Campaign aimed at MHUSD Board President Bob Benevento
Published in the November 11-24, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters approved the circulation of petitions to recall Morgan Hill Unified School District Board President Bob Benevento. The recall campaign was initiated when several parents were angered when the board voted Aug. 4 for the district next year to move sixth graders into middle schools.
The group calling itself “Parents For Positive Change” have until Feb. 19, or a period of 120 days, to collect 6,289 valid signatures from registered voters living in the MHUSD boundary. If they collect enough signatures verified by the Registrar of Voters, the district would call a special election, possibly to be set in May or June 2016, that would cost the MHUSD about $503,000. Benevento’s term ends in November 2016.
The “flash point” for the campaign occurred when Benevento, along with fellow trustees Ron Woolf, Donna Ruebusch and Amy Porter Jensen, approved to move sixth-graders to middle school, said Armando Benevides, a San Jose-based lawyer who organized Parents For Positive Change. Benevides has no children in the MHUSD.
Trustees David Gerrard, Gino Borgioli and Rick Badillo voted against the change. The reconfiguration was recommended to the board after a year-long committee of parents, teachers and staff studied the change.
“In the months leading to the vote, many parents appeared before the board and expressed a choice to keep sixth grade in the elementary schools,” Benevides said. “Benevento denied those parents their choice.”
Benevento said he listened to all sides of the issue and came to the conclusion that for many reasons MHUSD needed to change its middle school configuration to include sixth grade. In Santa Clara County, 20 of 26 districts currently include sixth grade in middle schools.
“As president of the school board, I have tried to ensure that parents, teachers, staff and others in the community have an opportunity to voice their opinions,” Benevento said. “Unfortunately, it is impossible to satisfy everyone on every issue. This recall effort is based on one contentious issue: the decision to move most of our sixth graders to a middle school. Regardless of how any parent or citizen may feel about that, an ugly recall will be bad for our community.”
MHUSD Superintendent Steve Betando said sixth-grade reconfiguration has been a consideration for the district since May 1990 when a report was submitted by a committee of administrators, counselors, teachers and parents. The recommendation of the committee then was: “A middle school program in the Morgan Hill Unified School District should be comprised of three grade levels. The preferred configuration is 6 to 8.”
In his education career, Betando taught sixth grade at both a kindergarten-to-sixth-grade configured school and a sixth-to-eighth-grade configured school. From his experience, he said, he observed sixth-graders in middle school tend to do better in social and self-esteem issues because they faced a “less insulated” environment, enabling them to emotionally mature more as they entered their teenage years.
The MHUSD historically has had non-traditional grade configurations including, before Sobrato High School was built, high school freshmen attending middle schools with seventh and eighth graders because Live Oak High School was overcrowded, he said. Live Oak had only 10th, 11th, and 12th grades during those years.
Among the reasons the committee recommended the new configuration was because San Martin/Gwinn Environmental Science Academy and Jackson Academy of Math and Music opened up to eighth graders, and there’s a projected growing student population coming into elementary schools as more development takes place in the district, Betando said. The reconfiguration also better adheres to the new curriculum in Common Core as well as next generation science standards developed on a sixth/seventh/eighth-grade model of lab learning.
The reconfiguration of sixth-grade also supports the trend in the district to reduce class size, Betando said. The reconfiguration also benefits from a “scaled-up” school environment because the more students attending, the more likely teachers can prepare the same content for lessons in several periods instead of having to segment their instruction, he said. Larger middle schools also provide the chance to create more elective classes so that students can have a greater opportunity to experience different interests, he said.
“I’ve seen that the sixth-grade configuration at middle school helps integrate students into the culture and the expectations, but also they have a life-line at the school site which is their core teacher,” Betando said. “But it’s hard to express that to anybody who hasn’t experienced both.”
The Parents For Positive Change recall campaign has caused much stress among board members and district staff and has been “a distraction,” Betando said. Several board members including trustees Benevento and Porter Jensen said they have received numerous emails on a daily basis from recall organizer Rob Guynn to the point they called “harassment.”
Porter Jensen filed papers with the Santa Clara County Superior Court in October, accusing Guynn and his wife, Monica Guynn, of inundating her with hundreds of emails concerning the recall. She also claimed Rob Guynn made a “disturbing” phone call to her. The court granted her a temporary restraining order against Guynn. The situation caused her to fear attending school board meetings, resulting in her Oct. 28 resignation from the board.
Rob Guynn did not respond to emails asking for a response to Porter Jensen’s allegations. He is no longer involved with Parents For Positive Change, Benevides said.
