Now that my daughter is a high school senior, I often reflect on
the time my daughter has spent attending Presentation HS in San
Jose. Over the past four years, we sacrificed personal time
commuting to school and events out of town, after-tax money for
tuition, and most of all, community connections.
Now that my daughter is a high school senior, I often reflect on the time my daughter has spent attending Presentation HS in San Jose. Over the past four years, we sacrificed personal time commuting to school and events out of town, after-tax money for tuition, and most of all, community connections.
As my 8th grade son looks forward to high school next year, I wonder: should we make the same choice again?
Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of information coming to me, a South County resident but a non-public school parent, from the school districts that help me make informed decisions. Take GUSD’s recent accountability task force report, which is missing any measurable goals.
While I understand the measurable specifics can be left up to the individual schools, when I asked how the information would get from the schools to the general community, the combination of words used in response were tantamount to a shrug.
And now, MHUSD needs to inform the public about the need for a parcel tax that will help make our schools the kind of “excellent schools that raise property values.”
Superintendent Nishino had a nice long guest column in the Morgan Hill Times recently, but it didn’t provide any new or convincing information different from the previous news articles that covered the proposed tax, (but I do appreciate that he made the effort to connect with the community).
The challenge, though, is to connect with the ENTIRE community, and that includes private school parents. At the risk of beating a dead horse, I feel I must call again for the beginning of a real dialogue between private school parents and the public school administrations. I’m calling for it again, mostly because the situation hasn’t changed since I brought it up more than a year ago.
When Morgan Hill was searching for a superintendent, I urged private school parents to participate in the community meetings. I was the only one to attend.
I asked the school board to have a focus group of alternative school parents. They promised to, and then didn’t. (I guess they thought having Greg Sellers, a charter school parent, on the search team was enough). I offered to help facilitate a survey of private school parents; there were no takers.
From a survey conducted at the beginning of the school year, I found that more than 1,000 children from zip codes 95037 and 95046 attend private schools (so this number doesn’t count the south San Jose children in MHUSD boundaries), 400 of them in high school leaving our town every weekday morning.
That’s quite an exodus of children, not to mention resources, on which the public schools are missing out.
Now, the school district will ask for more money to make the Morgan Hill schools the quality they need to be so that parents like me will consider private schools simply an option, rather than a necessity, for educating our children. I want the public schools to succeed, and not for my property values (housing here is overvalued as it is).
I am willing to hear them out. Our ears, I told proponent Elaine Reimer, a Live Oak parent who actually understands that private school parents need to be brought into the conversation, are more likely to be open if the district addresses the issues that private school parents have with the public schools. Therefore, it would be a good idea for them to make a concerted effort to find out what they are.
Though I detailed them last year, I don’t have the space to reiterate them here. (The columns are on record in the archives online). In addition to detailing how the district would address those concerns, I’d want the district to give details on how the money from the new tax will be used.
I don’t want general categories, and I don’t want to be told that these are characteristics of outstanding schools. I want specifics: why spend in this particular area (for example: technology: what kind, by the way and why?) and not another (for example: intensive teacher and staff training and class size reduction across all grades)?
I, and many like me, might become a parent of a public school student yet. The question is whether we will support the parcel tax.
Without any significant, meaningful information coming our way on which to make a decision, and engagement, my bet at this moment is the parents of more than 1,000 school children will be voting no.
