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For the first time, the Los Altos School District board formally came out this week in favor of placing Bullis at its long-awaited 10th campus, a move that the charter school strongly opposes.
The school board voted 4-1, with Vladimir Ivanovic dissenting, at a Monday, Oct. 13 meeting to direct staff to pursue allocating its new Mountain View location to Bullis Charter School upon the site’s completion, which is expected in fall 2028.
While the final decision to move Bullis will come later, Superintendent Sandra McGonagle told the board that district staff needed clear direction in order to take the next steps in the process.
With hopes to build an additional campus, the Los Altos School District purchased 11.7 acres in Mountain View’s San Antonio Shopping Center in 2019. However, deciding which school to place there has proven to be difficult and controversial. District parents have previously opposed plans to move Egan Junior High School to the new site and Bullis officials have similarly objected to the idea of relocating.
Board members Bryan Johnson and Vaishali Sirkay expressed disappointment that no representatives from the charter school came to Monday’s meeting. Sirkay said that it would be “irresponsible” of her not to weigh district families’ perspectives more heavily than those of Bullis community members, adding that the majority of school district parents don’t want one of their schools to be moved.
“Our families have chosen to make LASD their academic home,” she said. “I want to be respectful of that, and I want to honor that.”
In contrast, charter school officials claim that placing Bullis at the San Antonio site without its consent would be illegal, citing a section of California Education Code, which states that the district needs to “make reasonable efforts to provide the charter school with facilities near to where the charter school wishes to locate, and shall not move the charter school unnecessarily.”
“BCS has made clear over and over again that we do not wish to move to the San Antonio Site,” Bullis’ board said in a Monday letter to school district trustees. “The October 13, 2025 agenda item appears to confirm what BCS and other taxpayers have long suspected—that LASD’s acquisition of the San Antonio Site was and is a sham pretext to attempt a forced relocation of BCS. Again, BCS has made its home at Egan and Blach, and intend to remain at those locations.”
Bullis is currently housed in portable classrooms at the two junior high schools. The district is planning to build a 607-student school on the San Antonio site, which wouldn’t fit the nearly 1,000 kids who attend Bullis.
Instead, board members voted on Monday to study whether Egan or Blach would be a better second site for the charter school. The board also approved schematic design plans for the new campus.
Three community members provided public comment about Bullis at the meeting, all favoring putting the charter school at the San Antonio site.
“This community overwhelmingly requested putting BCS on the San Antonio Site during the very lengthy and involved multi-session community engagement that occurred before the pandemic,” former LASD parent Danielle James told the board.
In addition to solving the issue of where to house Bullis, McGonagle said Monday that one of the district’s other main priorities is to transition to a sixth- through eighth-grade middle school model in three years. Currently, only seventh and eighth graders attend Egan and Blach.
The district has been trying for years to change this, but hasn’t been able to make any progress because of Bullis’ large footprint on both campuses, Assistant Superintendent Erik Walukiewicz told the Voice after the meeting.
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No surprise they want to move Bullis to the new site. Of course site will only hold ~600 students, ~60% of Bullis enrollment so where will the other ~400 Bullis students go? Split with 200 at Egan and 200 at Blach? Give an existing elementary school campus to Bullis (watch the fireworks start if that happens)? What will the average elementary school population be when they move sixth graders to Egan and Blach?
The LASD board is clueless. Did they reach out to the charter school and ask for input? They just expect a delegation to appear at the Board meeting? That would violate the Brown Act unless they just spoke in public comments for 2 minutes each. Pointless. No way to run a railroad.
The obvious example is the sloppy way they talk about putting part of Bullis at San Antonio. The enrollment fluctuates from year to year and involves specific number of students in specific numbers of classrooms. You can’t just magically get 607 kids at San Antonio in any year. It’s more like you allocate the space to Bullis and then they would place 500-600 kids in one site and another 400-500 in another. Only Egan could hold 450 students, so the 2nd site would have to be Egan. Or perhaps the charter school would need both their Egan site and their Blach site, but with fewer kids at each. That’s the only way the one board member’s idea of Bullis using San Antonio just for their middle school. BCS Middle school grades 6 through 8 only has about 330 kids most years.
Now interestingly, as small as the outdoor space is at that site, 330 kids is about what it could handle. All the LASD sites have at least 7 acres of outdoor space and they are all only 350-450 students.
The LASD Board should not make sloppy comments like saying they would be happy if Bullis just used San Antonio for grades 6 through 8 unless they truly mean it. If so, then both Egan and Blach would need to have another 300-400 students, i.e. maybe 300 at Blach and 400 at Egan, less than what Bullis has to cram into those spots now.