OUSD Board Votes for Exclusive High School

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

So the poem goes. Or in education parlance, give me your sub-groups, your minorities, your socioeconomically disadvantaged.  This was the spirit of Orcutt Academy at its conception; if you believed and had the will, you were welcome.  That’s been the narrative for the past five years—largely a true one—until now. The Orcutt school board’s recent decision to exclude outlying communities from its high school has demonstrated the board’s disregard for those who put their faith in OAHS, believed in its promise, and built it into the success we see today.   

Orcutt Union School District is a K-8 district.  They wanted a high school of their own, but the challenges of building a high school exclusively for Orcutt residents were nearly insurmountable.  A solution presented itself in the form of a dependent charter high school.  Dependent, because OUSD wanted to control it; charter, because they needed students from beyond the Orcutt boundary to attend it.  But it was a risk.  It required the bravery and bold faith of a small group of visionaries who would walk away from St. Joe’s, Righetti, Santa Maria, and other local high schools and take a chance on OAHS.  The Orcutt community alone did not have so many brave souls. Thankfully, since anyone in California could attend, enrollment was achieved by relying on the courage of families from Santa Maria, Guadalupe, Los Alamos, Lompoc, and Vandenberg.  Like America itself, the bond that held OAHS together was ideology, not race, religion, or region.  And it flourished.  In fact, it did so well, that those who once lacked conviction were given the courage to send their kids to OAHS based on its growing reputation and continued success.  Whereas in the beginning filling seats was difficult, today it is necessary to hold a lottery for enrollment.  Or, rather, it was until the school board decided to abandon those outlying communities—those sub-groups—who not only gave the school its diversity and fulfilled its promise, but who helped to build it in the first place.  Once they were used for their purpose, they were discarded.  They will have to return to yearning to be free because four board members decided OAHS is no longer for them.

The Orcutt Academy’s mission statement includes the promotion of “intercultural understanding” and its Single School Plan reminds us that “because the charter accommodates students who live outside of the Orcutt community, the school enjoys a greater ethnic diversity than that of the community of Orcutt.”  While the school may enjoy its ethnic diversity, not all board members do.  As one of them said publicly at the last board meeting, “People live in a community to either have diversity or to not have diversity, that’s why they live there.”  Sadly, in a modern example of taxation without representation, the communities who are affected by this decision have no recourse; they don’t vote in Orcutt elections.  The wall of the board room where this vote took place announces that in Orcutt “kids come first.”  If some members of the board would rather protect votes than kids, then I suggest they revise that statement.  In the board room, maybe votes come first, but in the classroom, kids still do.  As teachers at Orcutt Academy, it is our responsibility to protect our kids and our school, and that means representing the communities from which they come, and representing those who have no voice.  It means putting our kids first.  All of our kids.

Orcutt Academy High School Teachers:  Scott Gelotti, Vickie Gill, Ricardo Gabaldon , Patti Garcia, Jenny Hubbard, and Jan Brown.