After a marathon discussion last week that drew an overflow crowd of parents, members of the Mountain View Whisman school board indicated they had no appetite for closing down a neighborhood school. Earlier plans drafted by district staff singled out Theuerkauf Elementary School for possible closure.
And while it was a first step towards coming to a consensus on decisions to redraw the patchwork of school boundaries and meet demands to open a school in the Whisman and Slater neighborhood area, the board could only offer split votes and a handful of ideas on how to go forward.
At the March 19 meeting, the majority of the board opposed the idea of closing an existing school in order to open a new one in the northeast quadrant of the city. Two of the five board members, Ellen Wheeler and Steve Nelson, indicated that they would still be willing to look at options where the Stevenson campus is closed and its parent participation (PACT) program is moved to another location.
“PACT is a program, not a school, so I’m willing to close Stevenson,” Wheeler said. She was the only trustee willing to support, specific district-wide plans, including moving the PACT program to the former site of Whisman Elementary School.
District-wide plans on the table right now include re-opening Whisman Elementary School as a neighborhood school and leaving the other campuses intact, or moving PACT to the Whisman or Theuerkauf campuses and closing down the Stevenson campus. Wheeler said she supported moving PACT to Whisman.
But moving choice programs around faces opposition from PACT parents, who made their wishes known during the meeting. When Nelson suggested that the PACT community does not have any strong attachment to the Stevenson site, he was met with vocal opposition from Stevenson parents in the room who did not want the program uprooted.
“You guys would rather be in these old buildings for the next 10 years?” Nelson asked. “Rather than to be in a new school?”
“Yes!” shouted several parents in response.
Stevenson parents also took issue with the idea of a “hybrid” boundary, in which some students would have enrollment priority over others. If PACT is moved to Theuerkauf, for example, families within the Theuerkauf attendance boundary would get priority for enrollment into the PACT program, which draws students from all over the district.
Marco Garcia, a Stevenson parent, told the board that enrollment that is based on proximity over family choice wold be problematic, and that PACT needs to remain a district-wide program accessible to all students.
“Our progressive education model and philosophy is of the utmost importance, and families must choose Stevenson PACT for its unique mission above any other reason,” he said.
Board president Chris Chiang said he opposed the hybrid boundary because it would result in PACT no longer being a choice program. He said it would also mean Theuerkauf students who want to go to a neighborhood school will have to travel to Monta Loma.
“Rengstorff is a gnarly street to cross,” Chiang said. “Monta Loma was not designed for those streets.”
Theuerkauf parents show strength in numbers
The board discussion was largely a response to the district’s Boundary Advisory Task Force meeting, held earlier this month, where members refused to give the board recommendations] on the handful of district-wide plans. Members of the task force said they lacked critical information and adequate time to consider the effects of the decisions before bringing recommendations to the school board.Among the questions to the board Thursday night, task force members asked for a definitive answer on whether the district should stay at its current eight elementary schools or find enough money in the budget to take on the operational costs of nine schools by re-opening a campus in the Whisman and Slater area. If the board sides with district staff and says the district can only afford eight schools, officials may have to scrap plans for a new school or shut down an existing school to make way for the new one.
Parents from all over the district packed the small board room and with the overflow ending up in a “viewing” room. Among the attendees were about 30 parents and students from Theuerkauf sporting the school’s blue shirts. They held signs demanding PACT not be moved to Theuerkauf and that the district let Theuerkauf remain a neighborhood school.
Lisa Whitfield, a district parent, said it doesn’t make sense to open Whisman and close Theuerkauf to re-open Whisman Elementary. While the northeast “quadrant” of Mountain View has been without a nearby school since 2006, she said the district shouldn’t solve one neighborhood’s problem by shutting down another neighborhood’s school.
“I completely understand that they want to have a neighborhood school,” Whitfield said. “I don’t think it makes sense to uproot Theuerkauf, a great school with great parents and a great network, to make that happen.”
Chiang said there are “creative solutions” to opening Whisman, but urged his colleagues not to commit themselves to opening Whisman yet, especially if it means doing something to Theuerkauf or Stevenson Elemenetary.
“If you say yes to Whisman, you’re basically saying yes to blending PACT … or closing Theuerkauf,” Chiang said.
Bob Weaver, a district resident and long-time advocate for opening a neighborhood school in the Whisman and Slater area, said the community in northeast Mountain View has been patient ever since the district closed Whisman 15 years ago. He said all options need to be open in considering a new school, including the possibility of moving the Dual Immersion language program from Castro Elementary.
“You’re not putting all the chips on the table,” Weaver said to the board.
All the trustees except board member Greg Coladonato opposed the idea of moving Dual Immersion.
The other possibility, which would avoid the problem altogether, would be to re-open Whisman elementary and leave all other schools intact. But district staff reports say that option is not financially feasible because it spreads resources too thin and puts enrollment numbers at unsustainable levels at each school.
Board member Bill Lambert, who expressed skepticism over opening a new school, said the district staff and the task force ought to look at new ways the district could rent out land and facilities to generate more money and use it to effectively run school programs.
Chiang, on the other hand, said making the most out of its facilities in an area where land is in such high demand could make a nine-school solution more plausible. Though Coladonato suggested the district make better use of its land at Cooper and Sylvan parks, Chiang said there are plenty of creative ways to shift around facilities at the district’s large, 17-acre parcel where Stevenson, Theuerkauf and the district offices are located.
A combination of new revenue sources and holding onto Measure G bond money for future plans to open Whisman Elementary could make for a financially feasible ninth school, Chiang said.
Nelson was uneasy with the idea of putting off plans for Whisman Elementary, and questioned whether the district could hold onto that type of money amid site improvements at the rest of the schools. He said the district ran out of money from the last bond before it finished all the sites, leaving Monta Loma with unfinished roofs.
“It doesn’t work unless there’s a district-wide plan,” Nelson said.
Coladonato said the money is already there for re-opening and running a school at the Whisman site in the form of “at least $40 million in lease revenue,” which he said is currently sitting in the district’s substantial reserve funds. Coladonato said he was concerned that delaying concrete plans on Whisman now will mean the bond money will dry up and the area will continue to go without a nearby school.
“If we don’t decide to start doing something at Whisman or Slater now, I have a feeling it’s going to happen again. There’s going to be another bond that completely passes the northeast quadrant of town,” he said.
Challenging the numbers
One of the primary factors driving the debate over having eight or nine schools is that enrollment is expected to flatten out and decline in the coming years, despite new housing developments and increasing demand to live in Mountain View.The number of elementary school students in the district is at 3,611 this year, and is projected to decrease next year and nearly every year after that, all the way to the 2024-25 school year, according to a demographic study by Jack Shreder and Associates. The study takes into account city-approved residential developments, including hundreds of row houses and multifamily homes.
The projected “student generation rate” of row houses, in particular, is about 0.07, meaning the district can expect to see about 7 students for every 100 row houses built. Coladonato questioned those rates at the board meeting and said he did an anecdotal headcount of the students at the Ada Avenue row house development. There, he said, he was able to find seven kids in seven houses where he should have found only four among the 59 homes.
Stevenson parent Kate Kester said if Google’s new plans in North Bayshore are approved it could mean as many as 10,000 more employees in the area, which she said is going to put plenty of kids in the district’s schools no matter what the student generation rates are.
“If it’s true that we’re going to have 10,000 more Google employees, then I think that there has to be at least 500 more children who are elementary-aged coming out of that,” Kester said. “Growth in this school district is inevitable in the next few years.”
Nik Kalyani, also a Stevenson parent, said there appears to be a lot of problems with the data the district staff has been using to steer its decisions, and that it would be good to disseminate the raw information so the public can look through the data and fact-check it.
“There’s a concept in information technology called ‘garbage in, garbage out,’ which translates into ‘bad data results in bad decisions,'” Kalyani said. “There’s plenty of us (in Mountain View) who are qualified who can analyze this data and come up with scenarios … but we need the data for that. The raw data.”
Email Kevin Forestieri at kforestieri@mv-voice.com
