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By Chris Chiang
As a former trustee, I urge the community to ask their MVWSD school board to accept the city’s standing offer to sign the 3-year contract that MVLA has already signed with the city, which will ensure MVWSD receives $6.5 million in additional funds annually.
MVWSD is gambling its cash reserves by engaging in a “game of chicken” with the city. Though the reality for students is no game. Without a Shoreline agreement, MVWSD faces a $10.6 million deficit; burning down its cash reserves, meant to weather economic downturns, would result in its reserve going from 40.4% to 2.4% by 2026 (Sept. 5 board meeting). These reserves took decades to build up.
The city does not have the bandwidth to spend more time on the school district’s political machinations. As a former MVWSD board member, I myself felt exasperated by how much leadership time is spent fighting the city over the minutia of the Civics Center Act on how little the city charges for field use, which held up the Joint Use Agreement regarding school fields and parks, leaving the community with a new, less collaborative parks agreement. Then, MVWSD’s refusal to sign the renewal of the Shoreline shared funding agreement, which will again leave MVWSD and Mountain View with less than it had before.
How does MVWSD plan to negotiate without MVLA or the city? Does it think hundreds of thousands of tax dollars spent on a Washington, D.C.-led public relations campaign will compel the city to meet MVWSD’s demands? I don’t think anyone other than MVWSD thinks House of Cards is how local governments treat each other.
The school district would like parents to believe that the city is uncooperative. Yet the city has made it clear that within the timeframe of their three-year standing offer, the city will continue to work with MVWSD to develop a long-term funding formula. The city states it cannot commit to a long-term formula until it itself knows what is the future of North Bayshore, which has been changing as Google itself changes its vision for North Bayshore.
So why does the city make this offer? Having seen the city’s reactions to school district’s constant and changing requests, I assume it offers this agreement not to trick MVWSD, but to free itself of MVWSD issues for a time, enough time for it to focus on other pressing issues, and to give it time to know what will be the future of Shoreline. I also believe the city and the City Council do care about school needs, and that drives their work too.
Does MVWSD care about the needs of the city and Shoreline? The MVWSD school board frequently speaks of Google and Shoreline as buckets of money waiting for them. The tax revenue that would otherwise go to schools if it were not for the Shoreline tax district is not being hoarded or wasted by the city but planned for other public investments.
North Bayshore/Shoreline was once a garbage dump with little revenue for anyone; community planning, luck of geography, and Google are what created this tax base that everyone benefits from, and yet changes aren’t done. With continued support for more housing and infrastructure investments, the future tax revenue of a new residential neighborhood in North Bayshore may once again dramatically increase the tax base for everyone. The city has already agreed to pass to our schools their full property tax revenue for all new housing built in North Bayshore.
MVWSD families benefit from more housing. MVWSD’s clamoring for Shoreline funds puts future Shoreline housing at risk by injecting financial instability into housing plans. Regarding the promises Trustee Blakely spoke of in her Sept. 21 Shoreline editorial, I wish MVWSD had invested in STEAM with Measure T, as was promised in its ballot language, but not a dollar of investments in STEAM were made. The other promises for more world language and gifted instruction, all if more Shoreline funds are given to MVWSD; I hope the school board realizes they could invest in all those worthy programs with or without even more Shoreline funds. Ultimately, I wish the school board would take more time to listen to the community on how it is spending its existing revenue.
Chris Chiang is a former board member of the Mountain View Whisman School District
The district should try to maximize what it gets, but you’re right that it is unnecessarily playing a game of chicken. The city doesn’t legally need to give the district anything at all. Dr. Rudolph thinks that he’s holding a gun to the city but the district is actually shooting itself in the foot. DC-based PR firm wins, our children lose.
Rudolph needs to be replaced. It’s his time to go. He’s too long on the job and is making the district suffer for his boredom which explains all the fights he is picking.
As for revenue, MVWSD has 130% of the LCFF funding of the average elementary school district in the site and then beyond that with parcel taxes and city contributions, it gets another $4300 per ADA beyond that! This data is for 2022-23. It’s total per ADA funding is $26,600. Compare to Los Altos elementary which is at $25,300 per ADA. Also, the deals with the city save MVWSD spending much on groundskeeping which big cost that is avoided. The city proposed amount has a big increase for MVWSD as it is. They are just very inefficient and money grubbing. The waste money that should be used for education on frills and luxuries. There is such a thing as having too much money and MVWSD has proven they are in that situation. They have no citizen’s oversight committee and the board is led astray by Rudolph. They propse a new committee to pretend to be oversight, but is planned to have just ONE SINGLE community member on it. A joke!