Pleasant Valley is a mostly agricultural, though quickly urbanizing, community, located roughly one hour’s drive north of Los Angeles. Its climate is mostly coastal overcast, perfect for growing strawberries and discontent in teachers who crave sunlight. It is relatively uncrowded, at least by Los Angeles measurement.
Chumash High School is one of five main campuses of the Pleasant Valley Union High School District, which serves over twelve thousand students. The other four campuses are Pleasant Valley, Mission Oaks, Bard, and Academy. There is also a sixth, a continuation school, Gateway, to which many students who cannot seem to succeed at the main campuses are sent.
It’s been my experience--at two of the campuses, PeeVee (read: Pleasant Valley) and Chumash--that each school feels that it is the ugly step-daughter of the district, perpetually and alternately put upon and ignored. All schools in the district feel this way, save possibly Academy, the most anglo of the campuses, and to where (as they used to say about the elephants that go to the mountain to die) the burned-out go to retire. Quietly. Easily.
Pleasant Valley High had felt this ugly step-daughter complex because it was the oldest campus, run-down, in ill repair, and in the flight path of the local airport. But now it is being torn down (due to the airport) and replaced with a "state of the art" school across town. M.O. had felt the syndrome because it had been the most recently built campus, constructed in the early seventies; so after the early glow of the spotlight, it had been ignored as other, more pressing, problems were addressed. But it has received a huge influx of technology money. Bard had felt the complex because of its location--out in the agricultural fields of north Pleasant Valley. But a superintendent who ruled the roost during the eighties had a son who attended Bard, so--surprise--it was the first campus to receive the technology funds. Chumash still is with out tech-funds, continues to watch its thirty year-old site decay, and feels like the black sheep.
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In the real district, since the writing of this over a decade ago, a new school has been constructed (Pacifica), to which many of the English teachers with whom I served at Huen-- er Chumash had transferred in the years following my exit from the classroom.
As I mentioned in the commentary for "Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?" our son Kyle will not be attending "Chumash" our neighborhood school and our (both our) alma mater. It was a tough decision... both of us having been (or in Lisa's case still is) teachers, we know that when you take a quality student and transfer him to a different school, you're not making that local school better. We wrestled for that for over a year. But we felt that the program (IB) at Rio Mesa was far more advantageous for a kid like Kyle.
Now for Jack, who knows...
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