Berryessa Union School District

KNOW YOUR EDUCATIONAL RIGHTS
Starting the 2014 – 15 school year, in the BERRYESSA UNION SCHOOL DISTRICT (BUSD) you are no longer guaranteed enrollment in your designated school of attendance. That means if you buy a house in one school’s area, your children may have to attend a different school in the district. Then, IF space becomes available in later years, your child will be invited back. In past years, you were GUARANTEED enrollment back to your school. This is no longer the case in the BUSD. Interestingly, other school districts still offer a guarantee to their residents.
In the BUSD alone, over 100 families have children that are divided up at two separate elementary schools or two different middle schools (data obtained through a public records act request). Many of those affected were as a result of the intradistrict transfer process that did not properly inform parents that their children might not be able to attend the same school.
In the BUSD at least 6 out of 14 schools are considered «program improvement» schools since they did not make adequate yearly progress (AYP). What does this mean? It means that the students at the school failed to meet goals in reading and math tests. It also means that according to the federal No Child Left Behind Act, any family within the state of California whose children attend a public elementary, middle, or high school has the right to school choice if their school did not meet AYP. The parents are able to ask the district to transfer their children to another school in the district that is not considered a program improvement school.
This is how you find out whether your public school did not make AYP. Go to the California Department of Education website
Click on AYP reports. You can look up school district names or individual school names.
Your local school district website may also have this information as BUSD does:
According to the most recent data from the California Department of Education, in 2014 the following BUSD schools did not meet AYP: Northwood, Summerdale, Toyon, Vinci Park, Morrill Middle, and Piedmont Middle. If you (or another family you know) are interested in transferring your children to another school in your district, you have the legal right to do so. Furthermore, the California Education Code 35 160.5 permits parents to indicate a preference for the school which their child will attend, irrespective of the child’s place of residence within the district, and requires the district to honor this parental preference if the school has sufficient capacity without displacing other currently enrolled students.
In order to find out whether a school has seats available for a certain grade level, you cannot just call and rely on the verbal notification. In a formal request via email or letter, write that you are exercising your rights under the California Public Records Act. The district must then comply with your request for information. Here is a link to a sample letter:

This is the district office, this was a new building back in the 70’s when I still was in school, it is time for an upgrade, but you know something they have done a great job of keeping the inside new and updated.

I grew up w/​in this district– I went to Laneview Elementary and then to Morrill Middle and I can’t say from a parent’s point of view but from the student’s point of view– it was the best years in my life! I enjoyed 7^th grade the most as well as 3^rd grade.
Anyhow– back to reality. I came in today to ask about the state scores that is given to all the schools. I explained why I wanted them and where I was looking for them and sure enough, 2 nice friendly ladies helped me. One showed me step-​by-​step on how to run the report and she was nice enough to print it out for me!
Staff = friendly!
Parking = plentiful
Location = quiet and easy to find

I went to Piedmont Middle School and for the most part I thought that the Berryessa Union School District was relatively fair in the kind of policies they had towards their schools and were pretty responsible for things like upgrading facilities when possible as well as purchasing new text books to ensure that the older versions were no longer used.
They held monthly (if I remember correctly) meetings that were open to the community for discussion of relevant topics to education. However, I disliked how they were extremely beyond paranoid about people attending certain schools that lived exactly in the area. They used to go around to «suspicious» people’s house addresses to knock on the door to see if they would come out to be the people actually living in the house. They would then kick people out if they did not actually live there. Rather strict I suppose for a school without the highest reputation such as that of Cupertino School District.