IT'S ALL ABOUT COMMUNITY Bringing Heritage High School to the Brentwood Area
	MARCH 2005

by Don Huntington
Photos by Russell Byrne

Andy Parsons is a California native, born in Carmel, and educated at Cal State Hayward and St. Mary’s College. He has a wife and two daughters; one of them, Kelsey, is a sixth-grader at Edna Hill. In a couple years she will be a student in Andy’s own school, because her dad is the first the principal at the new Heritage High School on Balfour Road between the Highway 4 Bypass and Deer Valley Road.

In 2001 Brentwood voters, by a wide margin, approved a $40 million bond to build Heritage as the city’s third high school. Andy became principal two years later — at about the same time that the bulldozers and earthmovers began moving towards the site. Andy says that he is looking forward with keen anticipation to the great opportunity that was given to him of opening a new school.

Working for Unity
The local educational organization is confusing to some people because the Liberty Union High School District, which has oversight of the three high schools, is different than the Brentwood School District, which administers the K-8 program. The high school district includes 350 square miles, covering Discovery Bay, Byron, Knightsen, Brentwood, Oakley, Bethel Island, and a part of Antioch. Adding to the confusion, Freedom High School is in the district but is located in Oakley, rather than Brentwood. Eric Volta is the principal.

Andy has a passion for our Brentwood educational community and one of his big goals with the new school is to prevent the Brentwood educational milieu from splintering into the Liberty school environment “here” and the Heritage school environment “over there.” High school students have been studying their lessons in Brentwood for more than a century. Andy believes that both Brentwood high schools should view that rich heritage as being part of a history they all share together. He acknowledges that he has his work cut out for him, in this respect. Heritage is being built in the middle of a number of golf courses and people are already referring to the facility as “the Club Med School.” He’s trying to resist that kind of fragmentation.

Andy is in a good position to help build bridges between Heritage and Liberty, having served for ten years at Liberty as teacher, assistant principal, and principal. He’s planning to use the roots that he’s planted deep in the Liberty community to pull the two schools together. Andy says that Tim Halloran, who has taken Andy’s place as the Principal at Liberty High, is an incredible educator with a superb focus on his students.

Tim shares with Andy his vision of a school district with a sense of unity that goes beyond mere organizational structures and involves a genuine integration of heart and emotions as teachers, staff, and students come to view themselves as part of the Liberty Union High School District educational program first and members of one school or another second. The Liberty High School District Superintendent, Dan Smith, also shares Andy and Tim’s goal of unity between the two schools. Dan was quoted as saying, “What we don’t want to do is have one school appear to have more opportunities or to have advantages that the other schools don’t.”

Numbers, Boundaries, and Programs
Heritage is planning for 800 students to form the initial student body when the first classes meet this summer. About 35 teachers will be creating lesson plans by the start of school. Classes will begin with grades nine and ten. The two higher-level classes will be added during the subsequent two years as the tenth graders pass through the systems, moving into their junior and then senior years. A total of 2,200 students will ultimately attend Heritage High.

The school board formally stated three goals while creating the boundaries for the new school:

• To achieve socioeconomic/ethnic balance
• To generate long term population balance for the three schools so they are
• equal in size when all four grade levels are present
• To minimize the number of students required to “drive by” one school to get to another

After considering fifteen different plans, the school board set the official boundaries for the new school in June. The first classes will be created as fairly as possible and will take in the desires of parents and students. You can trace the boundary line for the Heritage school on a map by following a line from Walnut Street, to Concord Avenue, to Fairview, to Balfour Road, to Griffith Lane, to Central Boulevard, to O'Hara Avenue, to Sand Creek Road, to Brentwood Boulevard, and finally to Delta Road.

The majority of students in the first class of ninth graders will come from Bristow Middle School and about one third of the eighth graders from Edna Hill. The current ninth graders in Liberty who live within the Heritage boundaries will have the choice of attending the new school or remaining at Liberty.

Creating Manageable-size Educational Programs
Andy Parsons created the Heritage educational program working with a steering committee consisting of eight teachers — six teachers from Liberty, including a library-media technician, plus two teachers from Freedom. The committee has been putting together the school catalog, creating course selection sheets, and have been busily preparing for the first day of classes, which will be held August 1.

This student body will be too large for all the students to become acquainted with each other, so, as is being done at Liberty and Freedom, the student body will be sub-divided into four smaller “learning communities.” Segmenting a student body in this way provides a system by which large schools are able to personalize educational experiences for each student.

The learning communities at Heritage will give teachers opportunities to serve as accessible learning resources and as mentors for their students. A team of teachers will remain together teaching math, science, English, and social sciences to a group of students in a particular community. The team will remain with students, in effect, forming the learning community into a school-within-a-school, and moving from year-to-year until the students in that particular learning community graduate. The subsequent year the teachers will create a new learning community with an incoming group of ninth graders.

Beginning with the ’06-’07 school year, the Heritage learning system will follow a program that Liberty implemented a decade ago as the learning communities are further sub-divided into “academies” that will focus on specific disciplines — including Law, Government and Public Service, Engineering Technologies, Health and Recreation, and Environmental Sciences. These academies will function within learning communities similar to the way that colleges operate within a university. Students won’t be forced to join one of the academies, but those that do so will be able to take electives such as law, government, debate, and public speaking within their academies.

Getting Ready to Compete
Planning for the school has a strong emphasis upon sports and fitness. The school district is spending nearly five million dollars, most of it from the original bond augmented by developers’ fees, on a new sports facility. Playing fields will be provided for football, soccer, and softball, plus tennis courts and a complete track and field facility. The current Boys Varsity Basketball Coach at Liberty will be the Athletic Director and PE Teacher. He will begin hiring coaches to start planning for the programs.

The Heritage Patriots will participate in a full roster of inter-school sports right from the beginning in football, baseball, basketball, volleyball, swimming, and track & field. Freshman and JV Sports program will compete in BVAL (Bay Valley Athletic) — the local association of the NCS (North Coast Section) that the other area high schools belong to, including Freedom and Liberty (plus Deer Valley High, Antioch High, etc.).

One magnificent feature of the new school is a 50-meter pool that is being built as a joint project with the city. Separate locker rooms will be provided for the students, on the one hand, and for the municipal athletes, on the other. The school was able to build this pool, instead of a much smaller 25-meter pool, because in 2002 the City of Brentwood approved funding for design of the facility, plus the required office and storage spaces. The ambitious plan enhanced the original 25-meter design that had been proposed by the school district. The final figure approved by the City council in December 2003 was $390,803.50.

A big focus on the new Heritage High School campus will be an emphasis on building bridges to the Brentwood community. The school will be forming partnerships with local businesses. Students will have the opportunity of securing internships. Educational activities and businesses will blend together in order to promote learning by students through service to local commercial enterprises. Additional bridge-building to the Brentwood community will take place through the activities of parent clubs and booster clubs.

Brentwood will continue growing for the foreseeable future as the school district plans for the next decade, and beyond. Advance planning is already under weigh for a fourth high school that will open sometime within the next ten years. The district is currently considering a property near the intersection of Delta Road and Sellers Avenue as the possible site.

925-634-2166 ext. 2207
parsons@libertyuhsd.k12.ca.us