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Following years of delays and public disagreements, Los Altos School District administrators are formally recommending allocating the district’s yet-to-built campus in Mountain View to Bullis Charter School.
At a Monday, Oct. 13 meeting, the school board will review – and potentially vote on – a staff proposal to pursue moving a portion of the charter school to the new space once it opens.
For more than a decade, the district has sought to build an additional campus, dubbed the “10th school site,” leading to the purchase in 2019 of 11.7 acres in Mountain View’s San Antonio Shopping Center. Currently, the district has 10 schools operating on nine sites, with Bullis sharing space at both Egan and Blach junior high schools.
Even with the 10th site entirely set aside for Bullis, the district doesn’t anticipate that all of the charter school’s roughly 1,000 students would fit. Instead, administrators are recommending performing a study to determine whether Egan or Blach would be a better second location.
The charter school has had a contentious relationship with the school district, particularly over facilities allocations, since its founding more than 20 years ago. In the past few years, district officials have publicly expressed interest in moving Bullis to the 10th site, but Bullis administrators have rejected this idea, arguing that it’s too small. The district is currently planning to build a school that could house 607 students.
Bullis Superintendent Maureen Israel told the Voice that charter school officials only found out about the recommendation to place Bullis on the 10th site when the school district released its board agenda on Thursday.
“BCS was surprised to see LASD agendize this item on a holiday weekend,” the charter school’s board said in a statement. “BCS has made clear over and over again that we do not wish to move to the San Antonio Site. Instead, LASD insists on pursuing this blatant waste of public resources, rather than repairing woefully ageing facilities at the existing 9 school sites. This abuse of tax revenue and the attempt to move BCS are contrary to the letter of the law.”
Bullis urged the district’s board to not take action on its staff’s recommendation.
As recently as two weeks ago, Los Altos School District officials said that they had not yet come to a conclusion about which school they wanted to place at the San Antonio site. District administrators did not immediately respond to a request for comment this week on their recommendation to move Bullis.
In the presentation staff has prepared for Monday’s meeting, three theoretical alternative options are listed for the new campus: opening a new elementary school, moving Egan to the 10th site or delaying building altogether.
However, the district’s enrollment has declined in recent years and administrators have previously said that they are not currently planning to open an entirely new school. As for Egan, when the district contemplated that idea in 2019, it faced strong opposition from district parents, prompting the school board to backtrack.
Beyond the question of what to put on the new campus, on Monday the school district’s board is also set to vote on schematic designs for the 10th site, as well as raising the project’s budget from $85 million to $116.8 million. Funding for the construction is expected to come from a $350 million bond voters passed last year and from selling “transfers of development rights,” which allow developers to buy excess density rights from the school site to use for other projects.
The open session of Monday’s meeting is slated to start at 7 p.m. in the district’s board room, 201 Covington Road.
The meeting materials for this weeks board room include the issue of forcing Bullis to pick up and relocate 600 or so of its students to the new San Antonio 2 story school with reduced outdoor space. That’s all that is examined in this a rticle. However, the item is called incorporating the San Antonio site into the LASD Facilities Master Plan. This entails a lot more than just relocating part of Bullis. For example, Bullis operates 2 different school sites in LASD currently. They have just under 600 kids on part of the Egan Campus that has housed an additional school for 25 years (starting before Bullis was there0. They also have just under 500 kids over at Blach, using part of that campus. Previously the district used to rent out that part of Blach to a private preschool, but there are now nearly 500 Bullis kids there.
However the biggest thing contained in that document for the meeting is that the district wants to move 5th grade out of all 7 elementary schools and have these kids travel to either Blach or Egan. They cite the same school year where San Antonio opens as the target. So in 2028-29, 6th grade disappears from LASD Elementary Schools and winds up at the Jr High campuses. Not clear how they would deal with housing that extra grade level at the Jr High schools. However, even with Bullis present, the 2 Jr Highs have been before about 175 students larger than the 7th and 8th grade number now. There are many empty classrooms at various hours of the day at Egan and Blach, that once were needed for larger enrollments.
The biggest impact