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The Pleasanton school board will be reviewing and discussing two options to readjust the high school boundary lines during Thursday’s board meeting.
“It is time to adjust our High school boundaries to reflect the demographic changes, enrollment changes and attendance area changes to balance the attendance and staffing at our high schools,” reads the district’s informational webpage on the boundary adjustment process.
The boundaries also help determine which high schools the middle schools will feed students into.
District staff is set to present background information on the recently adjusted elementary and middle school boundaries to the board as well as the input the district received from recent community meetings and survey results.
The board will make a final decision on which boundary adjustment option to approve during the Jan. 25 meeting after making any necessary final adjustments following Thursday’s discussion.
Last spring, the board gave Pleasanton Unified School District the green light to update its elementary and middle school boundaries, which adjusted where certain elementary school students would go for middle school. At the time, the board also committed itself to evaluate and adjust the high school boundaries for the 2024-25 school year, according to Thursday’s staff report.
The district’s technical and stakeholder committees later came together in the fall — which are made up of district officials, trustees, parents, teachers, school administrators and members of the city government — to review the current boundaries and begin developing two options to bring to the table.
After the boundary options were created, the district held two community meetings in early December so that the public could provide input. The district also posted a survey on its website for people to share their feedback which garnered over 360 responses.
Staff’s presentation also addresses two “choice areas” which represent neighborhoods in the city located in the Meadowlark Park and Fairlands Park areas. Parents who live in those regions currently have the option to choose which of the two high schools they want to send their children to attend.
According to the district’s survey results, more than 60% of the respondents preferred the first option, which would more evenly split students living in South Pleasanton between Foothill High School and Amador Valley High School as opposed to the second option which would send majority of those students to Foothill.
However, according to staff, there were other factors and issues that came up during the community input gathering process.
The staff report states that many community members wanted to keep elementary schools grouped as a whole and that those who are in choice areas would like to keep those areas — the two new options do not have any choice areas.
“Families bought their home in choice areas to have the flexibility to make that choice,” the staff report states.
The report also states that depending on the impact each option has on certain residents, they either supported or disapproved of each option due to transportation and distance issues. They did, however, support the district’s “grandfather” transition plan which allows middle school students to choose which high school they want to attend. That way they can stay with their friends and continue their current academic plans.
Another part of the transition plan will be to allow younger siblings to attend the same high school as their older siblings even if they are impacted by the boundary change. New incoming students for the 2024-25 school year, who aren’t affected by the grandfather rules, will have to attend the high school set by the new boundaries.
The board’s open-session meeting is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. Thursday (Jan. 11). Read the full agenda here.
In other business:
* During the consent calendar, which are items considered routine and are typically approved through a single vote, the board will be looking to approve an employee arrangement so that Nimarta Grewal, senior director of human resources, would take over as acting assistant superintendent of human resources. This follows the departure of former assistant superintendent Julio Hernandez, who moved back to southern California for a new job at the end of last month.
* Staff will be asking the board to approve a lease amendment with Extended Day Child Care Center, which operates a childcare program for Walnut Grove Elementary School students. The amendment would allow the district to end the lease arrangement and take over running a childcare program through the district’s Kids Club program beginning in the 2024-25 school year.
* The Board of Trustees will be reviewing and receiving an update report on the 2023-2024 Transitional Kindergarten Associate Educator Cohort
* Staff will be presenting an update on the recent work PUSD has done to develop essential math standards for kindergarten through eighth grade.
* The board will be receiving a report on the 2023 California Dashboard, which reflects a “full return of California’s accountability system with the reporting of status (current year data), change (the difference from prior year data), and performance levels (colors) for most state indicators from the 2022-23 school year data.”
Introduce school choice in PUSD.
Start small with maybe 5% of the enrollment being open to students outside of the school boundary. First come first served. This would begin to create competition between the schools that would cause schools to begin to focus on more important education issues, would help identify the better teachers, better counselors, well in short the better schools. And the lesser schools, teachers and counselors.
Why is it that when a student moves to 13th grade (colleges and universities) that students can choose their school? No one tells them where they must go.
When a student moves out of the mandatory k-12 educational system into higher education, they will have learned what schools provide the curriculum that best suits their adult goals. 13th year and beyond isn’t required, most high school graduates have reached 18 years of age, therefore classifying them as adults. They’ve moved beyond general studies to a more focused field of study, so of course, they can choose where to continue their educational pursuits, providing they have funding opportunities available.
The high schools within the district should be providing equally good educational opportunities, not creating greater vs lesser schools.
Transportation and distance considerations ought to be the main consideration while grandfathering in siblings as the transition is put into place is a factor that should be considered. Beyond that, all students in elementary, middle, and high school should adhere to district boundaries.
Theoretically all schools everywhere should be providing equally good education. But they don’t. For that reason some parents resort to the competition to find a better school. They may apply to or move to another school district. They may enroll their child in a charter school or private school. There are private schools here in Pleasanton. So, competition exists. And competition generally makes things better. Saying that children should not make school decisions is irrelevant. Parents make decisions for their kids. And some parents are exercising school choice whether PUSD offers it or not.
We moved to Pleasanton 33 years ago because of the good schools. We were exercising school choice then and we would make the same decision today. According to a national survey, last year PUSD schools were top rated in the Bay Area and in the State of California. How can we make them better? One answer is to increase the competition.
>>PUSD schools were top rated in the Bay Area
Rated with others very nearby that are even ‘higher’ top rated. huh.
This might help:
https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/print/story/2023/04/07/tri-valley-school-districts-ranked-in-best-of-state-list
Last year PUSD was rated 17th best district of 997 districts in California.
yes, ‘one’ of the top rated. This district does rock (I’m an employee); but another twice as big rocks too; specially the high schools. Just saying.
Good! And I am on the CBOC.