When Zaira Medina was a freshman at Ann Sobrato High School in Morgan Hill, she didn’t take her schooling seriously and fell behind in course credits needed for graduation.
“I started not really paying attention to my studies,” admitted Medina, now 18. “I disliked homework, so I didn’t do it. During class, I was always talking and not paying attention.”
Just before entering her junior year at Sobrato, Medina realized: If she didn’t change her ways, she was not going to earn a diploma alongside the rest of her classmates.
“It just hit me that I wasn’t going to make it,” said Medina, who decided to seek out the advice of a school counselor. “I just told myself that I had to get my act together and grow up.”
The counselor advised Medina to attend Central Continuation High School for her senior year – a suggestion that at first really “bummed” Medina out. She felt like a “failure” and an “outcast” who couldn’t make it at Sobrato. And then there were the stereotypes: Continuation is where “all the girls who are pregnant go,” Medina noted.
But Medina – wanting to turn her life around and make her family proud – took the advice and enrolled at Central.
In one year’s time, she made up her lost credits; completed her senior coursework; graduated on time; was named Central’s “student of the year”; and was also chosen by Principal Irene Macias-Morriss to be featured in the “senior spotlight” edition of this newspaper. Medina delivered a speech during Central’s June 5 commencement ceremony and became the first member of her family to earn a high school diploma. She plans to attend Evergreen Valley College in the fall and work towards a career in journalism or photography.
Her school, however, is in the center of a heated community debate. Some parents believe Central exists only because Live Oak and Sobrato, the two mainstream high schools, are failing students. Others are angry that the Morgan Hill Unified School District trustees are spending $7 million in school bond money to relocate Central High to the former Burnett Elementary School site and renovate the campus. They say that as the neighborhood grows, the campus should have been re-opened as an elementary school.
Trustee Ron Woolf dismisses Central High’s critics.
“I think anyone who makes statements like what we’ve heard about alternative education doesn’t know what alternative education is. They don’t have a clue,” said Woolf. “At Central, there are people doing amazing things … to me, it’s almost a joke some of the statements that are made.”
Members of People Acting in Community Together, or PACT – a citizens’ group consisting largely of Latino parents – think otherwise. They claim their children are unwillingly forced to transfer to Central and believe it’s part of a ploy to keep poorly performing students from impacting Live Oak and Sobrato’s Academic Performance Index scores – the state’s yardstick for measuring school success.
“That’s not the first alternative. It should be the last alternative,” said Armando Benavides, a PACT parent leader and local attorney who regularly voices his concerns on how MHUSD is handling its “at-risk” students.
 Benavides, who believes the district should be using more general funds for programs that target at-risk students and get them up to speed before dropping them from the comprehensive schools, believes moving Central to a bigger facility is so MHUSD can “transfer hundreds of Sobrato and Live Oak students” in effort to boost graduation rates.
“That’s what’s being said; that we are dumping Latino kids and we’re building this facility so we can warehouse them,” said Trustee Claudia Rossi at a June board meeting. “This is very damaging for our community to actually hear this and some of them actually believe it.”
One of the leaders of the two new charter school operations bucking to land in Morgan Hill believes there’s an underlying problem.
James Dent, the co-founder of Navigator Schools which broke API records after it opened Gilroy Prep in 2010, says that “any student” who “ends up in a continuation high school” was not educated properly at the beginning of his or her educational career.
“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,” Dent said.
Whether Central High students were not “educated properly” to begin with or fell behind as a result of their own slacking, Central’s recent star graduate says the school is safety net for those who need a second chance.
“If there’s a student out there who knows they are not going to make it in time, instead of staying another year and falling further behind (at a traditional high school), they might as well go to Central,” Medina reasoned.
Smaller class sizes with more one-on-one attention; teachers who are well apprised of students’ credit deficiencies and what it will take to catch up; and being surrounded by other students who are in the same predicament helped Medina turn her grades around.
According to 2008 report from EdSource – an independent online forum that works to engage Californians on key education challenges and issues – “alternative school students are many more times likely to drop out than their peers in comprehensive high schools.”
That same study showed 55 percent of students in continuation schools are Hispanic.
California Department of Education spokeswoman Tina Jung calls the continuation high school format a “wonderful program to help these kids earn a diploma.”
Jung added that students ages 16 and older often re-enroll back into their traditional high school after making full credit recovery. Others need the schedule flexibility because they have day jobs or other family issues.
Interim Superintendent Steve Betando says, “We’re doing great things for kids. Central is an amazing program.”
The district must continue to “provide opportunities and options … because if we don’t, then we’re ignoring those kids,” he said.
