Schools

After a yearlong delay, work has started on sprawling campus solar energy installations that will save at least $1.5 million and replace the pothole-plagued parking lot at Gilroy High School.

Gilroy’s 1,326 special education students, whose needs range from weekly speech therapy to 24/7 residential schools, have a new leader in charge of their care in the wake of the resignation of the woman who had run the beleaguered department since 2013.

For 30 years, during careers in engineering and computerized banking, through fatherhood and retirement and as a student and teacher at Gavilan Community College in Gilroy, Herb Spenner lived with a singular, droning dream.

In today’s world, sewing your own clothes may seem a bit outdated, but here in Gilroy, one woman’s passion has created a resurgence for the craft, as well as a sense of pride for those who’ve mastered it.

Students at Gavilan College have new sports facilities to look forward to as the community college moves forward on refurbishing its gymnasium and installing a new pool this summer.

Nine hundred twenty-seven students just earned high school diplomas in Gilroy and 23 of those were handed out in the city’s first Adult Education graduation since 2013. Dropout Jovita Caspary, 37, a single mother at age 14, turned her life around and received a diploma during the program’s May 30 ceremony at the Gilroy High School Theatre.

Gilroy’s Class of 2017 tallied record numbers in diplomas and scholarship dollars, including nearly a quarter of a million dollars from a mystery donor known only as “Uvas Creek.”

This was the speech given by Adult Ed director Rick Charvet to the graduating class last week.

The Gilroy Foundation gave out $621,250 in scholarships this year to Gilroy students

Purists in both camps might well argue that winemaking and soccer aren’t in the same league, that the goals of one cannot possibly be the goals of the other and, for that matter, wonder who’d even suggest such things.