All of the 110 Morgan Hill School District students who
requested transfers from the new Sobrato High to Live Oak High will
be able to attend Live Oak High in the fall.
All of the 110 Morgan Hill School District students who requested transfers from the new Sobrato High to Live Oak High will be able to attend Live Oak High in the fall.
School Board trustees made the difficult decision during their regular board meeting Monday night when they considered whether to honor all requests for transfer to and from Live Oak High next year or save approximately $124,000 that would have to be spent to bring two classrooms to an acceptable state for use and to keep portables on the campus.
The board voted 7-0 to approve the Live Oak capacity at 1,820. The district will now be able to notify the students and parents by the March 1 deadline that their transfer requests have been approved.
The district plans to open Sobrato High School as a 9th and 10th grade high school in August, bringing ninth graders back to the high school for the first time in nearly 25 years.
The district offered an open enrollment period in January, so that students and their parents would have the opportunity to fill out applications to change from one high school to the other.
According to district staff, 107 students in the Sobrato High boundary submitted applications during the open enrollment period to move to Live Oak High, while 27 students in the Live Oak boundary asked to move to Sobrato. At Monday’s meeting, Assistant Superintendent Claudette Beaty said one additional student had requested to move to Live Oak since the close of open enrollment at the end of January.
In order to accommodate the transfer requests, all 18 portables on the campus will be retained, rather than removing some of them as the board had previously discussed.
“The (18) portables cost $114,000 per year, which comes out of capital improvement monies,” Deputy Superintendent Bonnie Tognazzini told trustees at an earlier meeting.
Trustees heard a report at an earlier meeting from Tognazzini on Live Oak’s capacity for next year to recommend steps that would allow all the students requesting a transfer to be house on the campus. She told trustees that the problem was science labs and having ample space to accommodate all the students with a minimum of movement during the day required for teachers.
There are two former science labs, now closed and scheduled to be renovated into foreign language classrooms, that could possibly be used if they were “deep cleaned” and painted, Tognazzini told trustees.
In the staff report prepared for the Feb. 9 meeting, trustees are given an estimate of work required to use these classrooms for at least next year:
“The estimate is about $10,000 to prepare these science lab classrooms and we would need to use Live Oak’s modernization money to accomplish this task,” according to the staff report. “These rooms are planned to be modified into modern language classrooms, hence, all of the lab equipment would be removed in the next two years and any dollars invested will be lost.”
Even with these two classrooms, according to the report, there would still be four teachers that need to change classrooms during the day.
District staff reported Live Oak’s enrollment at 1,620 during the fifth month of the school year, officially Dec. 15 through Jan. 9. The fifth month enrollment numbers are the ones the state uses to calculate ADA, or average daily attendance, funds the district will receive.
Middle and high school students registered for next year’s classes at the beginning of December. Sobrato High School Principal Rich Knapp said in January that 749 have registered for the district’s newest high school in its first year, with 387 ninth graders and 362 students expected in the 10th grade. Live Oak has a total of 1,742 students with 291 ninth graders, 263 sophomores, 645 juniors and 543 seniors.