Schools

What Happened To Ygnacio Valley High School?: The Decline

This is the second of a three-part series on what has transpired at Ygnacio Valley High School in the more than 50 years since it opened.

The decline of Ygnacio Valley High School didn’t happen overnight.

It was slow downhill slide with many factors, some within the school and some outside the campus boundaries.

But fall it has.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Ygnacio Valley was considered by many to be the best high school in Central Contra Costa County.

Its graduation rate is estimated by former students and teachers to have been around 98 percent in its glory years.

That has changed dramatically.

The graduation rate in now 81 percent. The dropout rate is 17 percent, the highest in the Mt. Diablo Unified School District.

The Concord school’s API score sits at 673, almost 130 points below the state’s goal of 800 for California schools.

The school now has 1,161 students. That’s only slightly larger than some of the 1,000-student senior classes the school had in the early 1970s.

Ygnacio Valley isn’t the only high school in the state to see this type of decline.

“There are pockets throughout California where this is happening,” said Joseph Ovick, Contra Costa County’s superintendent of schools.

So, the question needs to be asked. What happened to Ygnacio Valley High School?

New school opens

Perhaps the most dramatic change to hit Ygnacio Valley was the arrival in 1974 of Northgate High School.

When it opened, Northgate snared about half the student body from its Concord counterpart. More important, however, is who it took away.

The Walnut Creek school is situated three miles south of Ygnacio Valley High, against the hillsides of Shell Ridge. However, when YVHS’ new attendance boundaries were drawn, the southern border followed the Walnut Creek city limits along the Contra Costa Canal. Part of that boundary is actually the property line of Ygnacio Valley.

Students from The Woodlands housing tract and other upper-income neighborhoods in that sector of Walnut Creek were not sent to Ygnacio Valley, even though they lived closer to that school than they did to Northgate.

“Northgate took away the more affluent of the Ygnacio Valley kids,” said Carol Fidler-Hasse, a counselor at YVHS in the mid-1980s who lives in the Northgate attendance area. “It brought the higher socio-economic level to Northgate.”

Pleasant Hill High School closed a few years after that, bringing students from the Poet’s Corner region of that city to the YVHS campus.

“It was difficult for them initially,” said Bruce Smith, an arts teacher at Ygnacio Valley from 1965 to 1999. “Many of the parents weren’t happy that their school had closed.”

On top of that, De La Salle High School grew in prominence. In the early 1970s, the Catholic high school that sits next to Ygnacio Valley wasn’t highly regarded, former students say. That changed when its sports programs became successful.

“The football team put De La Salle on the map,” recalled Steve Brown, a 1972 Ygnacio Valley High graduate.

That provided higher-income Ygnacio Valley High families in the Peppertree, Ygnacio Wood and other neighborhoods with a nearby alternative.

Demographic shift

The emergence of Northgate and De La Salle started a demographic change that slowly altered the student make-up of Ygnacio Valley High.

Smith said he first noticed the shift in the early 1980s when families from war-torn Afghanistan moved into Concord. Later that decade, an influx of families from Latin America arrived.

Many of these families came to the United States with little money and little education. More importantly, they arrived speaking little or no English.

Ovick noted a language barrier is a high hurdle to overcome in education. It doesn’t matter what the language or situation is. A Northgate High student attending school in Paris would have a difficult time with lessons if he or she didn’t speak French.

Ovick said it can take three to four generations for families with language barriers to fully overcome that obstacle. He said it wouldn’t be as difficult if foreign-born students came to the U.S. in kindergarten. However, many arrive here as they approach their teenage years.

The numbers today tell the story.

In the 2011-2012 school year, 63 percent of Ygnacio Valley High students were listed as Hispanic or Latino. Another 18 percent were categorized as white while 6 percent were listed as Asian.

At Northgate High, 67 percent of the students are white and 15 percent are Asian. Eight percent are listed as Hispanic or Latino.

The 2010 Census Bureau report shows stark differences from Ygnacio Valley High’s two zip codes -- 94518 and 94521 --  compared to Northgate High’s 94598.

The median annual income for the 94518 zip is $71,770. For 94521, it’s $79,040. Over in the 94598 area, it’s $117,229. 

On the educational level, 70 percent of 94598 adults have some sort of college degree. It’s 50 percent in 94518 and 47 percent in 94521.

The numbers for parents of Ygnacio Valley High students are more of a contrast. The state department of education reports that 27 percent of YVHS parents did not graduate from high school. Another 28 percent have only a high school diploma.

In addition, 69 percent of YVHS students are participants in the free or reduced-priced lunch program.

“It’s not the staff. It’s not the school. It’s the demographics. It’s socio-economics,” said Fiddler-Hasse.

Ygnacio Valley High School principal Sue Brothers said these language and economic barriers are the main reasons for her school’s high dropout rate.

“High school can be overwhelming to kids,” she said. “They come in with low academic skills and don’t see any advantages to graduating.”

Financial woes

Making that job more difficult for Brothers and other educators is the financial constraints schools have been placed under the past three decades.

Proposition 13 was approved in 1978. It cut property tax rates by 57 percent across the state. Property taxes were the chief revenue source for schools then. Their budgets were slashed when the initiative took effect in 1979.

“It was hard on everybody’s budget. It affected everybody,” said Smith.

Smith said teachers were laid off in the years after Prop. 13 and his classes grew from 23 to 28 and then to 32 students.

Families from upper income areas solved part of the problem by approving local parcel taxes or simply writing checks to their schools. Places like Ygnacio Valley High don’t get that kind of support.

“Proposition 13 screwed all the schools, but it had a bigger effect on schools like Ygnacio Valley,” said Fidler-Hasse.

In 1988, Proposition 98 was approved, guaranteeing minimum revenues for schools. However, the state budget crisis of the past decade has eaten into that funding.

Brown, who coached at Bishop O’Dowd High from 1986 to 2010, said he noticed the decline as he visited campuses with his cross country teams.

“I’ve seen the deterioration with my own eyes,” he said. “It’s sad. They don’t have the money to do simple maintenance.”

Brothers said Ygnacio Valley High has classrooms with as many as 37 students because there aren’t enough teachers. There’s no money for field trips, new technology or adequate sports programs.

“Right now, we don’t have enough to cover the basics,” she said. “We’re trying not to spend money on things that aren’t mission critical.”

Wutzke departure

As the financial and demographic changes hit Ygnacio Valley, the school also lost its leader.

Ernie Wutzke, who was principal at YVHS at its founding in 1962, left his position in 1985. He spent one year in the Contra Costa County Superintendent of Schools office before retiring.

Fidler-Hasse remembers arriving as a counselor at the school the year after Wutzke left.

“The staff was in mourning,” she said. “They were in culture shock.”

Wutzke, who died in April at the age of 86, was credited with hiring a top-notch teaching staff and setting high standards while keeping an upbeat atmosphere on campus.

Smith said future principals put forth an effort, but they simply couldn’t match what Wutzke had done.

“Ernie was a tough act to follow,” Smith said.

Smith retired in 1999, still enjoying his students and his profession but worn out from riding the downhill slide at Ygnacio Valley.

“I was glad to get out of there,” he said.

This past September, Brothers arrived as principal, determined to change the course. She has instituted new programs, designed specifically to help Ygnacio Valley High’s current students succeed.

“Our job is to make sure demographics isn’t destiny,” she said.

Part One: What Happened to Ygnacio Valley High?: The Glory Years
Part Three: What Happened To Ygnacio Valley High?: The Programs Today


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