Of the 254 students hoping to transfer to Christopher High
School for its opening this fall, 67 will get their wish.
Of the 254 students hoping to transfer to Christopher High School for its opening this fall, 67 will get their wish.
The school board unanimously voted to allow the 67 students who live north of First Street but outside the CHS boundary and who submitted a transfer request by the district’s deadline to attend Gilroy’s second high school, located at the corner of Day Road and Santa Teresa Boulevard in north Gilroy. Uncomfortable with accommodating all the transfer applications for capacity reasons, the board will allow the 67 transfers this year with the stipulation that the boundary committee go back to the drawing board in the near future to reconfigure the dividing line that separates CHS students in the north from Gilroy High School students to the south.
CHS will open August 2009 with freshman and sophomores. Junior and senior classes will be added in subsequent years. The school’s first phase will accommodate 1,000 students. It’s second phase, which is planned to open Fall 2010, will double the capacity.
Adding the 67 transfers will bring the school’s student population to 609 in its inaugural year, well within the school’s initial capacity for 1,000 and leaving room for about 400 new students if the second phase of the high school isn’t complete by Fall 2010 – a prospect trustees didn’t feel comfortable gambling on.
Trustees also revisited their initial goals and vision for creating two separate comprehensive high schools and the amount of time that went into developing separate populations.
“If we begin to accept a significant amount of transfers, we’ll be undoing all the work we did,” trustee Rhoda Bress said, alluding to the countless hours the board and boundary committee spent on divvying up Gilroy’s students last spring. “If we decide to add another 50, 100, 200, then this needs to go back to the boundary committee.”
Bress emphasized, and other trustees agreed, that the board planned to populate both schools based on certain criteria – matching socioeconomic status and academic achievement as closely as possible, as well as considering proximity. Granting more than 200 transfers would skew that data significantly and create a growing disparity between the two schools, according to district data. Allowing all 254 transfers would widen the socioeconomic and academic gap between CHS and Gilroy High School, placing more socioeconomically disadvantaged students at GHS and more students performing at the proficient and above levels on state standardized tests at CHS, district data showed.
Staff did not have readily available data reflecting the impact of allowing the 67 transfers north of First Street.
The two parents who spoke to the board at the last two board meetings, asking them to reconsider the boundary instead of “balancing socioeconomics at the expense of other common sense issues,” like proximity, endorsed the board’s decision.
Trustee Denise Apuzzo also urged board members to draw on common sense when casting their votes, acknowledging that many requests were probably made on the basis of parents wanting their children at a new school. Because the board had discussed reinstating the boundary committee once the second phase of the high school is in the mix, trustees acknowledged that the life span of the initial boundary may be shorter lived than they originally expected.
“What makes the most sense is kids whose families will be going (to CHS) in a year from now – we should put them in (CHS) now,” Apuzzo said.
Of the 67 students residing north of First Street yet outside the CHS boundary who requested a transfer, 54 indicated proximity as the motivation behind their request, CHS Principal John Perales said. Other students living in the area who did not submit transfer requests by the district’s Feb. 11 deadline will still attend GHS. The board specified that it was not moving the boundary, it was merely allowing a portion of transfer requests of students living in a particular area to attend CHS.
