With a new school being formed, the communities, the culture, and the bonds between the students and teachers were built from the very beginning. Kathleen MacDonald High School is now facing the issue of possibly losing half of the staff after the 2025-2026 school year. This is because of the district “Right Sizing,” where staff with lower seniority from all over the district will be laid off due to a funding problem.
Kathleen MacDonald High School (KMHS) a new high school let students in during August 2022. A new school meant new teachers and a new community that would be breaking off of the traditional ways of education. Now in 2026, the district is planning to lay off not only a majority of staff at the school, but also staff from all over the district to sustain a budget, which would take into effect in the following years.
The coming of a brand new school meant that teachers would have new experiences to look forward to; leaving old experiences behind to start new ones.
“I was looking forward to [moving] on from my previous school, but when I heard about this site we were going to start a brand new school from the ground up. We were gonna be able to build the culture … I didn’t want to be anywhere else but here,” said Sara O’Connor, the math department chair and yearbook teacher at KMHS.
Teachers who came to MacDonald wanted to engage and experience a new community is shared between teachers.
English teacher and site representative at KMHS, Arantxa Figueroa said, “I had a really hard time at Santa Clara High School because I am an extroverted person who likes to interact with others and build community. People weren’t engaging with me making it hard to do my job. When [the] opportunity came to move schools where there was an effort to detrack, desegregate, and include everyone I thought it would be perfect for me.”
Teachers were drawn to KMHS wanting to be able to share common goals.
“What drew me here was the common vision, the common mission, the common practices, the common grading, all of it,” said Figueroa
An upcoming district plan called Right Sizing was established this year of 2026. With this they are planning to lay off newer teachers around the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in hopes of saving their budget.
KMHS, being a relatively new school, means that many of the teachers and the staff are all new to the district as well. This also means that KMHS staff are disproportionately at risk of being laid off compared to staff of other schools within SCUSD.The district’s decision to lay people off had left teachers shocked.
“There’s no way that I’ve dedicated 4 years of my life to building this school from the ground up, having great relationships with my students, and I might not get to be here anymore because of a potential budget issue that wasn’t caused by me, my students, or my colleagues,” said O’Connor.
Not only are the newer teachers being affected but their colleagues are also being affected by this decision.
“It’s every counselor, half the office we see, I would say at least a third of everyone. I’m not at risk [of being laid off] but my friends are and that’s just as bad,” said Figueroa.
