The Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees on Wednesday unanimously approved a proposal to close Pacific Pacific Coast Charter School after declining enrollment and chronic absenteeism made the school financially unsustainable.
Located in the district’s headquarters known as The Towers, the hybrid school opened in 1999 and has an enrollment of roughly students who are largely home-schooled, and attend in-person classes 2-3 days per week.
The school’s last day will be June 30.
District officials say the school has shown poor academic performance, with numbers that have declined over the past two years.
Heather Gorman, interim director of Student Support Services, told the board that the district will now create a new independent study program, keeping the current teachers and offering in-person classes.
Students will not experience a change in services, district officials say.
According to the California School Dashboard, PCCS had a chronic absenteeism of 20.8% in 2024, a number that jumped 14.5% from the previous year.
The school was 93.4 points below state standards in English Language Arts scores that year, and 131.4 points below state standards.
In making the proposal, the district is citing Assembly Bill 1505, which among other things authorizes school districts to close charter schools that are unlikely to be able to implement their program due to financial or other factors, or is not adequately serving their students.
The school has also shown a declining graduation rate, with 81% graduating, a 2.4% drop from the previous year.
PCCS teacher Joan Ling-Zwissler agreed the school should be reimagined, but said that the low test scores come not from poor instruction, but because the majority of students come to the school already having fallen behind.
She also said that the school has had a series of several interim principals.
“This last loss of a principal is a good example of why PCCS staff has never felt that we have had the full support of PVUSD,” Ling-Zwissler said.
The school originally opened as an alternative to traditional schools to serve families that wanted a home-school option, and evolved to include an online component. But over time, those needs shifted and the families said they wanted a different option, PVUSD Superintendent Heather Contreras said.
Contreras said she went to visit the program when she started her role and found nobody in the office.
“That was my first heads-up that things were not right,” she said.
But she also saw “the huge passion of the teachers for students,” and saw that the school offers a “safe haven” for students who do not fit into the traditional school model.
The recommendation came from the school’s own charter council, and followed talks with district officials beginning in the fall of 2024 about developing a new vision for the school.
“I’m excited to see we have this other opportunity to offer some of our students that need it because they struggle with traditional classrooms of 30 students,” Board President Olivia Flores said.
