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Looking to upgrade aging school facilities – and potentially build an entirely new campus – the Los Altos School District is asking voters to approve a $350 million bond measure this November.
Measure EE requires 55% support to pass. Those living in much of Los Altos and certain areas of Mountain View will have a chance to vote on the measure, because the Los Altos School District’s attendance boundaries encompass portions of both cities.
Bonds like Measure EE can only be spent on school facilities, including construction, rehabilitation and replacement, according to the county counsel’s analysis of the measure. That’s different from the district’s typical funding streams, which can generally be used for a wider range of expenses, including staff salaries and other operating expenses.
The school district has said that it would spend the majority of Measure EE funds on upgrading its existing campuses. It may also use some of the proceeds to build a school on a 11.7-acre parcel of land in Mountain View, known as the “10th school site,” that the district purchased in 2019. The school board has not decided what portion of Measure EE would go to the 10th site versus existing schools.
How much would you pay?
The bonds would be paid back by levying a tax on properties within the school district at an estimated average annual rate of $30 per $100,000 of assessed value. The total cost, including both the principal and interest over the life of the bond, is estimated at $730.8 million.
The text of the measure requires the school board to establish an independent citizens’ oversight committee to review bond spending. Independent annual performance and financial audits are also required.
What would the measure support?
The ballot measure language states that the money would be used to “upgrade aging neighborhood schools, enhance science, technology, engineering, and math classrooms/labs, fix leaky roofs/windows, improve school traffic safety, update aging heating, cooling/plumbing, and construct facilities needed to preserve small neighborhood schools.”
The school district has said most of Measure EE’s proceeds would go to improving existing campuses. Last month, the school board unanimously approved a facilities master plan, which lays out roughly $700 million in potential upgrades to the district’s nine current schools.
Measure EE wouldn’t raise enough money to pay for all of these improvements, but the facilities master plan identifies projects that the district wants to try to complete with the bond proceeds and places them into three priority groups.
“We need some basic renovations to get our classrooms up to speed to the 21st century,” Assistant Superintendent Business Services Erik Walukiewicz said. “They’ve been maintained relatively well, but it’s time to do some major renovations at all the school sites.”
The first priority group encompasses modernization projects on all nine campuses, including upgrading heating and cooling systems, making roofing repairs, updating classroom AV equipment and upgrading fire alarm systems.
The second group includes renovating the district’s two junior high schools so that they can accommodate sixth graders and upgrading the transitional kindergarten and kindergarten spaces at three of the district’s elementary school campuses.
The third group includes building new classrooms, libraries and innovation labs at certain campuses.
The facilities master plan is meant to be a living document, since needs can change over time, Walukiewicz said.
How many of these projects the district can afford is dependent in part on how much money is set aside for construction at the 10th school site. School board President Bryan Johnson said in August that he anticipated the board would decide before the election how it would split bond proceeds between existing campuses and the 10th site.
That didn’t end up happening. Johnson told the Voice recently that the board won’t be able to decide ahead of the election due to Bullis Charter School’s “ongoing dispute with the county over their charter renewal and the resulting uncertainty.” The Santa Clara County Board of Education approved a five year renewal of Bullis’ charter in August, but made it subject to a set of conditions. The charter school is contesting those conditions and the dispute is ongoing.
The school district purchased the 10th site, located at the corner of Showers Drive and California Street, nearly five years ago with plans to build a school, but construction hasn’t yet begun. The district has previously said it wants to place Bullis at the 10th site, while the charter school has said it isn’t interested in going there.
Arguments in favor of the bond measure
Bond measure supporters argue that the money would fund critical repairs to schools that haven’t been upgraded in almost three decades.
“Too many students are learning in deteriorating portable classrooms that are well past their useful age and expensive to maintain. We want to prepare local students to compete in high school, college and their future careers. We need Measure EE to provide the exceptional education our community expects,” the argument in favor of Measure EE that appears in the county’s official voter information guide states.
Among those who signed the ballot argument in favor are Los Altos Chamber of Commerce President Kim Mosley and the vice president of the Los Altos-Mountain View PTA Council.
They argue that despite Los Altos having some of the best schools in the country, students are learning in buildings with leaky roofs and have science labs that don’t meet modern standards.
Supporters also note that the measure would provide the money to have “10 schools on 10 campuses,” a reference to the 10th school site. Currently, in addition to the district’s nine schools, Bullis Charter School shares space at Egan and Blach junior high schools.
“We also know that having 10 schools at nine campuses isn’t working — with hundreds of students taking classes at overcrowded junior high schools in dilapidated portables,” the ballot argument in favor of the measure states.
The district has not yet decided what to build on the 10th site, with options including a 900-student school, 500-student school or simply razing the site, prepping it for future construction and building athletic fields and a gymnasium to fulfill the terms of a deal with the city of Mountain View.
Decisions about what to build on the 10th site and which school would go there “would be determined through a transparent, public process once Measure EE is approved,” the website in favor of Measure EE states.
Arguments against the bond measure
Bullis Charter School’s board has come out against Measure EE. In a press release, the board said that it had voted unanimously to oppose the bond, and raised concerns about the potential use of bond proceeds to build on the 10th school site.
Bullis’ board said it does not want the Los Altos School District to spend Measure EE funds to develop a school on the 10th site to house the charter school and is instead happy to continue being split between Blach and Egan.
“We have no wish to see students in district-run schools shortchanged so that LASD can spend $145+ million on a new school for us when we have made it abundantly clear that we do not want it,” the press release said.
Bullis also said it was “disconcerting” that the school district hasn’t been more transparent about the potential to spend a substantial portion of the bond proceeds on a new school, taking money away from improvements to existing sites. The charter school went on to say that the district could make adjustments to accommodate sixth graders at Blach and Egan without spending much of the bond proceeds on a 10th site.
Johnson responded that the majority of Measure EE funds would fund existing schools and that “to the extent that some funds may be allocated to the 10th site, it will be to reduce the overcrowding on the junior high campuses, which impacts the programs there on a daily basis.”
The school district’s board wasn’t unanimous about placing Measure EE on the ballot. Board member Vladimir Ivanovic was the sole “no” vote. He has argued that the bond measure “privileges” Bullis over the district’s schools by spending money to construct a campus on the 10th site.
The Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association and Libertarian Party of Santa Clara County are also against the bond and wrote the ballot argument in opposition to Measure EE.
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If you look back at this coverage of LASD’s facilities planning you can see what they were doing in 2015. https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2015/05/12/lasd-hosts-broad-outreach-sessions/
It’s interesting that since 2014, enrollment in LASD has dropped 26% but by 28% in grades 4-6 and 36% in grades 1-3. This demonstrates how the birthrate affects schools. Over time the lower number of kids in 1-3 will bubble up to higher grades. LASD Demographer projects a decline from 3162 in 2022-23 to 2800 in 2027-28 and 2600 in 2032-33. The talk back when the planning was done was all about GROWTH but we are forecasting is continued shrinkage. The effect is direct, i.e. portable classrooms from 2014 can now just be removed rather than replaced with permanent structures planned in 2015.
The demographer report also shows that LASD in 2022 had 189 students attending but who are not residents of the LASD territory. They project that this number remains the same going forward.
Hmm…. As recently as 2018, Bullis was pushing for a single site for its K-8th graders, stating that having a unified campus was integral to its learning model. Now the very real prospect of being put over by Walmart at the new site has the school backpedaling. I guess if Bullis can’t get a single site at Egan, the school will say anything to get out of having to move to the 10th site.
LASD has lost 1000 kids since 2018, from 4400 down to 3300. I guess LASD is kind of stuck on the idea that they are overcrowded. This bond measure is a complete waste of taxpayer dollars. Worse still, the charge back for the $150 Million spent from 2014 has only half way started to show up on property tax bills. Even if Measure EE goes down, property tax bills will go up next year.
LASD did a multiyear planning exercise between 2015 and 2016. They tried to justsify buying a 10th site then and got a huge set of contributions from the city of Mountain View and others so as to subsidize their efforts. Even after that the price tag for this new 10th site kept going up. The problem is partly that they hoped to get about $70 Million more in TDR sales set up by the city of Mountain View to help, because development and population growth has slowed. The TDR’s were salable either to apartment complexes or to office buildings. The up shot of LASD’s facilities master planning process was several options for this possible new site which ended up being at Kohl’s. The top two options were (a) to make a local elementary school to serve the area as it grew by the time the school would open or (b) relocate Egan Jr High to the site. Then after that Bullis’s 5 year agreement with the LASD and it needed more space because it had grown, i.e. added portables. LASD tried to offer Bullis the old Egan site because it would be left over after Egan relocated to the brand new campus. In the end Bullis got more new portables added at both Egan and Black to handle the growth. This occurred AFTER the last time LASD and Bullis negotiated. The outcome was that Bullis outgrew any potential location around San Antonio.
Also, LASD parents were quite upset at the idea of relocating 6th grade to the Jr High Sites. They did not want that! The Egan at San Antonio as envisioned need not have 6th grade there. It would only be about 450 kids in grades 7 and 8. That’s a much better fit for the small site, with only 8.5 usable acres. The expensive buildings have 2nd floors and that leaves the deluxe athletic fields and gym facilities required by the CIty of Mountain VIew for 7th and 8th graders, not primary school children!