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After a decade of public discussions, debates and disagreements, the Los Altos School District is on the verge of making a set of major decisions about what to build on a 11.7-acre plot of land in Mountain View that the district bought for a new school.
Though the purchase of the property at the corner of Showers Drive and California Street was finalized nearly five years ago, construction has yet to begin. The district was in the midst of a community input process when the pandemic hit, and district officials have since resumed the planning process.
What to build on the plot of land, which is frequently referred to as the “10th school site,” is intertwined with a $350 million bond measure that the school district is asking voters to approve on November’s ballot, and long standing disputes over where to house Bullis Charter School.
The plan is for the board to decide at an upcoming meeting how much money to set aside from that bond measure, should it pass, for 10th site construction and how much to leave for upgrades to existing campuses, school board President Bryan Johnson told the Voice.
“We understand that as people contemplate the bond measure, they’re going to want to understand where the money is going to be spent,” Johnson said. “I think the sooner (we decide), the better. I’m hopeful we will make that decision in September.”
How much money is allocated to the 10th site will impact how large a school can be built there.
The district is considering options that range from constructing a 900-student school to not building a school at all, but rather demolishing the existing buildings on the site, prepping it for future construction and creating a gymnasium and athletic fields that would meet obligations it has to the city of Mountain View.
Decisions around the 10th site are also connected to long-running disputes between the Los Altos School District and Bullis Charter School. Since the charter school’s founding 20 years ago, it has had a contentious relationship with the school district, particularly over what facilities the district provides to Bullis.
Even as the school district prepares for a decision on what to build on the 10th site, it isn’t clear which students will end up attending the potential new school. District officials have said publicly that they want to see Bullis move to the 10th site, while Bullis officials have made clear they aren’t interested in going there.
More than a decade in the making
Over a decade ago, Los Altos School District officials wanted to buy land for another school, or potentially two schools, to address overcrowding on existing campuses and find a solution for where to house Bullis Charter School.
The school board ultimately decided that adding two schools would be too expensive and instead put Measure N, a $150 million bond, on the November 2014 ballot with the intent of buying land for a single school to address growing enrollment. Measure N ultimately narrowly passed.
The district spent the next several years trying to acquire land, which proved to be a challenge given rising costs and limited open space. The district considered multiple sites and ultimately bought an 11.7 acre site in the San Antonio Shopping Center in December 2019, with plans to demolish the commercial buildings on the property to make way for the school. At the time, the property was home to various businesses, including a Kohl’s department store, Jo-Ann fabrics and 24 Hour Fitness location.
The purchase price was $155 million, and the district planned to foot the bill with a complex financing structure that included money from the city of Mountain View and real estate developers.
The city agreed to pay the district $20 million in exchange for getting approximately two acres of land to turn into a public park. The city also agreed to kick in another $23 million for joint public use of certain facilities, including athletic fields and a gymnasium.
The city also approved a system where the school district could sell its excess density rights to real estate developers for use on other projects in Mountain View. Described as the transfers of development rights, or TDRs, the idea was that since the new school wouldn’t use all of the site’s allowable density, the district could sell the remaining square footage. The district expected to make $79.3 million off of these sales.
As the Los Altos School District was finalizing the 10th site purchase in 2019, it announced a deal with Bullis Charter School that would have given most of Egan Junior High School’s campus to Bullis and moved Egan to the new school site.
That idea faced strong opposition from some in the community, particularly Los Altos School District parents, and the school board ultimately backed off the idea. The district instead launched an extensive community engagement process aimed at figuring out long term facilities options for the charter school, but it was interrupted by the emergence of COVID-19.
While the pandemic put the district’s planning on pause for multiple years, it is now back underway. However, the landscape has changed dramatically since the district initially started looking to open a new school more than 10 years ago.
When Measure N passed in 2014, the district was seeing enrollment climb, but it has since dropped substantially. From a peak of 4,675 students in the 2014-15 school year, the district’s student body declined to 3,361 last school year. While Bullis’ enrollment has grown over that same time period from 707 to 1,025 students, the overall number of kids attending school on district campuses is still lower.
The district’s plan to fund construction on the 10th site has also hit substantial roadblocks. The TDRs, originally meant to raise $79.3 million, have only generated $10.4 million so far, Assistant Superintendent Business Services Erik Walukiewicz said.
Coming out of the pandemic, the commercial real estate market hasn’t been doing well, with higher interest rates making it more expensive for developers to borrow money. There are some commercial developers with TDR deals signed who haven’t pulled permits for their projects and actually executed the agreements, Walukiewicz said.
“We’re hoping to keep those TDRs active and that, if the commercial real estate market rebounds, that the TDR money will come in,” he said. “It might not all come in all at one time – commercial real estate takes a while to rebound.”
If that money does arrive, the district could use it for future projects, he added. The district currently has $38.7 million in remaining Measure N funds, $10.4 million of which is from successful TDRs.
With fewer students and a gap in funding caused by the unsold TDRs, the district is left with a set of questions: What will it build on the 10th site? Who will end up using the site? And crucially, how will the district pay for it?
Putting a bond on the ballot
The Los Altos school board voted earlier this month to put a $350 million bond on this November’s ballot, with plans to use the funds to pay for a combination of upgrades to existing schools and construction on the 10th site.
That bond could face a tight road to passage, with district polling showing support hovering right around the 55% threshold required to pass and one board member, Vladimir Ivanovic, publicly opposing the measure. Ivanovic has raised objections to what he describes as the bond favoring Bullis Charter School over the district’s schools, a claim that his fellow board members dispute.
One question is how the district will decide to split the potential bond proceeds between the 10th site and existing schools. Johnson’s hope is that the board decide next month, but he said the timeline isn’t certain.
The district is also in the process of finalizing a long-range facilities master plan, which lays out a detailed list of improvements the district wants to make to its existing schools and places them in prioritized groups. The projects include upgrades to heating and cooling systems, roofing repairs, fire alarm upgrades, renovations to existing buildings and constructing new buildings. The district plans to vote on the facilities master plan at its next meeting on Sept. 9, Johnson said.
The projects in the facilities master plan are expected to cost more than bond measure would bring in. How much bond money the district sets aside for the 10th site will also impact how many of the facilities master plan items the district can get through.
“Depending on how big we build the 10th site out, or what we decide to do with it, then there will either be more or less money available for other master planning projects at the other nine sites,” Walukiewicz said.
At a meeting last month, the school board considered three potential splits for the bond money, which roughly correspond to three different visions for the 10th site that the board has contemplated.
Figuring out what to build
At the July 29 board meeting, district staff presented three scenarios of what to build. The most expensive option would create a 900-student school on the property, at an estimated cost of $115 million. Alternatively, the school board could opt for a 500-student school for roughly $90 million.
Depending on how big we build the 10th site out, or what we decide to do with it, then there will either be more or less money available for other master planning projects at the other nine sites.
Erik Walukiewicz, Los Altos School District Associate Superintendent
The final option, with an estimated price tag of $33 million, would be to demolish the existing buildings, construct athletic fields and a gymnasium, and prep the site for future construction, including undergrounding utilities.
These price tags are estimates and don’t account for things like cost escalations, building inspections, buying furniture and equipment, and unexpected issues found at the site, Walukiewicz said.
Johnson also stressed that the district isn’t necessarily locked into only these three options. The plan is to use Blach Construction’s prefabricated Folia system, which other nearby schools have used, including Cupertino High School. Folia will give the district flexibility on how much to build, Johnson said.
He described it as a “panelized construction method” in which portions of the building can be pre-built and then assembled on site.
“It’s permanent construction. We’re not talking about portables, or what’s sometimes called ‘prefab’ – cheap materials, not designed to last for very long,” Johnson said. “This is steel-frame construction.”
Deciding who will go to the 10th site
Assuming that a school gets built on the 10th site, the Los Altos School District has made it clear that it wants Bullis Charter School to go there. The charter school has pushed back on that idea, arguing that the site isn’t large enough.
All in all, it doesn’t make sense and is not fair to the students that the largest school would be housed on the smallest site.
Maureen Israel, Bullis Charter School Superintendent
According to Johnson, there hasn’t been any appetite among district board members for any use of the 10th site in the near future other than putting Bullis there.
“Our enrollment has declined to the point where it doesn’t make really any sense educationally, financially, (or) anything for us to look at opening a new LASD elementary school, for example,” Johnson said. “We just don’t have another use for that site in the short term.”
Bullis Superintendent Maureen Israel told the Voice that the 10th site is too small for Bullis, which had over 1,000 students spanning transitional kindergarten through eighth grade last school year. This is roughly three times the size of most Los Altos elementary schools, Israel noted.
They’ve been asking for ten years to be on a single site. There is not, and never will be, a site in LASD that could accommodate 1,100 students. At some point, they have to decide whether they really want a single site or not.
Bryan Johnson, Los Altos School District Board President
“Approximately 1 in 4 students in the school district are either attending BCS or are on the waitlist. Moreover, BCS draws learners from across the entire geographical area covered by LASD,” Israel said in an email. “All in all, it doesn’t make sense and is not fair to the students that the largest school would be housed on the smallest site.”
The district’s environmental impact report, which was completed in June, evaluates a school that could fit up to 900 students. Last year, Bullis had 1,025 students.
Since the new school wouldn’t be ready for several years, Johnson said that Bullis would have time to decrease its enrollment to 900 students.
“They’ve been asking for ten years to be on a single site. There is not, and never will be, a site in LASD that could accommodate 1,100 students,” Johnson said. “At some point, they have to decide whether they really want a single site or not.”
Israel pushed back on the idea of shrinking her school.
“We want as many students to have the BCS experience as possible,” Israel said. “To have the district creating a narrative that we aren’t serving enough students on one hand and then on the other hand telling us we need to reduce our enrollment by 10% is inconsistent.”
Bullis is currently in the process of asking the Santa Clara County Office of Education to renew its charter, with the county board slated to consider the renewal next week. The Los Altos School District has advocated for Bullis to agree to move to the 10th site and add an enrollment preference for students living in the San Antonio neighborhood as part of the renewal process.
As part of purchasing the 10th site, the Los Altos School District signed an agreement with the city of Mountain View that stipulated that the eventual school on the site would either be an elementary or junior high school serving neighborhood students, or a charter or choice school with a preference for neighborhood students.
If the district doesn’t adhere to this requirement, the agreement gives the city “sole discretion” to terminate the deal, pursuant to certain contractual provisions. The city would then be entitled to reimbursement of some or all of the $23 million it contributed to get joint facilities use.
Israel told the Voice that as a high performing charter school, Bullis is subject to a streamlined charter renewal, that the 10th site “is not part of renewal as a matter of law” and that the school district “cannot unilaterally move BCS to 10th site.”
Connected to the question of whether Bullis moves to the 10th site is the Los Altos School District’s desire to shift from a junior high to middle school model. The district wants to move sixth graders to Blach and Egan junior high schools, but Johnson said there isn’t enough space because Bullis is currently housed on both sites.
According to Johnson, as the district has seen its enrollment decline, there has been a greater need to shift to a middle school model.
With fewer students at Egan and Blach junior high schools, it has become more difficult to maintain elective courses. At the same time, with only two sixth grade teachers per elementary school, it’s also a challenge to offer the specialized instruction that sixth graders require, Johnson said.
“Fifteen years ago, moving the sixth graders to the junior highs was very much seen as an optional thing that had pros and cons,” he said. “Now, it’s just necessary.”
Although the school board wants to put Bullis on the 10th site, Johnson said the decision doesn’t have to be permanent, and that the district could always decide to open a neighborhood school if there was a future need.
Obligations extend beyond a school
Whether the district decides to build a school now or not, it has separate obligations to the city of Mountain View.
As part of buying the school in 2019, the district agreed to give the city roughly two acres of the property for a public park in return for $20 million. The district also signed a joint use agreement with the city that called for the district to make certain facilities available for public use outside of school hours in return for another $23 million from the city.
In particular, the district agreed to include roughly four acres of joint use area, which would include athletic fields and a track, soccer and baseball field, as well as the potential for playground facilities, outdoor basketball courts and other amenities. The district would also provide the city use of a gymnasium.
The district is planning to set aside room for the public park at the corner of California Street and Pacchetti Way, with the joint use area directly to its south.
The agreement called for the district to develop and provide the city access to the joint use area by Sept. 30, 2024, though the gym could be constructed with the school, if that occurred later.
The district and city are in discussions to extend that timeline, although a date for it to come before the Mountain View City Council hasn’t been set, city spokesperson Lenka Wright said.
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Zoe: very good summary of a complex topic
LASD needs to get real. No way will taxpayers pass a bond to build a giant Jr High campus at San Antonio. They would be trusting the trustees not to relocate Egan there, which is what would likely happen if it gets built. Egan even with 6th graders would sort of fit and match the plans LASD has for the site. BCS has 80% K-5 students and those K-5 students don’t need a Jr High site.
What could end up happening is that after Egan relocates Bullis with then 1200 students would fit on the current Egan site, using their portables for K-5 and the current Egan facilities for 6-8. That looks like the secret plan to me.
Thank you for this. I’ve been wondering what would happen to that site.