HSD presents a daunting logistical picture
HSD presents a daunting logistical picture
It’s the biggest employer in San Benito County, serving more customers than any other single local institution on a given day. It operates with an annual budget of $51 million. It’s brightly painted vehicles are visible throughout town every day.
It is the Hollister School District.
And looking at the district by the numbers presents a glimpse at the staggering logistical task that public education – even in a small community – presents.
The district’s fleet of 10 buses, operated under contract with Tiffany Motors Co. of Hollister, each covered some 100,000 miles last year. That’s a million miles to and from school.
The district is the county’s largest restaurant operation, serving an average of 3,023 student lunches and 850 student breakfasts per day.
The Hollister School District counts 606 employees and 6,009 students served. The overwhelming majority of its employees, well over 90 percent, reside in San Benito County, according to district Superintendent Ron Crates.
Even so, Hollister School District is miniscule compared to California’s giants. Los Angeles Unified School District alone serves 727,000 students, making it second in size only to New York City’s district.
Crates, a trim silver-haired man who favors natty suits, arrived at the district a little more than a year ago with a lifetime’s experience in public education.
Since arriving, Crates has encountered many challenges, but the largest may be unexpected for many.
“The biggest challenge to us is having housing that is affordable for teachers,” Crates said. “The district faces the same issues as this community and without adequate housing, we can’t attract teachers. In order to backfill the people that are retiring from the district, people need to be able to afford to live here.”
When Crates first arrived from a district on the San Francisco Peninsula, the district didn’t have a business manager and the financials were not in good shape, but he did a lot of work on the budget and has since managed to turn things around, he said.
“It didn’t help that shortly before I arrived the district dismissed more than 80 teachers so morale was pretty low,” Crates said. “That, added to the fact that we needed to get our fiscal house in order, was a pretty major challenge.”
Still, one might suspect that finding creative ways to manage $51 million every year and keep things in the black would also rank up there as the most difficult parts of the job.
Crates lauds what he describes as a supportive staff and an exceptional board of trustees.
There are other challenges to operating a district the size of Hollister’s.
“This is a heterogeneous population both economically and language-wise which is not unique,” Crates said, “But the major thing we need to make sure of is that we establish a culture of kids that graduate from high school and go on to college.”
With 6,009 students, classroom sizes are still a little on the large size at most of the schools, but Crates said the district has spent $800,000 to reduce class sizes and it is still working to make things better.
There are 2,040 English-language learners and 1,799 migrant-ed students within the Hollister School District and an additional 772 special education students.
“I think we’re also starting to do more significant interventions for middle school kids and those interventions are aimed to help kids achieve success later in school,” Crates said.
Patrick O’Donnell can be reached at po*******@pi**********.com.
