A Pajaro Valley Unified School District school is slated for closure, taking part of this author’s childhood with it.

Erik Chalhoub here, Pacific Coast Charter School’s Class of 2006 valedictorian. At the time that I began kindergarten in the mid-1990s, the school had been about a decade old, starting off as a small independent studies program within the Pajaro Valley Unified School District.

It eventually became a charter school in 1999, where it received its name as well as a new, larger location in a former Watsonville hospital. Being a school in PVUSD, it welcomes students across North Monterey and South Santa Cruz counties.

I attended PCCS from K-12, bypassing my junior year of high school, thanks to the school allowing students to work at an accelerated pace. It was here where I was first exposed to working on a publication in a team environment—I created my own mystery story section of The Scoop, the K-5 newsletter (I was a fan of writing such fiction), and eventually I became the senior editor in eighth grade (I endured the nickname of “Mr. Senior Editor” for a year). For all three years of high school, I wrote and helped design The Oracle, the creative writing quarterly.

Would I be sitting here now, in the Monterey County Weekly’s Seaside office, had it not been for PCCS and its teachers who encouraged me to pursue a path in journalism? It’s hard to say.

I bring up my history with this school because tomorrow, this school may be history.

The PVUSD Board of Trustees will consider closing PCCS, following a report that the school’s declining enrollment and “low performing” characterization by the state are reasons to shut the doors.

Students in PCCS are primarily homeschooled, but attend classes on site a few days a week, in addition to meeting with their supervising teacher on a regular basis to come up with a lesson plan.

In a report, Heather Gorman, PVUSD’s interim executive director of student support services, points to the California School Dashboard, which shows that chronic absenteeism has been on the rise at PCCS over the past three years, coming in at nearly 21 percent in 2024, putting it in the red, the lowest performance measured on the dashboard. Enrollment has been hovering around 200 students or less for the past five years, and the graduation rate has declined over the last two years.

Such indicators are cause for closure under Assembly Bill 1505, a 2019 law that outlines the role of local governing boards in authorizing such schools.

Should the PVUSD board approve the closure, PCCS will shut down on June 30. PVUSD spokesperson Alicia Jiménez says the affected students will have the option to attend a newly developed independent study program, or attend a school in person nearest their residence. PCCS teachers will work within the new program.

I’ll be tuning into the meeting tomorrow, March 5—if only to watch another facet of my childhood disappear in real-time.