GILROY
– Parents and staff of Gilroy High School are joining forces to
inform, and potentially recruit, the hundreds of local
eighth-graders weighing their schooling options for next year.
GILROY – Parents and staff of Gilroy High School are joining forces to inform, and potentially recruit, the hundreds of local eighth-graders weighing their schooling options for next year.
The first-of-its-kind welcome night for incoming ninth-graders and transfer students will be Jan. 9 in the theater at Gilroy High School. The event is billed as primarily an informational session, but as hundreds of junior high school students – and the roughly $4,300 that come with them – head off for private high schools each year, it’s no secret that organizers hope to convince a significant percentage of attendees to give Gilroy High School a try.
The orientation will run from 7 to 8:30 p.m. and will be followed by a reception where coffee, hot chocolate and cookies will be served. During the reception future Mustang students and their families can talk one on one with current students, staff and faculty.
“The high school has a lot to offer and since public schools don’t advertise and market themselves the way private schools do, we thought an orientation night would be a good idea,” GHS parent Jackie Stevens said. “We’re doing it at this time of year because people are already testing for private schools now.”
Stevens, along with other parents in the Alliance for Academic Excellence, lobbied last school year for GHS to take a more aggressive approach in attracting and retaining high achieving students. The alliance says having an honors program and an orientation night for potential freshmen are two things helpful to that effort.
The orientation night is not being held for high-achieving students only. Stevens, who teaches in the Morgan Hill Unified School District, said the event will seek to inform and answer questions for all students of all ability levels.
“We do one of these in Morgan Hill for sixth-graders going into seventh-grade and it really helps the kids to demystify the whole process and get them excited,” Stevens said.
In a bilingual letter mailed to eighth-grade families last week, GHS Principal Bob Bravo and Superintendent Edwin Diaz wrote, “Gilroy High School offers every student challenging academic programs. . . . We feel confident that our rigorous 9 – 12 college preparatory curriculum will prepare students for success in college and the world of work.”
The letter was also hand delivered to St. Mary Parish School students. Flyers about the event will be given to district eighth-graders when they return from winter vacation next week.
A question and answer session between the potential GHS families and current students and staff from the school will be featured at the event. A panel of students and staff will talk about academics, sports, extracurricular activities, music programs, college/career planning and school safety.
In these budget-tightened times, recruiting and retaining students takes on added significance. Each year, more than $4,300 per student is given to the school district by the state. A recent Dispatch survey revealed that roughly 900 Gilroy students attend less than a dozen Bay Area private schools. There are at least 160 private schools in the Bay Area.
“The orientation is for every potential student of Gilroy High, but it’s no secret that the majority of local kids attending private schools are the high achievers,” Stevens said.
