Hundreds of frustrated parents are fed up with Morgan Hill’s public education system, which they say is in a state of crisis and allows underperforming students to fall through the cracks.
With a growing presence and backing from a grassroots activist organization called People Acting in the Community Together, or PACT, concerned parents of predominantly Hispanic backgrounds are demanding change – and they want it now, particularly in the form of a new charter school run by the same group of educators who are transforming socio-economically disadvantaged students into some of the highest achieving in the Gilroy Unified School District.
Principal James Dent, a founding member of Gilroy Prep School and soon-to-be-opened Hollister Prep in the fall of 2013, is working with parents to get the new charter school sanctioned by the Morgan Hill Unified School District. But concerned parents say the MHUSD Board of Education is dragging its feet and wasting time instead of taking immediate action to put an end to the underachievement of the poorest population in Morgan Hill.
“Enough is enough. We need to make real changes,” said parent Roberto Auguierrez who has two children attending Paradise Valley Elementary School on La Crosse Drive in Morgan Hill, where he says they are already falling behind and will not be prepared to attend a four-year college by the time they graduate high school.
Holding MHUSD’s feet to the fire on this problem has become “a movement,” Auguierrez says. “It’s about fixing our district. We want good schools and that’s the only thing we want.”
At past PACT community action meetings, such as the one held March 11 at St. Catherine’s Catholic Church, MHUSD trustees Rick Badillo and Bob Benevento said they were verbally assaulted by hostile parents.
“The folks at PACT seem to think there’s a crisis. Yet in looking in at the definition of a crisis, I don’t think our district meets any of those parameters of a crisis,” insists Badillo. “There’s room for improvement. There are areas that need to be addressed. But a crisis, no, we have too many positive things in our district.”
School Board trustees and MHUSD administrators insist they want the same opportunities for all students and have already seen improvement: The district’s 2012 high school graduation rate of 79 percent was higher than the state’s; the Latino and English Language Learner subgroups have seen more than a 50-point increase in the last six years on the Academic Performance Index (California’s yardstick for measuring academic growth and success) and five schools saw double digit growth last year on the API.
Six schools, however, recorded drops in scores including Barrett Elementary (23), El Toro (10), Jackson (13), Paradise Valley (19), San Martin/Gwinn (5) and Live Oak (13). Barrett has shown a decreasing trend in the last four years, sliding by 44 points since 2008.
Trustee Benevento says parents “have valid concerns, but they are being addressed … we are not ignoring the community.”
After touring Gilroy Prep School Tuesday morning, trustee Don Moody said, “I was pleasantly surprised with what I saw … I can see that it would meet the education needs of some our students. I still plan on doing more homework on this charter school before I make up my mind, but I will say that the kindergarten through third grade students I saw today were fully engaged in their learning.”
Trustees Shelle Thomas declined to comment; trustees Ron Woolf and Claudia Rossi did not return emails.
Parents, though, are tired of waiting for change, tired of students falling below grade level and being sent to Central Continuation High School or dropping out and turning to a life of crime or gangs.
“This just didn’t happen this year,” said concerned parent Silvia Topete, who has two children in MHUSD and a third attending a Catholic elementary school in town. “It’s been going on for years. There should be something better for our kids – and there is.”
Parents believe that “something better” lies with the Gilroy Prep School leadership team, which established a flagship school in 2010 on I.O.O.F Avenue in Gilroy and heads a charter management organization called Navigator Prep. Their goal is to spread successful learning models and lower the achievement gap by establishing additional charter schools in up to eight other cities. Morgan Hill parents want to be next.
In its first year of operation, the charter broke the 970 API barrier – the state’s benchmark for this score is 800 – and is also the highest-performing first-year charter out of 500 in the state of California since 2006. The previous high score was 957.
A sample of characteristics that set the GPS model apart include a reactive learning environment that offers tiered instruction based on ability; an extended school day with art, music and dance enrichment classes; tracking closely the statistics of each students’ progress with monthly reports sent home to parents; and having students work with multiple teachers throughout the day, which prevents stagnation, Dent said. The classrooms at GPS are designed to be “extremely active” learning environments where “students are engaged 100 percent of the time,” he explained.
Dent is working diligently to get a charter school start-up grant in order to open a Morgan Hill Prep to underperforming kindergarten, first- and second-grade students by 2014. Another grade would be tacked on every year after that through the eighth grade.
Contrary to what some Morgan Hill parents see as stubborn hesitancy, Dent – who has been in talks with the Morgan Hill School Board since January – confirms Superintendent Wes Smith has been very receptive to the idea of bringing a Navigator charter school to MHUSD by 2014.
Sharon Waller, GPS vice principal and co-founder, added that Smith, several trustees and other MHUSD faculty and staff “seemed very interested in our ideas” during Tuesday’s tour.
Waller was originally focusing on opening a third charter in Watsonville until learning of the concerns and reviewing academic performance data in Morgan Hill.
She said MHUSD is “really trying to investigate what we’re about and they seem open-minded to the idea.”
Smith, in turn, said he is “not against” adding a second charter, despite claims made by PACT parents.
If a Navigator Prep School opens in Morgan Hill, it will be the city’s second charter school. Charter school of Morgan Hill opened in 2001. The difference between the two is that Navigator schools target the lowest-scoring, poorest demographic area of a district.
In the event the MHUSD school board rejects a proposal by Dent to open a charter, he can still seek overriding approval from the Santa Clara County Board of Education.
Districtwide, MHUSD’s overall API score increased from 781 to 789 this past year, but still lags behind Gilroy, which is at 802.
Morgan Hill’s Central Continuation High School increased 158 points to 656 after decreasing significantly the year before, but remains the lowest achieving at 92 points behind Live Oak High School.
“Any student that we have here that ends up in a continuation high school, in my opinion, we did not educate them properly at the beginning of their educational career,” Dent said. “What happens is that kids fall behind and, when they get behind, they can never catch up and they end up misbehaving and getting shipped off somewhere else.”
For videos and more information on Navigator Prep schools visit gilroyprep.org.
