We have so many concerns about the Morgan Hill Unified School
District
’s boundary change process that it’s hard to know where to
begin.
We have so many concerns about the Morgan Hill Unified School District’s boundary change process that it’s hard to know where to begin.
The boundary changes are needed, district officials say, because Sobrato High School will open in the fall of 2004. Setting aside our doubts that Sobrato will open on time, we’re confused about why the opening of the district’s second high school means that middle and elementary school boundaries need to change at all.
District officials have taken a simple problem – how to decide which students will attend Live Oak and which will attend Sobrato – and made it unnecessarily complex. And they’re putting the cart before the horse. Before deciding how to change middle and elementary school boundaries, and what high school boundaries to create, the district must first decide on what basis students will be sent to Live Oak or Sobrato: geography or curriculum.
At least one member of the school board wants to send students to a high school based on what classes and sports they want to take, not based on their addresses.
Given that the two schools won’t have duplicate facilities, that both schools are located in the relative geographic center of the district, and that parents have to pay for their children to ride a school bus anyway, we see a heck of a lot of merit in that argument. A curriculum-based enrollment policy for Morgan Hill’s high schools means there’s no need to mess with school boundaries at all.
Which is a good thing, given the number of families who were yanked around the district when elementary boundaries were changed for the 2001/2002 school year with the opening of Barrett Elementary. Now, many of those students have just started middle school – a huge adjustment all by itself – and face the very real and unfair possibility they’ll be switched to a different middle school next fall – without having ever changed their address. And speaking of middle school, it seems to us that the district is ignoring another question that ought to be settled before any middle school boundaries are touched: should sixth graders attend elementary or middle schools?
There are compelling arguments on both sides of that debate, and it’s an important question to settle before boundaries are redrawn. If boundaries are drawn on the assumption that sixth graders will remain in elementary schools, only to have that assumption changed a few months or years down the road, students will undergo boundary upheaval all over again. Let’s not put the cart before the horse on this issue either. The boundary committee currently expending lots of energy on an unnecessary project is also looking at changing elementary school boundaries, which completely baffles us.
Morgan Hill has strict growth-control ordinances. City planners know where and how many new units of housing will be built over the next several years. Elementary school boundaries were adjusted, causing great inconvenience and stress for many families, just two years ago.
Did those boundary committee members, district employees and trustees do such a poor job that elementary boundaries need to be redrawn already? That’s the only plausible explanation we can come up with, given the slow and planned growth in Morgan Hill. And if that’s the case, every one involved in that boundary process owes the families they disrupted a huge and sincere apology – especially since many of those same students face being uprooted again.
We like the KISS principle – keep it simple, stupid. That’s best accomplished by adopting a curriculum-based enrollment policy for district high schools and leaving boundaries alone. That will give the district time to thoughtfully weigh the best placement of sixth-graders before adjusting middle school boundaries.
But whatever happens, we urge trustees to pledge not to revisit the stress of the previous boundary changes upon families: leave the elementary boundaries alone, and allow school choice for any student who has ever, in his or her Morgan Hill school district career, been moved from a school due to boundary changes.
Those students and their families have sacrificed enough for ethnically, socio-economically balanced schools. If granting them school choice means some schools are out of balance for a couple of years, so be it. Parents and students are the school district’s customers. These particular customers have been treated shabbily more than enough. Let’s put their interests first this time around.
And let’s apply the KISS principle to school boundary questions at every level.
To respond to this editorial or comment on this issue, please send or bring letters to the Editor, The Morgan Hill Times, 30 E. Third St., Morgan Hill, CA 95037, fax to 779-3886 or email to [email protected]
