Students line up every morning at 8:15 a.m. outside the classrooms and pledge allegiance to the stars and stripes. “I pledge allegiance to the flag …” chanted a group of identically dressed children in matching blue polo shirts.
They are students from Hollister Prep School, which began its inaugural semester in August as part of Gilroy-based Navigator Schools. Its sister school is Gilroy Prep – the first school established by the parent corporation. The prep school, on the west side of Hollister, shares classroom space with R.O. Hardin Elementary School.
The charter school has a home here and in other districts because California voters approved Prop. 39 in the 2012 election – which has a requirement for local school districts to allow access to facilities for charter schools that are “reasonably equivalent” to other classrooms. Hollister Prep pays the school district between $10,000 and $15,000 per year to use the space.
“The working relationship we’ve had with the Hollister School District has been unparalleled,” said James Dent, founder of Navigator Schools and principal of Hollister Prep.
He said local school leaders have welcomed the efforts of the new charter.
“We, the district, believed in the mission,” said Gary McIntire, superintendent for the Hollister School District, in a phone interview last week.
The charter petitions required for the school were submitted to the board last summer, he said. By April of this past spring, the school district had approved the charter. Upon receiving the Prop. 39 request for facilities, the school district offered space next to R.O. Hardin.
“It’s followed a very linear trajectory,” McIntire said.
Hollister Prep’s model is “very positive” and is closely aligned with the goals of the Hollister district, he said.
The school employs relatively new teaching strategies to keep young people engaged in the process, said Samantha Hanlon, vice principal at the school.
“There are lots of routines and systems in place,” she said.
Routine and technology come together to form a unique learning environment at the school.
Typically, a teacher conveys the lesson to the students, and then does an assessment of each child to decide if the child is where he or she needs to be with academics, she said. Additionally, every child fully participates in each lesson, using singing, chants and hand signals to react to the instructor’s lessons.
It is known as the “full inclusion” model of teaching, Hanlon said. The idea is that every student participates in the lesson at the same time.
Unlike traditional public schools, students with special needs are not separated from other students at the prep school – they are included in the lessons and have paraprofessional teachers who offer specialized services for each student. Part of the interaction also includes “whole-brain” teaching, which is to engage students in not just the correct answer, but why the answer is correct.
Students have to “prove or disprove why an answer is correct,” Hanlon said.
Some of the curriculum stems from a new set of education standards – adopted nationally by the Department of Education – called Common Core. Many states, including California, have adopted the Common Core standards. California’s standards include an emphasis on “results” instead of means and give teachers more room to experiment with methods to help students understand the curriculum – instead of just absorbing information.
In 2013, Gilroy Prep performed well on the Academic Performance Index that gauges student achievement among all demographics, including white and Hispanic students, compared with other schools in the area that saw much lower performance achievement among socio-economically disadvantaged and Hispanic students, according to state statistics. Because Hollister Prep started in August, comparable figures are not available at this time of its academic metrics.
Dent said Hollister Prep’s leaders want to “change the world” in how students achieve in school.
“What we’re doing is creating six-week units based on the Common Core standards,” he said. “Our coaches will even go into other schools and coach teachers if the teachers request that.”
R.O. Hardin is one of the schools using coaches from Navigator Schools.
“In the long term, Navigator Schools will have a training division that all they’re trying to do is help bring best practices into schools and help teachers implement those as quickly as they can for the benefit, of course, of kids who live in California,” he said.
Dent noted that Navigator Schools is in the process of applying to start a charter school in Morgan Hill. The Morgan Hill district denied the petition on Oct. 17, and the petitioner is appealing to the Santa Clara County board of education to get it approved. Petitioners must gather at least 180 resident signatures to force the county to make facilities available to the school.
He said there are many parents in the Hollister area, especially in low-income neighborhoods, who desired better education opportunities for their children. As a result, the Hollister school held a lottery.
“A lot of parents signed up to enroll their children,” Dent said.
Now more than 180 children attend the charter school, after 400 intent-to-enroll forms were submitted by interested parents in March, Dent said.
McIntire praised the new school and its employees for being “very generous” – and providing computer equipment and staff to the elementary school. He said he expects the charter and Prop. 39 facility request will be renewed for next school year.
“It seems to me that we are very much going down a path where (Hollister Prep) is fulfilling all the commitments they said they would,” he said.
