Single Sex High Schools?

It’s an idea the board of trustees should consider while we’re
two years away from opening the second high school
With the impending construction of Gilroy’s long-awaited, much-needed second high school comes an important and difficult decision: How to determine which students will attend which high school.

To that end, Gilroy Unified School District staff are forming a committee to make recommendations to the board of trustees. They hope that a plan will be approved by next fall, a year before Christopher High School’s planned opening in 2009.

So far, the ideas that have been tossed around are traditional: geographic-based attendance following the district’s current neighborhood schools model, or program-based attendance following the abandoned magnet schools model.

Geographic boundaries make little sense at the high school level for a few reasons. First, with only two high schools, both situated on the west side of town, the facilities will be “neighborhood” schools for a small portion of students. Second, given the demographics of Gilroy’s neighborhoods, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to draw reasonable boundaries that balance the schools’ student bodies racially or socio-economically. 

In addition, both plans raise the issue of cross-town rivalries with the accompanying pluses and minuses.

We have a third idea for consideration: single-gender high schools. One high school would be for boys, one high school would be for girls. Single-gender high schools are becoming increasingly common.

There are many good reasons that increasing numbers of school districts are trying single-gender schools, which have been a popular option in private high schools for decades. Studies show that single-gender schools improve the education of both genders. Instruction can be tailored to long-documented gender-based learning differences, which ought to help improve the graduation gap between boys and girls. The gender-based graduation gap is especially dramatic among Hispanic students.

Gender-based schools would automatically be balanced racially and socio-economically. The schools would be natural partners, instead of rivals, for sporting events, proms and dances. 

We urge the district and the boundary committee to give full consideration to single-gender schools. The timing, with the opening of a second high school, is a perfect and rare opportunity.