“I’m optimistic in the sense that now we have a plan and we’re going to be implementing the plan,” said Gomez. “We have challenges. As you know part of the challenge is how to do more with less. Our school district and other district’s funding keeps going down instead of up. We’re trying to be smart and constantly looking at ways to maximize our funding. It’s a tough world out there right now, but it’s a challenge being a leader and our administrators are ready for the challenge.”Dr. Gomez says he’s little perplexed at why some students aren’t motivated to do better. “It’s not blaming the student,” he said. “I don’t know hot to get them motivated. That’s another challenge we have, how do we get students motivated to buy into these tests.”He notes that 40 percent of the students are ready to go on to the University of California system, which is fairly high for a school with the demographics Santa Paula High has. “We’re really proud of that,” he added. “We have a rigorous curriculum. What we need to find out is how do we get our students to want to try and do better?”Gomez says that the message to parents from the board, the administration and the staff is that they need all the help they can get. “It’s critical that the parents reinforce that their children need to do their best always, in school and especially in taking their tests,” Gomez said. “I don’t want to blame the parents, but they can surely help. The board and the staff are very serious about improving student achievement and we’re making our best efforts to do this and we have very high hopes that we will significantly improve student achievement in the next few years.”
SPUHS District superintendent asks for help from parents
August 25, 2004
Santa Paula High School
The release of state test results for the Santa Paula High School District show little or no improvement over last year and the superintendent says they need support from parents.
By Brian D. WilsonSanta Paula TimesThe release of state test results for the Santa Paula High School District show little or no improvement over last year and the superintendent says they need support from parents.District Superintendent Dr. David Gomez says the test results were somewhat discouraging. “We did not make any improvements from the previous year,” Gomez said. “We were pretty flat. We did okay in some areas but our API (Academic Performance Index) actually went down one. We were hoping to go up about 10 points.”Dr. Gomez says they’re trying to be proactive, coming up with action plans to improve achievement. “We’ve already started to implement it but the main implementation year is this coming year, 2004-05,” he noted. He listed among the changes, an increase in the school day of one hour, they’ve created more classes that tie into admission requirements for the University of California and they’ve hired some new teachers. In addition, they’ve spent about $290,000 for new textbooks.
