San Benito High School officials’ use of that curious incentive – to cut students’ detention hours if their parents attended a facilities renovation forum – was pulled from a broader playbook. That playbook’s theme is this: Do whatever it takes to get the necessary number of votes to OK a $39 million school bond.
As school officials know, there is no logical connection between the release of students’ detention hours and parents listening to a school-bond presentation. In principle, there is no reason why the school should relinquish ill-behaved students’ punishment because parents attended a completely non-germane forum about a $71.2 million master plan project – $39 million of which would come from a ballot bond and an astounding $16.9 million of which could go toward upgrades to athletic facilities.
School officials were simply trying to make it appear as though they wanted the entire community involved by spiking the forum’s turnstile figure. At the forum and afterward as well, school leaders proudly boasted of attendance topping 100 people – despite the fact that they barely promoted it to the wider public because, of course, that could result in losing control of the message.
Besides, the attendance number is meaningless. It doesn’t represent broader community involvement if parents show up to relinquish detention time. It merely represents the number of people the district could bribe into attending. In reality, those visitors were pawns. The plan is written. Now expansion supporters at the district just need the votes – that’s where the parents come in – to make it official.
By all indications, district officials behind the bond proposal, from the start, have carefully plotted outreach efforts and how those steps might be perceived, even during initial outreach meetings before the district officially and quietly decided to go with a renovation over a second campus. About a year and a half ago, district representatives held a meeting at the Community Foundation for San Benito County with about 10 people from local nonprofits and businesses, a group that ultimately expressed unanimous support for a second campus over expansion. Even such a unified message – from many of the most influential people in San Benito County – didn’t matter. So why would the district’s expansion supporters listen to a crowd of parents whose only motivation for attending the forum was getting their kids out of trouble?
It’s a humiliating joke. It’s humiliating for school officials because the community input process has become a mockery and everyone outside of the San Benito High School bubble is the butt of the joke. It’s humiliating for the community as a whole because it’s yet another example of one group driving home a narrowly supported agenda while manipulating the rest of us to pick up the eye-popping tab and accept a seriously flawed direction for this county’s academic future.
There are many unanswered questions that the district appears uninterested in addressing before steamrolling ahead onto the 2014 ballot. Most important, what level of urgency actually exists to do significant renovations, expand or build a second campus? Although there certainly is a short-term need to make improvements to the current campus – the district has needed to address the temporary classroom structures for years – there is little evidence to support any sort of immediate need to build for serious growth. On the contrary, San Benito High School enrollment peaked in 2005 at 2,990 and has dropped to around 2,800 this year. It signals more of a need to take a breather on the planning process and allow for some clarity to develop as it pertains to future growth trends rather than play a guessing game.
The outreach process and the plan itself: They are both reflections of the San Benito High School community’s insulated nature. They are also signs of severely mixed priorities within the high school culture.
A prime example of those mixed priorities is the price tag for new athletic facilities. Even in a county where academics have taken a back seat to sports, it is alarming that the master plan proposal includes spending $16.9 million on new baseball fields, new softball fields, a new aquatic center, and an athletic plaza and field house. That amounts to 24 percent of the entire master plan and 31 percent of the “educational transformation” projects laid out in the document.
Compare that with the total amount designated for new classroom buildings – $12.54 million – and it becomes clear that those outside the high school’s seemingly impenetrable bubble must stand up against this absurdity, or else this county is destined to continue failing academically and economically for decades to come.
