Hollister Prep School, which will be using classroom space on the R.O. Hardin campus in the fall, selected its first students Saturday with a lottery for the 180 available slots.
Sharon Waller, co-founder and principal of Gilroy Prep School, said school officials received nearly 400 intent-to-enroll forms before the deadline to accept them in March. The only requirement for families who were interested in having their children enrolled in the new charter school is that they must be a resident of California. But Waller said they recruited families from schools on the west side of Hollister, such as R.O. Hardin and Calaveras, because their charter is to improve performance of students in groups that often underperform, such as English language learners or low-income students.
“A great percentage of students from R.O. Hardin want to enroll,” Waller said. “We have had plenty of interest in the community for the school.”
Waller, who works closely with co-founder James Dent, who will be the principal of Hollister Prep School in the fall, said the lottery is bittersweet for those families who don’t receive a spot.
“In Gilroy we had our lottery and we had 60 kindergarten spots, and we had almost 200 people who were interested,” Waller said.
Of those slots, 35 of them were retained for students who already have an older sibling enrolled at the charter school, so they had spots for about 25 of those 200 students.
In Hollister on the day of the lottery, school officials opened 55 slots for second-grade students and only 40 slots for first-grade and kindergarten students. The school officials said they wanted to ensure they had enough slots for siblings and so that after they test students, they can place them in the proper grade. Once they complete the testing, they will move onto the waiting list to fill the remaining slots.
“The mission of our organization is to try as much as possible to provide high-quality education to students who typically don’t get it,” Waller said. “Our primary objective is to close the achievement gap.”
Hollister School District Superintendent Gary McIntire said after the school board approved the charter school, his staff reviewed available spaces.
“As required under the (state) law, we made an offer to them and they have until the end of April to let us know if they accepted it – that would place the program on the campus of R.O. Hardin,” McIntire said the week before the lottery took place.
Waller said the charter staff members had verbally accepted the offer.
McIntire said because the charter school had recruited families from R.O. Hardin and Calaveras school, he did not believe there would be a large net gain in additional students on the Line Street campus despite Hollister Prep’s enrollment of 180 students.
McIntire said his staff members predicted that five to six elementary school teachers would be displaced by the lower enrollment, as six classes of students move from HSD to the charter school, but his request to send out layoff notices was denied by the school board in March.
McIntire and Waller said teachers from the Hollister School District, including some from schools other than R.O. Hardin, have visited Gilroy Prep School to learn more about their teaching methods.
“I’ve been very impressed with the willingness of the charter school and James Dent in particular has been really good about working with the staff,” McIntire said. “They are sharing resources and things. It has been working as a learning lab for best practices and they’ve been doing that.”
Waller said the collaboration with Jananne Gaver, the principal at R.O. Hardin, has been working well.
“She invited us onto campus and she wants students to have other opportunities,” Waller said, of Gaver. “We are the envy of a lot of people because we have such a great support network.”
