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