Two Districts, One Town: Gilbert Public Schools and Higley Unified
Gilbert is served by two school districts — a heritage system that grew with the farms and a newer one built for the subdivisions. How the town's students are sorted, governed and taught.
Draw a map of Gilbert's schools and you draw the town's history in two layers. Gilbert Public Schools — the district of the old farm town, founded in the era of the one-room schoolhouse — serves the town's northern and central areas with more than thirty campuses, including Gilbert High, Mesquite, Campo Verde and Highland among its high schools. Higley Unified, created to serve the building boom in the town's south and east, runs a smaller, newer system anchored by Higley and Williams Field high schools. Between them, they educate the overwhelming share of Gilbert's children.
The two-district map produces Gilbert's characteristic school politics: two elected governing boards, two superintendents, two budgets — and families who choose homes by which side of a boundary line the driveway sits on. Arizona's open-enrollment law softens the borders: students may apply to attend schools outside their home district and attendance zone, and both districts compete — with each other and with the charter schools woven through the town — on programs, from Gilbert's agricultural and veterinary sciences heritage to Higley's engineering and performing arts academies.
Money is the permanent agenda item. Arizona funds schools by a state formula supplemented by voter-approved local overrides and bonds; both districts periodically take those questions to Gilbert voters, where they are decided by the same electorate voting Tuesday on statewide races. The overrides fund the unglamorous essentials — teacher salaries that compete with neighboring districts, class sizes, nurses, counselors — and their renewal campaigns are a fixture of Gilbert's civic calendar.
November finds both districts in full stride: football teams in the state playoffs, marching bands and orchestras in concert season, and the first semester's academic competitions underway. Gilbert's outsized share of National Merit scholars, championship teams and blue-ribbon campuses is the town's favorite statistic about itself — and the standing product of the two systems' long competition to deserve it.
This newsroom will cover both districts as the civic institutions they are: board meetings in plain language, budget and override questions translated, and the boundary-line questions answered with maps. In Gilbert, there is no more local government than the school district. We'll act like it.
