Original Research by School Decision on Alpha: Jose Hernandez District
Jose Hernandez District is a small charter district in Santa Clara County serving kindergarten through eighth grade. The district operates a single school, Alpha: Jose Hernandez, which until recently functioned as a middle school and has now expanded to include elementary grades, creating a kindergarten-to-eighth-grade continuum. This transition allows families to enroll children from kindergarten and keep them at the same school through middle school.
The student body is heavily concentrated in one demographic group. The vast majority of students are Hispanic, with very small numbers of Asian students and even smaller representation of other groups. The enrollment spans all grade levels from kindergarten through eighth grade, with modest per-grade populations. The district serves roughly a small school's worth of students overall.
State testing data and academic proficiency metrics were not available, so a parent cannot see how students perform on California state assessments in English language arts or mathematics. The district's grade band—kindergarten through eighth—means no high school graduation rate is applicable. Without this standard performance data, evaluating academic outcomes directly from state measures is not possible.
The district does report one concerning metric relative to its county peers. Chronic absenteeism sits in the bottom quartile among Santa Clara County's districts, meaning attendance is a notable challenge. A parent may want to look into this further with the school: what drives absenteeism, what strategies are in place to support regular attendance, and how the school communicates with families on this issue.
Per-pupil spending is in the middle range, lower half of the county, so the district is neither high-spending nor bare-bones but operates with modest resources relative to its neighbors.
The expansion from a middle school to a full elementary-through-middle continuum is itself a significant structural change. A parent considering this district would want to understand how the elementary grades launched, what curriculum and pedagogy guide the early years, how well integrated the younger and older students are within the school community, and whether the school has stabilized after adding these grades. The shift from serving only middle schoolers to serving an entire K-8 arc is not a small undertaking, and evidence of how smoothly the transition has gone would matter to a family.
The combination of limited academic data, a high chronic absenteeism rate, and the recent expansion suggests a family would benefit from direct engagement with the school to understand academic standards, support systems, and the current operational stability post-expansion.
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