GILROY
– With a deadline for school board approval approaching, a
proposal for determining how elementary school students will feed
into Gilroy’s three middle schools is not winning over district
parents.
GILROY – With a deadline for school board approval approaching, a proposal for determining how elementary school students will feed into Gilroy’s three middle schools is not winning over district parents.
At a public forum on the plan Thursday, parents expressed concern over longer home-to-school commutes and the splitting up of some kids who currently attend elementary school together. The session even left some parents questioning whether Gilroy Unified School District has a hidden agenda to send Luigi Aprea Elementary School students to Brownell Middle School.
Luigi Aprea students typically outperform all other GUSD students on standardized tests. Brownell Middle School is in line for state intervention since it failed to improve its scores on the Academic Performance Index – the state’s system for measuring student progress – two years in a row.
“API scores were not what this committee looked at when it drew up these boundaries,” said Juanita Contin, the GUSD’s director of student enrollment.
Instead, the group strived for boundaries that establish school enrollment capacities of 800 or less, socio-economic balance and residential proximity to campuses.
The group says the plan it’s endorsing, which parents saw up close for the first time Thursday, met those criteria better than any of the dozen other alternatives drawn up by enrollment consultant Tom Williams of Tom Williams & Associates.
“They’re not making it easy for our kids to walk, and I don’t want my child on a school bus. It means I have to drive to school every morning,” said parent Christy Vasquez, a Luigi Aprea parent whose elementary school children would attend Brownell in the future under the current proposal.
The boundary committee will present its plan to the school board this Thursday at its regular monthly meeting. The session takes place at the district office, 7810 Arroyo Circle, at 7:30 p.m.
The boundary proposal sends students who live east of Santa Teresa Boulevard, from roughly First Street to Day Road, to South Valley Middle School.
Students south of First Street and north of 10th Street and Uvas Park Drive will attend Brownell. Brownell students will also come from areas west of Santa Teresa Boulevard from Uvas Creek in the south to roughly Sunrise Drive in the north.
Ascencion Solorsano students will come from the remaining areas, including a section of town north of 10th Street and south of Sixth Street, between Monterey Road from the east and Orchard Drive from the west.
The new campus will open for the 2003-04 school year. It will house incoming sixth-graders and kindergarten through fifth-grade students from Eliot School, which will be razed and rebuilt next school year.
The committee explained that Solorsano’s boundary was the most expansive because no matter how reasonable boundaries are drawn, students from most areas in Gilroy would need to be driven there. Students living near Solorsano but on the other side of Uvas Creek were put in the Brownell boundary to prevent children from crossing the creek.
City Engineer Kristi Abrams, who held a seat on the boundary committee, told parents that it takes only a small amount of water (two feet) traveling at a slow rate (two feet per second) to knock a person over.
