Morgan Hill high school grad rates surpass state, county averages
Published in the February 18-March 3, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Bob Benevento
Bob Benevento
As taxpayers, we all want to know how our money for public education is being spent. Accountability is key to effective local government. So let’s talk about the dollars and cents spent in the Morgan Hill Unified School District and how that funding impacts the quality of our young people’s learning in classrooms.
When Measure G, the $198 million bond measure, was passed in November 2012 with 65.74 percent of voters favoring it, we all suddenly became very interested in how all that money was going to be spent.
The bond was passed to enable the Morgan Hill Unified School District to finance technology and facility improvements for a district where the average age of the school facilities is 40 years old. In February 2013, the first series of bond sales, known as Series A, was released to the tune of $55 million. Of this money, more than $33.5 million will be spent on the much needed areas of roofing, HVAC, utility upgrades, safety and code upgrades such as fencing, fire alarms and restrooms, along with the planning associated and all that entails. Another $21.5 million will be spent on technology construction, including all the hardware and cabling that comes with building a first-class network for our students.
Money and academic learning being linked as they are, one thing which we should all be aware is that California remains near the bottom of the country when it comes to per student spending for education. When Proposition 30 was passed in 2012, it was a stop-gap measure to prevent further erosion of dollars for schools. It provided some stability for education funding that was badly needed in a poorly managed environment. Under the Proposition 30 scenario, it will take the state until about the year 2020 to get back to levels we were at in 2007. Proposition 30 expires in fiscal year 2018/2019. And while the economy and job market here in the Bay Area might be booming, it can’t be said for the rest of the state. So we should be careful not to confuse local euphoria with the state of the state. While things are looking good, we’re not home free by a long shot.
The funding mechanism Gov. Jerry Brown rolled out in late 2013 is called the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). It gives local districts a lot of latitude in where and how to best spend education dollars. You might have read about the Local Control Accountability Plan, or LCAP, that was rolled out in Morgan Hill in 2014. This state-required plan is a roadmap prepared by the school district with input received from all factions of the local community. Part of a three-year process, the district is now working on its 2015 LCAP and will be meeting with an even more expanded community, including input from students. Now that the State Department of Education and the Santa Clara County Office of Education have had a year’s worth of experience in evaluating district plans and expectations, local districts like Morgan Hill Unified will be submitting even further refined LCAPs focused on our students and their needs. The LCAP process is extensive, time consuming and sometimes frustrating because the district still has a limited amount of dollars with which to work. And the demands far exceed our means.
One of the challenges facing the district is how to best use funds to optimize our facilities. When evaluating improvements and modernization for Britton Middle School, the district found that the structure presented challenges that were originally unforeseen. So district administrators took the message to the community in a series of public hearings and determined it would be more cost effective to build a new facility on the same campus than to try to improve upon the old one. Preliminary plans are on the drawing board. Martin Murphy Middle School faces a different challenge. Having gone through a thoughtful modernization, the campus is now under-utilized. Meanwhile, the Los Paseos Elementary School just next door is over capacity. So the district is considering options regarding restructuring the grade levels at both schools with input from the community as well as administrators and teachers.
Our district’s three high schools, Live Oak, Sobrato and Central, continue to bring pride to the community. The modernization of the former Burnett Elementary School, now named The Loritta Bonfante Johnson Education Center, gives the students of Central High School a campus of which they can truly be proud. Opened in the fall of 2013, it provides many of the technological tools the students need to succeed in learning.
Live Oak and Sobrato both continue to exceed expectations when compared to Santa Clara County and the state. For the class and cohort of 2013, Live Oak graduated 97.66 percent of all students, while Sobrato graduated 95.92 percent of all students. The MHUSD average was 93.19 percent. Santa Clara County recorded an 82.9 percent graduation rate, while the state graduation rate was 80.44 percent. Equally distinctive was the dropout rate. While Live Oak and Sobrato saw dropout rates of 1.6 percent and 2.2 percent respectively, the district average was 3.4 percent. The Santa Clara County dropout average was 11.1 percent and the state average was 11.4 percent.
For more information on how your child’s school is doing, visit the school district’s website at www.mhusd.org. There you can look up the School Accountability Report Card for any MHUSD school.
Bob Benevento is president of the MHUSD board of trustees. He wrote this for Morgan Hill Life.
