Profile in courage: Explosive growth model
Newly unified Lammersville USD accommodates rapid rise in enrollment
By:
Kristi Garrett
How do you build a thriving unified school district on miles of rural farmland?
It’s not easy, as the governance team of the Lammersville Unified School District in San Joaquin County will attest.
The district is located in Mountain House at the base of the Altamont Pass, just northwest of Tracy. The ambitious master-planned community sprang up from almost nothing—what remained of a tiny agricultural settlement—just a decade ago, with the vision of becoming home to more than 40,000 residents within commuting distance of the San Francisco Bay area. The economic downturn tempered its progress a bit, but the town now has about 10,000 residents and continues to grow.
From one original school of 300 students, the district suddenly faced the need to accommodate hundreds of new students each year. The current enrollment of more than 2,000 students represents a growth rate of 625 percent in eight years, requiring three new K-8 schools so far, with another in the pipeline.
“We have had amazing changes in the last four years,” says Superintendent Dale Hansen.
In coping with its growth, the district found an innovative way to plan for the future of, not just the school district, but the entire community.
Seeing the need for a high school in Mountain House—secondary students now must travel about 10 miles to Tracy—the board of the elementary school district disbanded and on July 1, 2011, a newly elected unified board took its place. The change allowed the district to apply for state funding for construction of Mountain House High School, scheduled to begin this summer.
“I found that it’s pretty unique for unification to happen without a high school,” says Hansen. “In working with the California Department of Education, the Office of Public School Construction and the different state agencies, we are setting the ground rules for this in the future. They haven’t had a unification of this nature in almost 20 years.”
While a couple of the new board members had served on the elementary board, three had never held elected office before. The area is also very diverse, with residents speaking any of 25 languages, says board President Matthew Balzarini.
“It’s been such a transition,” he says, taking the small, rural elementary district and transforming it into a unified district with some of the highest scores in the county.
The challenge now facing the Lammersville Unified board is to create a community from a sea of new homes. Besides the neighborhood schools, with a few parks sprinkled in, Mountain House still has no commercial or retail services to speak of.
“The problem is, there are no after-school activities here as there is no recreation department,” says Balzarini. “It’s a challenge for us, with our budget, to make sure we have something to offer. We’re constantly wracking our brains.”
“Right now it’s basically 3,500 homes, growing up to 12,000, without a sense of community,” laments Hansen. “I think the high school is going to be our sense of community.”
The planned high school will have a theater and two gymnasiums that can be used for community events. And a joint venture with the local community college extension will allow high school students to take advanced classes.
Other elementary districts isolated from a high school may want to consider unification, Hansen advises, saying, “I don’t know how many planned communities there are in California, but most of them are just a lot of homes with a few elementary schools.”
While growing so quickly is definitely challenging, Hansen says, it’s a definite advantage to build new technologies into the blueprints instead of having to retrofit older facilities.
“The last elementary we opened we set up a model classroom with interactive boards, dock cameras, all the tools for our teachers to deliver the curriculum,” he says. “It’s really nice to be able to do that.”
But then, that’s what you might expect in a community where the homes come standard with electric car charging ports.
The district is also one of the few statewide that has an active Facebook page, an idea Balzarini says he got at CSBA’s Annual Education Conference in San Diego last December. After getting community input and carefully weighing the pros and cons, the district’s social media page went live in January.
“What Facebook allows us to do is push out information,” Hansen says. “It will alert you that the school district is sending out a site bulletin or a survey.
“We think it’s very safe and it’s what our community is demanding. They’re very tech-oriented. We believe we can reach more community members and parents, and even future parents that way.”