Livermore Homes Blog

First you figure out where to live, then check to see if you can afford it and finally if you have kids or plan to, you ask, how are the schools.  As a Realtor, we can not answer that directly, but we can point you to our web site , where we have a link to school scores .  But school scores alone don’t always tell the full story about a school or a school district.  It is a good idea to do a Google or yahoo search on schools in the area you pick.  You can find out a lot about how the schools and school boards are functioning.   A case in point are Livermore schools. 

For the past many years, schools in Livermore have been a hot topic.  I am not going to give you a big history lesson, because one, I don’t know all the history and two, it would be mostly conjecture not fact.  So what I want to do, is give a brief overview with some links to various sites that will give more of a feel of the ever changing Livermore School district and the role the state has played in it.  Here’s a detailed description of how California went from having the top schools in the country to ranking near the bottom in the nation in 30 years.  Livermore had the misfortune of being designated a rural district when it unified, whereas Pleasanton and Dublin unified their school districts in the late 80’s and qualified for a lot more money.  Currently Livermore gets $6,585 per pupil, Pleasanont gets $7,419 and Dublin gets $7883 per pupil.  Yet despite this inequality, Livermore schools are competitive with Dublin and Pleasanton.  Not that it has always been easy for Livermore.  Four years ago, because of past budget issues the Livermore School Board voted to close two open border elementary schools, Almond Avenue and Arroyo Mocho.  Whether the hoped for savings were realized or not is open to debate.  Because of the closure, a movement to start a k-5 charter school was undertaken.  As a founding family, Joan and I had a close up experience with the painful birth of the Livermore Valley Charter School, which was opposed by the local school board.  Four years after the first petition and three years after opening, LVCS was denied a renewal of its charter by the Livermore School Board and for the same reason, finances.  Now my understanding is that charter schools are not suppose to be denied because of financial issues, but I do understand after the school district’s own rocky financial history, why they would be reluctant to be a back stop for LVCS.  I personally feel the school board and staff has been more of a hinderance than a help to LVCS over the years.  But currently LVCS is doing well and offering an alternative for parents in the area and the Livermore Charter Learning Corp. (LCLC), which oversees the charter school is working on opening a Charter High School next year as well.  Also back in the news is the construction OK for the first new Catholic High School built in the last 40 years in the East Bay. 

So in another couple of years, Livermore will go from two main High Schools to possibly four, with the Charter and Catholic High Schools focused on getting their students ready for college.  It just goes to show that you can’t judge a book by its cover and you have to do your homework on schools to grade them correctly.