Despite appeals to School Board trustees, some Morgan Hill
School District high school students will not be going to the
school of their choice when school opens Aug. 24.
Despite appeals to School Board trustees, some Morgan Hill School District high school students will not be going to the school of their choice when school opens Aug. 24.
Instead, students who have requested transfers will start at their home school, and if space is available after school begins, then requests can be granted.
When trustees agreed on boundaries for Live Oak High and the new Sobrato High in November, the consensus was that effort should be made to grant all student requests for transfers between the two schools.
After holding registration for middle school and high school students in December, district officials opened the rosters again in January, offering students the chance to transfer from their assigned “home” school to the other if they wished.
Students had until March 1 to request a transfer. During that time, 121 students requested a transfer to Live Oak and 55 requested a transfer to Sobrato.
District officials said there are 107 school choice applications at the high school level, 83 to Live Oak and 24 to Sobrato. Students will have to start at their assigned school, then move to the school they requested, if there is room. As of Monday night, there are 1799 students enrolled at Live Oak and 692 at Sobrato including seven unprocessed applications received after the close of school in June. Live Oak has an undetermined number of such applications.
During Monday’s School Board meeting, they heard from a family with a special ed student assigned to Sobrato. The student had played football for Live Oak, and wanted to sign up for the business academy there next year. The family told trustees they had received mixed messages from the district, sometimes being told that their son would be going to Live Oak, other times being told he had to stay at Sobrato.
“What was conflicting for them (the family who spoke), is that a teacher has a program (business academy) at Live Oak and needs a certain number of students to make the program work,” Superintendent Carolyn McKennan said Thursday. “The teacher sent forms home with the students to request a transfer from Sobrato to Live Oak. That was not an acceptance, though some parents took it as that … I don’t believe they were given different answers.”
Trustee Shellé Thomas suggested that students who have requested a transfer but have been placed on a waiting list be allowed to start at the school they requested; then, if space doesn’t open up after school starts, they can be moved back if necessary.
“It seems to me there would be fewer disruptions that way,” she said.
“The May 24 transfer requests all came in a bundle from the business academy,” said McKennan. “Everyone at the District Office had good intentions.”
