In a plan being considered by the Sequoia Union High School District, all East Palo Alto students will be given the same opportunity to attend Menlo-Atherton High School and no longer be forced to go Carlmont.
The proposed plan would take all of the graduates from the Ravenswood City School District and route them all to the same high school. Ravenswood students are currently assigned to three different district high schools, depending on where they live - Carlmont, Woodside and Menlo-Atherton.
While discussions are still in the preliminary stages and a new boundary map will not be put into place before the 2014-2015 school year, district Superintendent James Lianides said Friday that on Sept. 25 the school board considered letting any Ravenswood City School District graduate who wants to go to Menlo-Atherton High next fall to do so.
The district also held community meetings in May to discuss the potential changes, and how they would affect both students and the community. Officials sought guidance on facilities planning for the district, which anticipates a growth of 20 percent in the next decade. Current enrollment is 9,247.
“The message that came back clearly as the number one priority from all those meetings was the need to strengthen connections between any given eighth-grade graduating class and, if possible, a single high school where the students would go,” said Sequoia Trustee Alan Sarver of Belmont.
Sarver indicated that the district plans to keep the popular open-enrollment program, which gives families the opportunity to apply for a school other than the one to which they were initially assigned. On a typical year the District usually gets about 700 of those requests, and approved “upwards of 500 of those,” he said.
In the past, the open enrollment program has been used often by Ravenswood families, with 60 percent of East Palo Alto students already attending Menlo-Atherton.
Repositioning of students started in the 1980s, after East Palo Alto’s high school closed because of declining enrollment and deteriorating facilities. Since then, district officials decided to distribute Ravenswood graduates among the four high schools.
The proposed move would end the long daily journey that students make on a daily basis. In July, the Bay Area chapter of the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights released an analysis saying that the District’s assignment system fails East Palo Alto students, who are suffering physically, socially and emotionally for having to commute long distances in order to get to school.
During the Sept. 25 meeting, the board also considered altering the boundaries for middle schools, in order to allow all students attending Tierra Linda Middle School in San Carlos to move onto Carlmont. About two-thirds already do, said Lianides.
All of these new proposed attendance boundaries could be critical for the future of the Sequoia district, as it is projected to be responsible for upwards of 10,000 students in 2020.
Lianides also said the board may pursue a facilities construction bond next June to add classrooms and facilities to the District’s high school campuses and possibly build one or two specialized high schools for students in need.
It remains to be seen if any of these proposed moves come to fruition, but it is clear that the district is striving to make decisions with it’s student’s best interests in mind.
http://issuu.com/scotscoop/docs/full_issue_september
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