Schools

A holiday boutique will bring some festive cheer to Gilroy from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 8 at Luigi Aprea Elementary School.

Attention, Gilroy High School alumni class of '82: It's time to start polishing up those "Thriller" moves and get ready to relive the glory days of your teen-age yesteryears. 

GILROY

Negotiations to let voters decide on whether to continue

GILROY—On Oct. 8, Kevin Dinh and Shelby McClelland received a special honor given only to the nation’s best and brightest high school students.

It’s here we come, Moscow, for a group of Christopher High School drama students who have been invited to participate in a Shakespeare festival.The teens received an enthusiastic go-ahead from the Gilroy Unified School District Board of Trustees for a 12-day trip that includes a short stay in London and most of 2017 spring break in the land of the Bolshoi and borscht.“It’s an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” CHS principal Paul Winslow told trustees before they voted at their Oct. 6 meeting to approve the March-April field trip.And there wasn’t a nyet among them.“It’s a fabulous and wonderful opportunity for students, I wholeheartedly approve of this,” said trustee Linda Piceno.Colleague Mark Good echoed her sentiments. He added that his son spent three months studying the Stanislavsky acting method in the same Moscow program while earning a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Harvard.Gilroy High School grad Steven Good is now a working actor, singer and musician in Los Angeles. He has performed at the famed Mark Taper Forum and in a feature-length movie for Lifetime television, among other roles.CHS drama director Kate Booth and Gretchen Yoder Schrock, CHS Sister City/International Club Advisor and Spanish teacher, will accompany the 14 teens to London and Russia. Twelve of the students are seniors, one is a junior and one is a sophomore.They are: Jacob Yoder Schrock, Grant Schaper, Jacob Flores Lopez, Owen Emerson, Devan Corini, Brandon Quirke, Annemarie Hayes and Cassidy Andrews.Also traveling to Russia are Samantha Drews, Melinda Colbert, Adaline McCaw, Michaela Hawkins, Brenda O’Connor and Sabine Yoder Schrock.Booth outlined for the board a busy schedule for the eight girls and six boys who auditioned for and won roles in the production being readied for the trip—Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.“Aside from an extraordinary opportunity to grow as artists and learn history, language, literature and culture from a unique perspective, the trip to Moscow is a true exchange,” she wrote in the 18-page application for student travel.“I am jazzed that they approved us,” she later said. Because the board has denied closer trips, including to Oregon, there was worry that Moscow might not be approved.Booth and Winslow said that rather than seeing the trip as missing four days of instruction, they view it as an opportunity for unique instruction during the spring break and of a nature that can only be had by a cultural exchange.The trip could have been undertaken under the auspices of the theater group’s booster club, but it has more weight and is better for both cities and schools for it to be an officially sanctioned GUSD field trip because “the whole point is to do a student exchange,” Booth said.The host school in Moscow is called the Slavic Anglo-American School Marina. Specializing in graduating students who are fluent in English, it hosts an annual international high school Shakespeare festival with all-English performances.CHS will represent the United States and there’s a Canadian school in the festival, too, Booth said.It’s not the first meeting of the Russian and CHS students. Marina students have visited CHS twice and are keen to create a long-term sister-school relationship, according the field trip supporters.In addition to attending a performance at the famed Globe Theater in London, CHS students in Moscow will participate in theater workshops, shadow their Russian hosts to classes, spend two days at the Moscow Art Theater Conservatory and attend a theater festival and four stage performances.Twenty-two advanced theater students in the Catamount Actor’s Theater (CAT) at Christopher High School auditioned for the slots. The number who can travel was limited by the host’s ability to transport the group around Moscow—their bus is too small for a larger group, Booth said.As it is, CHS will send one more person than they originally thought could be accommodated, she said.Of the performances CHS students will see, one will be either a ballet or opera at the renowned Bolshoi Theater, another will be an avant garde drama and one will be what Booth said provides a “new twist” on Stanislavski.Constantin Stanislavski was a Russian actor and director who created a naturalistic acting technique commonly known as method acting.Trustees said that their overarching concern in reviewing the proposal was student safety.Their approval includes a condition that if the U.S. State Department issues a travel warning for Russia, the trip will be off.Insurance and liability issues also were reviewed and not considered an obstacle. CHS officials assured trustees that students will be responsible for all classroom work missed during  their absence.And cost is not an issue, either. By law, Superintendent Debbie Flores pointed out, students cannot be charged for such field trips, assuring equality in access to educational opportunity regardless of ability to pay.In this case, the CAT booster’s club has raised in excess of $27,000 for travel expenses, more than enough for tickets, and the host school will cover many Moscow expenses.Per-student expenses are estimated between $1,500 and $2,500, which includes round-trip airline tickets between $700 and $800, according to the field trip application.  

 

A popular youth basketball program akin to Little League has been evicted from a Gilroy middle school after a dozen years and will be replaced by Mexican mariachi and folkloric programs and workshops for Spanish-speaking parents.School officials say South Valley Middle School’s programs must get priority and that the nonprofit National Junior Basketball Gilroy-Morgan Hill chapter was alerted to the change but collected fees from parents anyway.Chapter co-founder Shirley Lampkin disputed that they were alerted and said the group’s years of good relations with SVMS went sour only when a new principal refused to continue to rent to them so she could use the gym for the programs she wants for the Latino community.Lampkin said the principal, Patricia Mondragon, “is trying to make a name for herself by saying [she is] going to create all these programs for [her] community, for [her] people.”SVMS is 87 percent Latino and located on Gilroy’s predominantly Latino east side.Lampkin said an equal percentage of the chapter’s nearly 350 players is Latino and comes from “the whole community,” not just the east side. Her husband, Joe, also a chapter co-founder, serves on its volunteer board.While NJB continues to rent gym time at other schools, churches and community centers, the loss of its largest venue at SVMS, with four basketball courts, will mean a hike in fees to parents who already pay about $300 per season.The league has 25,000 players in six states with programs for first-graders through high school and helps families financially.Lampkin said most of its players are from Gilroy and that costs to parents will go up because the school gyms rent for $17 per hour plus custodial fees, while city facilities cost twice that and more.Facility rental now costs the league $1,000 a week, she said, to accommodate all practices and games.Lampkin and KC Adams, NJB Gilroy-Morgan Hill chapter co-founder and president, said they were told another reason for being ousted was friction between the custodial staff and NJB parents.Gilroy Unified School District assistant superintendent Alvaro Meza confirmed there had been such an issue but declined to go into details.Adams said it was about kids milling around waiting to be picked up by parents after hour-long practices, and a parent knocking on a door to find a custodian.Similar issues at Brownell Middle School led to the district forbidding kids from using outdoor courts while waiting for parents, and the district installed video cameras to monitor the players.The league instructed kids and parents not to use outdoor courts and the situation has turned out well, Adams said.He credited Brownell leadership with being more open to working with the league to resolve issues.As for Mondragon, Adams questioned her agenda after she initially rented to the group as its 13th season began, then refused to allow more use. He said the gym has gone unused for weeks and suspects she has not started new programs, at least not yet.Meza said GUSD officials met with the NJB reps, but SVMS programs get first priority.“They have been growing, so they require more basketball courts this year,” he said of the league.“They made one [rental] request that was granted and that was it. They had already collected fees for the entire season without securing the facilities; we are trying to help them [find alternative sites],” he added.Lampkin said the league was never informed in writing of a change to an arrangement they enjoyed for a dozen years and that has benefited so many Gilroy kids who for one reason or another are not allowed to play for school teams.Mondragon said, “We haven’t kicked anybody out.”The NJB, she said, “requested to rent the facilities but unfortunately the facilities are not available. There are different reasons but one of the major reasons is we have our own activities that take precedence.”She said she has added “new initiatives” designed to increase community involvement at the school and they include mariachi teams, a folkloric club and workshops for Spanish-speaking parents.While she said, “I make the decision to bring in more clubs and more parent involvement,” she also said the decision was made “at the district level.”Cheryl Galloway, who schedules the use of all district facilities, said NJB has grown tremendously in recent years and that the district can no longer meet all its demands for practice and game courts. 

To the delight of Principal James Maxwell, Gilroy High School