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Photograph by Ryan Olein
School districts clash over who will get two high schools
School unification battle heats up
A small school district's dream of expansion provokes a lawsuit, an election and a storm of debate
By Cecily Barnes
Parents with students enrolled in the Moreland School District, nestled between Campbell and San Jose, have a dream. Their dream is to watch their high school seniors be capped, gowned and presented with a diploma by the same teachers and administrators who have known them since they were nervous kindergartners at one of Moreland's six elementary schools and later when they were grade-schoolers at one of Moreland's two middle schools.
The transition from lower grades to middle to high school would be seamless. Elementary school teachers would meet with middle school teachers, and middle school teachers with their counterparts at the high school. In the end, students would graduate with a strong sense of community and continuity, with parents actively involved each step of the way.
The first step toward unification, of course, requires the passage of Measure A at the upcoming June 8 election. Passage of this measure would allow Moreland School District to take Prospect and Blackford high schools from the Campbell Union High School District beginning in July 2000, thus extending its district from K-8 to K-12.
This dream of an expanded Moreland district and downsized CUHSD however, is not shared by everyone. The two sides have come to blows often over the past few months, spurring a critical lawsuit that will be decided by the courts on May 21.
Opponents of unification--mostly parents and administrators affiliated with the Campbell Union High School District--believe Prospect and Blackford should stay in the care of the Campbell district of which they have been a part since the 1960s.
Opponents predict that because Moreland has only operated elementary and middle schools, it would do a poor job running these high schools.
They point to Moreland's failure to offer free after-school sports at even its middle schools. While Campbell Middle School and other local schools offer volleyball, basketball, soccer, track and field, cross-country and wrestling, Moreland has a pay-to-play regimen whereby students must pay $50 to participate in sports. Parents fear this same procedure will extend to the high school.
Moreland superintendent Jim Ritchie says he anticipates that a fully funded after-school sports program will continue at Prospect. Critics also point to Moreland's inexperience with the myriad of advanced classes, after-school programs and extracurricular activities associated with a high school.
"High schools have programs that don't even exist in an elementary school--take sports activities for example," CUHSD assistant superintendent Rhonda Farber says. "Activities more than double."
Susie Levin, who has a student at Prospect High and another student at Rogers Middle School, worries about losing teachers and very specific programs. She ticks off the names of some of these programs.
"They probably won't have Latin and most of the tenured teachers will stay with Campbell," Levin says. "They'll have no more district art festival, no district music festival; they're going to lose a lot and I don't see what they're going to gain."
To this, Moreland superintendent Jim Ritchie chuckles.
"The bottom line is, this is about the kids, and we want them to have every program possible," Ritchie says. "There is no reason to assume that any sport or activity or enrichment can't be offered with Moreland. We have made our intention clear that we intend to continue funding all of the programs and that we have the money to do that."
Photograph by Ryan Olein
Protecting their Future: A group of Prospect High School students fear their favorite teachers and programs will be lost if the Moreland School District acquires their high school.
The opponents whose children are at the high school right now want proof; they want to see exactly what will go, and exactly what will stay. They say repeated requests to Ritchie have gone unanswered, that they're always given the general response that everything will just work out.
Students themselves say they've asked specific questions, and received only vague responses.
"If they could substantiate their claims, I would be okay with the takeover but what really bothers me is the way they're going about it," says Michael Iatavro, a 16-year-old sophomore at Prospect. "It's not 'hi, we want to be your friend,' it's more like 'we're going to do this and you're not going to have any school.'"
Ritchie says a comprehensive plan can't be completed until Moreland has access to the teachers employed at Prospect, and can determine how many will stay with the high school during the changeover.
"It's as specific as we can get until we get a chance to talk to the teachers at the school," Ritchie says. "We have budget specificity, we know what our resources are going to be. We know what it costs to operate that school and we're very sure we'll be able to do that."
Opponents say this isn't good enough.
"How can you vote on something you don't really know about," asks Susie Levin? "So far Dr. Ritchie hasn't been able to tell us what are the advantages of unification, the specifics. He says all of these esoteric things--more community feeling, more parent involvement. But what concrete things?"
Out of Bounds
Moreland parents did not decide to expand their school district on a whim. A dedicated group of unification advocates have been working toward this end since 1994. Some say they've felt disgruntled with the CUHSD for years, pointing to the district's failure to interact with the middle school districts or community, or even send out a newsletter until recently.
Moreland unification supporters tick off examples of times when CUHSD hasn't measured up.
When Moreland tried to team up with CUHSD to seek improvement funds through Joint Venture Silicon Valley's Challenge 2000 grant, for example, the CUHSD wouldn't participate.
"You couldn't go in unless you had K-12. We could not get cooperation through the high school so we lost the opportunity to go for that funding," says Moreland superintendent Ritchie. "In some places where [the grant was received] it has amounted to several million dollars over the years."
Another example involves the Learning Alliance, whereby elementary school districts that feed into CUHSD have been meeting with the high schools to compare and unify learning standards.
"Last Saturday was the day the writings were supposed to be corrected; there were teachers and administrators there from all the different districts but no administrator was there from the CUHSD," Ritchie says. "We have found that the follow-through on those really critical projects isn't always there."
Moreland Education Foundation president Daniel Hinojosa says that CUHSD's failure to try to stop Measure A sooner only reinforces the district's apathy.
"We've been working on this for four years, and that whole time the high school district has not come to the Moreland community meetings to extend a hand to say, 'we think there's an issue, we might need to do some work, tell us what we need to do, give us some input, we want to be there for you, you're our constituents,'" Hinojosa says. "They haven't asked the question at all."
Hinojosa argues that this should have been common sense.
"Let's say my manager was passing a petition around to my customers asking 'is Daniel doing a good job?'" he posits. "As soon as I saw that, I would go to my manager and say 'what spawned this, is there something I'm not doing?'"
In 1994, Moreland parents, teachers and administrators decided to move forward on their own toward unification. They gathered signatures from 25 percent of registered voters inside the Moreland School District and sent the signatures to the California Board of Education in 1997. Soon after, the state okayed Measure A for a public election for June 1999. The election however, is limited to registered voters living inside the tight boundaries of the Moreland School District.
Photograph by Ryan Olein
Without a Vote: at Prospect High School will be directly affected by Measure A, even though they are too young to vote in the June 8 election.
Voted Out
Joan Gotterba is one of many Prospect parents who won't be permitted to vote in the upcoming election. Although her twin sons will be graduating this year, Gotterba still has an interest in the school and is very upset about being excluded from this democratic process.
"I just think it's very unfair that we don't get to vote, especially when our property taxes have been paying to maintain the school," Gotterba says. "The whole thing just sort of boggles my mind. It's a real hard lesson to teach your kids about the whole legal system and what's right."
CUHSD counsel Harold Freiman offers an explanation of how the state board justified limiting the election boundaries.
"What the state board has claimed is that the voters in the Moreland area and those outside the Moreland area have substantially enough differing interests in the outcome of the election that it warrants precluding non-Moreland voters from voting," Freiman says.
Freiman of course, will be arguing against this. The CUHSD sued the State Board of Education on March 19 to expand the voting boundaries. This lawsuit is still pending, and will go to hearing in Sacramento Superior Court on May 21 at 10 a.m. in department 31.
"If we win the lawsuit we are suggesting that the judge allow the election to go forward in the Moreland area only," Freiman says. "The logic is that if the election fails then the whole lawsuit becomes moot. If the election becomes successful, than we suggest that a second election be held in November in the remaining area."
If the lawsuit fails and the election passes, Prospect and Blackford high schools will fall into Moreland's hands beginning in July 2000.
If this happens, CUHSD will have yet another battle to face the following year when the Campbell Union School District pushes its unification plans to take Westmont and Del Mar high schools.
This would leave CUHSD with only two high schools out of its current six. According to Campbell Middle School principal Joe Pacheco, CUSD's unification will directly depend upon the success or failure of Moreland.
"We have passed the first hurdle as far as obtaining the necessary signatures to apply to the state," Pacheco says. "If the Moreland district succeeds, than our district will probably push for an election in 2000."
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Campbell, California
