I kid you not… it was a matter of days. Sad as the situation was, it illustrated something very important…

These successful school sites and campuses grow from a community of dedicated, hard-working people, well-directed by passionate, experienced and visionary staff and leadership. We’ve all experienced this in one way or another — the PEOPLE at the school make the school.

At any rate, the announcement is good news…even if it’s only a stay of execution.

As I mentioned, I don’t view API scores as the end-all be-all of education measurement. I’m sure many here agree with that.

As I also mentioned, I think the issue with Thornhill is not the here-and-now, but the fear that somehow OUSD will act to mess up what’s working well there. I never said I thought Thornhill was a bad school at present.

The closest I think you can get to a “best” way to evaluate schools is how the kids do later in terms of college admissions. I do not know these numbers for Thornhill vs. Orinda and Piedmont. Do you?

I wish life were simplistic enough for me to say things like “a school was PROVEN excellent.” I just don’t think life works that way.

Fair point that I hijacked the thread — though, people could just choose not to respond if it’s that irritating.

Anyway, it sounds like you guys are all earnestly trying to make the best of a bad situation. Good luck with that. As you knew would happen, I’ll be keeping my kids in private school.

When others are posting both the ins-and-outs (all sides) of hard work going into both their schools & the District you repeatedly post misleading, ignorant and false statements to show how bad they are (including some PROVEN excellent OUSD schools). When you’re taken to task and confronted with the facts you conveniently ignore them and answer glibly that you’re being censored.

You are, by design or not, an internet Troll.

About Thornhill – if you look at the LiveGo documents that you referenced earlier, 90% of the students that live in the neighborhood go to the school (this is not broken down by grade level. The two largest groups of outside students come from Montclair and Joaquin Miller. If you read the document that you referenced, very few students from East Oakland go to Thornhill; would you suggest that the document is inaccurate?

Hillcrest has 89% neighborhood students – outside students mostly come from Chabot and Montera Middle.

Also, how do you know there are large numbers of students at Thornhill from out of the area?

If you are so curious about Thornhill then ask the district for data on the # of seats available per grade, # of requests from the neighborhood, # of requests from outside the neighborhood and final enrollment numbers from both inside and outside the neighborhood. Given that neighborhood demand in the hills schools has increased dramatically in the last five years I would predict that the ratio of neighborhood to non-neighborhood kids is changing with each passing kindergarten cohort, with the share of neighborhood kids increasing among kindergartners. As someone mentioned above, OUSD has a sibling priority policy in place so yes, families from out of the Thornhill neighborhood who got in when there was space at Thornhill will have priority over neighborhood kids but I predict that Thornhill’s ratio (as well as other hills schools) will eventually look like Hillcest’s ratio as long as neighborhood demand stays strong.