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Though it appears to be an abandoned department store from the outside, the former Kohl’s building in the middle of Mountain View’s San Antonio Shopping Center has actually been transformed into a temporary robotics and STEM hub for local students.
Mountain View High School’s robotics club, Spartan Robotics, had been looking for a way to support STEM learning efforts in the community for some time, said Leonard Speiser, one of the club’s adult volunteer mentors. After making a deal with the Los Altos School District, which owns the building that Kohl’s previously occupied, the team turned the empty site into a community robotics space, The Talon, Los Altos High’s student newspaper, reported in December.
With the help of mentors, the team built a full-scale FIRST Robotics Competition practice field, invited other local teams to utilize the space and has been hosting events for students of varying ages.
“The really big win here with building the space out is showcasing that we can start to build these programs around practical, applied education, and we can do it in a way that engages the whole community,” said Speiser, whose wife previously served on the Los Altos School District’s board, before being elected to the Santa Clara County Board of Education in 2024.
The hub is only temporary though, as LASD is planning to demolish the building this spring to make way for a new school site. In 2019, the district purchased 11.7 acres in the San Antonio Shopping Center in the hopes of addressing overcrowding on its campuses. However, due to strong disagreements in the community about what school should go there and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the project stalled.
Over the years, tenants on the site have vacated, with the Kohl’s closing early last year. This past fall, progress ramped up again after the school board approved plans to build a 10th campus on the San Antonio site, with capacity for approximately 600 students. The district expects to break ground in May and have the site ready for students by fall 2028.
Spartan Robotics and other local teams, including Los Altos High School’s Eaglestrike and the community team Popcorn Penguins, will be able to continue using the space through the end of April, Assistant Superintendent Erik Walukiewicz told the Voice. The school district is letting Spartan Robotics lease the building to use as a community hub for $1 a month.
“We’re not doing anything with the site now,” Walukiewicz said. “We’re glad to help them because it’s a great program for kids.”
Students use former Kohl’s for practice and competitions
High school students from around the Bay Area traveled to the former Kohl’s on Saturday, Feb. 28, to participate in a pre-season match, where they had the opportunity to test their teams’ robots in a low-stakes setting before formal competitions kick off this week.
According to Spartan Robotics team member Sam Williamson, competitions like Saturday’s allow teams to get a head start on understanding and developing strategies, giving them an advantage in the upcoming events.
“Strategy evolves over the season,” said Williamson, a senior at Mountain View High. “No one really knows what they’re doing in the first competition … and then, by the time you’re at the world championship, there’s these crazy strategies that no one would have thought of in the first week.”
After seeing how the robot fared Saturday, the team will start making tweaks this week to improve performance ahead of the first official matches, said William Jojarth, a Spartan Robotics team member and Mountain View High School junior.
“In the past, we’ve struggled a lot with reliability, and I think that’s something where this robot really shines,” Jojarth said. “It’s been a huge asset to have this field available so we can come in here and practice, and that’s really given us the opportunity to kind of ‘battle test’ our robot.”
Before gaining access to the vacant department store building, Spartan Robotics practiced at Bloomhouse, a community warehouse in East Palo Alto. The space provided enough room for a smaller practice field, but its location was difficult for some students to reach, Williamson said. Additionally, since other teams also practiced at Bloomhouse, the Spartan Robotics team often had limited time to utilize the space.
It won’t be ideal to have to move out of the Kohl’s building in the spring, Williamson said, not only because of the benefits it provides to local robotics teams but also because of the work that went into creating the hub.
As part of a team bonding experience for the Spartan Robotics club earlier this school year, Speiser had professional graffiti artists come into the Kohl’s building and teach students about spray painting techniques. Students then filled many of the walls with artwork, making the space their own, Speiser said.
“We knew from day one that the space is temporary,” Speiser said. “We’re just really grateful to the Los Altos School District for giving us the time here and enabling us … to take this building that was ultimately going to be replaced and giving it life for the time that we could.”
He described the project of turning the Kohl’s building into a functioning community space as a “prototype” for a permanent STEM center that he hopes to establish locally. By engaging with community members, elected officials and industry professionals, his end goal is to create a facility that has machine shops for robotics as well as spaces for continuous K-12 STEM education efforts.
“Hopefully we build a consortium of interested and like-minded people who come together and find ways to make something like this happen here,” Speiser said.
On the delay after the 2019 purchase by LASD of the Kohl’s area purchase, the article blames the delay on Covid and internal conflict as to use of the site. Actually, the big factor was that the whole project is costing way more than LASD planned for over time. It’s like one of those Russian doll sets where they open up one plan and find still more cost increases inside. In the end, they had to go back to the voters and get another bond measure back in November 2024. As part of that campaign that made promises that were lies to get that extra $150 Million for building out the Kohl’s boondoggle. The truth is that the bond measure BARELY provided enough to construct the planned school at the Kohl’s site, despite LASD having already funded the land purchase with funds from 2014. LASD found it had to drastically reduce the size and quality of the buildings in order to be able to hope to break ground on a new school there. Originally they said it would be big enough for 900 students but that was way too expensive. They cut that back down to 600 but along the way they admitted it might make more sense to just build for 450 or so, which would make the project more affordable. Now they have plans for 600 but the funding is VERY tight and if they go over budget they are going to have a big problem.
At the same time May 2023 they commissioned a demographic report which showed the district continuing to SHRINK in the number of students over the next TEN years with no let up in that. There really is no justification at all to be investing bond money in adding a new school location, given that they will have fewer and fewer students over time. They should be cutting their losses and going into a holding pattern by spending the bare minimum on the Kohl’s school. They’re going to end up regretting this spending and they will likely change their mind yet again as to how the site will be used.
The enrollment forecast also relies on enrolling 150 or more students from out of the district. These 150+ extra students make the district need to hire 6-8 more teachers and a lot of support staff, but that’s out of operating funds.
Sure starting in 4-5 years, that Nov 2024 bond measure will provide more funds than it does initially and they are thinking to use the new capital revenue to the building fund by EXPANDING the capacity of all their existing schools. This really makes zero sense given that they will be down to just one class per grade level at several of the existing schools, and they will be needing to divert students away from their home schools just so they can get TWO classes per grade at some fraction of the schools.