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Branham High School  




School Profile

Branham High School was first opened as a new school in the Campbell Union High School District (CUHSD) in 1967. In 1991, as a result of steadily declining enrollment, the school was closed. During the period of Branham's closure, the site was retained by CUHSD and the site was leased to a local private high school during much of this period. As student enrollment in the school district began to grow, the district formed a school committee in the fall of 1996 to plan the basis of re-opening Branham as a comprehensive high school. Since its re-opening in the Fall of 1999, Branham High School has grown to a fully WASC accredited comprehensive high school with a total school enrollment of 1493 at the start of the 2007-2008 school year. The majority of Branham students matriculated from Ida Price and Dartmouth Middle Schools.

The largest percentage of Branham High School students are Non Hispanic Caucasian, comprising around 55% of the student population. The ethnic minorities are represented by Hispanic (19%), Asian (7%), African- American (2%), and Indian-American or Filipino (1%) students. The languages spoken are also diverse and include English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Serbo Croatian and 20 others.

Branham High School does not have an ELD program. The few students in the school attendance area that are not fluent in English attend Del Mar High School, a Comprehensive High School in Campbell Union High School District that houses the ELD programs for CUHSD students in this area.

The Branham community is largely middle-class in an area with a growing cost of living where median home prices lie in the $750,000 range. The school community is primarily residential with several small neighborhood shopping malls nearby. The parents of our students have diverse educational backgrounds; many have college degrees and/or experience. Most families have two adults in the home,and there is little mobility throughout the year.

Branham offers a diverse and comprehensive curriculum with extensive co-curricular opportunities. A full range of college prep courses is offered to all students, including honors and AP classes and a broad and growing range of electives in art, drama, music, foreign language, business and computers, applied arts, physical education, Leadership and JROTC. Branham has highly competitive teams in a wide variety of fall, winter and spring sports. Students also have great many clubs and activities available to enhance their school experience.

Over the past three years Branham High School has worked diligently to meet state and local school board requirements as highlighted in the district's Local Education Agency (LEA) plan. This plan contains an extensive framework for the implementation of high-yield programs for instruction to meet the needs of all students in each subject area. Many of these same strategies have been included in the school’s WASC Accreditation Action Plan, stemming from the desire of the Branham community to build a higher standard for student performance and achievement. This work has been an evolutionary process, whereby the school has developed curricular pacing schedules and common benchmark assessments for each subject area to monitor and analyze student performance of the ESLRs. As this process has advanced, instructional practice has been adjusting to implement high-yield research-based instructional strategies, such as those published by Robert Marzano in A Handbook for Classroom Instruction That Works, to differentiate instruction and impact student learning. All of this has been implemented to provide meaningful learning experiences to and increase all student achievement in each curricular area, particularly in English-Language Arts (ELA), Math, Science and Social Science.

During the development of these standards-based curriculum changes, the need for a more clear and focused school vision was developed based on a need to guide and focus the different components of school-wide improvement and the energies of Branham’s dynamic faculty and staff. Part of that vision articulates that Branham High School will be an organization that is data driven for the purpose improving standards-based instruction and to achieve a higher level of student learning and achievement.

The Branham teaching staff is comprised of 68 highly qualified, dedicated and supportive faculty members holding bachelor's degrees, many with master's degrees and one teacher holding a doctorate. Each of these teachers are assigned to teach in their credentialed major or minor field. The faculty and staff provide a safe, caring, educational community, in which students are challenged to reach their maximum potential, take risks and try new things.

 


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