At the school board’s behest, the Christopher High School
boundary committee will reconvene to draw up additional options to
their original delineation.
At the school board’s behest, the Christopher High School boundary committee will reconvene to draw up additional options to their original delineation.
The 17-member committee that consists of teachers, parents, district staff and a professional demographer aimed to strike a balance in terms of socioeconomics and academic achievement and create populations for “two great high schools.” They tried to be as fair and reasonable as possible without marginalizing any one group, according to their presentation.
But their recommendation was met with mixed reviews because some of the students who live within walking distance of CHS will have to drive across town to Gilroy High School.
The committee presented their recommendation at two community forums in April to gather public input. The line they decided upon cut through Gilroy down the middle of Leavesley Road and Mantelli Drive. With the opinions of community members in mind, the committee presented the same map to the school board for approval.
Like some parents, board members struggled with the wording and rationale behind the committee’s decision.
“I’m not sure I buy into some of the assumptions this starts off with – to come up with a recommendation that is as fair and reasonable as possible,” Trustee Tom Bundros read off his handout. “We’ve gotten some indication that there are areas of this that aren’t fair and not reasonable.”
He questioned the connection between a boundary line, academic success and the marginalization of certain groups – “For a number of these things, I don’t see a connection,” he said.
The committee managed to accomplish a number of goals in its proposal: keeping both high schools within a few percentage points of each other socioeconomically and academically while not exceeding CHS’s limited initial capacity. But Trustee Denise Apuzzo wasn’t so sure that was what she wanted the committee to focus on.
“It just seems like the charge of the committee was more focused on let’s get this exact kind of balance so that all the kids in the school look exactly alike – which is an impossible task,” she said. “It will never happen … because we have a very fluid movement in Gilroy. We have over 500 homes on the market and we don’t know who’s going to be living in those homes.”
She called the process “a guessing game” and zeroed in on some of the plan’s transportation issues. Just prior to the boundary committee presentation, Director of Transportation Darren Salo – also a member of the boundary committee – presented a proposal to eliminate several in-town bus stops to GHS. This proposal was brought on as part of the $4 million in budget reductions the school district recently suffered. Without buses, some students living on the south side of Mantelli will have to walk nearly three times as far to GHS than if they had been zoned for CHS.
“You can’t split the neighborhood in half and expect people to say ‘Yeah that makes sense,’ because it just doesn’t,” Apuzzo said. “It just doesn’t make sense. At least not to me. So I am in favor of having kids go to the high school they can walk to. That’s my bottom line. And the people that live in the rural areas can’t walk to any high school so we should put them at the school that has capacity and that’s GHS.”
Several parents agreed.
Melonie Gonzalez, the parent of a student at Rucker Elementary and a student at Rod Kelley School lives on Magnolia Way in northwest Gilroy. Despite her proximity to CHS, her daughters are zoned for GHS.
“It’s very difficult for families like ours to figure out how we’re going to do it. It’s almost logistically impossible,” Gonzalez said of her and her fellow neighbors living in Gilroy’s northwest quadrant. “I recognize that we are higher up on the socioeconomic tree so we’ll figure something out. If that’s private school – so be it. But what about the economically disadvantaged folks … maybe they’re not here because they don’t have a car. How will those kids get to school? I worry that if we don’t make it as easy as possible for people to get their kids to school, they won’t go.”
Apuzzo pointed out that many parents probably didn’t show up to the public meetings because they assumed their children would be attending the high school closest to their home – “If you can see the school from your house, you just make the assumption that your kids are going to that school.”
Trustee Javier Aguirre rose from his chair to remove his jacket and stretch. At that point, the board was more than an hour into the heated discussion and Aguirre was getting “a little frustrated” with where the conversation was going. If the board were to continue with the neighborhood concept that guided the drawing of the elementary school boundaries, “we would have to go back to the voters for more bond money to create eight high schools,” he said. Ideally, students would attend the high school they lived closest to, he said, but he preferred to focus on creating two schools with “two great curriculums.”
Aguirre and trustees Francisco Dominguez and Jaime Rosso expressed support for the plan although all voiced minor reservations.
“I know it’s not a perfect solution but I support the recommendation of the district and this committee,” Rosso said.
Trustee Patricia Midtgaard was absent.
After listening to the handful of parents who attended the meeting, President Rhoda Bress requested that the committee reconvene one more time to “tweak” their proposal and provide additional statistics that would reflect the demographics of each school with two revisions. She wanted to see what the numbers would look like if the southern CHS boundary were drawn at First Street west of Santa Teresa Boulevard (instead of Mantelli Drive) – an option Superintendent and Committee Chair Deborah Flores said the group had already looked at and would exceed CHS capacity by 400 to 500 – and if the eastern CHS boundary were drawn at U.S. 101 (instead of extending the Leavesley Road boundary into the country).
“If we do our due diligence, I think it’s worth it to look into,” she said.
The committee will bring a revised boundary to the board for final approval on June 5.
