las Animas, a majority of trustees suggested that T.J. Owens was their second choice.
Creating a second subcommittee now would have returned the same suggestion, but have taken months, trustee Denise Apuzzo said.
“It’s an awful lot of work to go through to get a result that anybody in town can say will be the result,” she said.
Trustees might debate whether to include Owens’ title – he earned a doctorate in community college administration – in the name of the school, trustee Rhoda Bress said.
“He was proud of his education background and so I think it would be appropriate to include doctor,” she said.
Bress invites residents to provide feedback on the selection at the next board meeting Thursday, but does not expect any objections.
“I think in this case there was a clear choice,” she said.
