 |
|
|
|
|
Speak Out
Willow Glen High is no 'academic landfill'
As a teacher at Willow Glen High School and a member of the Willow Glen community, I feel compelled to respond to highly inaccurate and offensive comments made by Carol Myers and Kathy Stark at the San Jose Unified School District Board Meeting on Dec. 14.
These remarks about Willow Glen High School were not only inaccurate in their depiction of WGHS, but also demeaned the efforts and accomplishments of our faculty, administration and student body.
In calling for the allocation of more desegregation funds to WGHS, trustee Carol Myers said that Willow Glen merely wants, "a little bit of music, a little bit of theater, a little bit of dance and a little bit of the performing arts" for the high school. Myers was obviously comparing the WGHS arts programs to that of Lincoln in her quest for more desegregation moneys.
Her Lincoln-envy aside, Myers' portrayal of WGHS as an arts wasteland, utterly devoid of music, theater and other arts is both bizarre and grossly inaccurate. Myers is curiously unaware of WGHS' award-winning choir program, led by Kathryn Donovan. Myers is apparently ignorant of WGHS students' recent epic production of the play, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as directed by teacher Sarah Miller.
Myers is strangely ignorant of the highly popular arts classes taught by Jef Wind and Eric Stachnick. Is Myers, the board trustee for Willow Glen, merely unaware about the growing high school arts program in the very community that she purports to represent? Or is she simply indifferent to the tireless efforts of principal Pat Day, the aforementioned WGHS arts teachers and countless students to build an arts program from scratch?
True, at this moment WGHS arts cannot rival that of Lincoln, a justly acclaimed program that was over a decade in the making. Yet Myers should not disparage Willow Glen's fledgling arts program with contemptuous remarks made out of either embarrassing ignorance or deliberate disdain.
Even more galling was Stark's snide description of WGHS as the "Safety Net Magnet" of the district, implying to the board that our high school is an academic landfill for the low-achieving students of San Jose Unified, and that the district owes Willow Glen some sort of academic Superfund cleanup.
Just because WGHS provides academic assistance programs to struggling students does not make our school the abject academic Molokai described by Stark.
While WGHS proudly and unapologetically extends a helping hand to academically needy students, it also provides more AP and honors classes than any other high school in the district. Furthermore, the WGHS test scores for all student groups rose sharply last year.
Perhaps the unspoken resentment of Stark and her fellow critics is that the administration and faculty of WGHS are dedicated to the proposition that academic achievement is not a zero-sum game, that the academic improvement and uplift of one group need not come at the expense of another.
Jim Cullison
Almaden Road
|
|
|
|
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
