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The Los Altos School District board of trustees agreed Monday night to continue real estate negotiations for a new school site on El Camino Real, turning down the opportunity to focus on building a school on an existing campus in favor of land acquisition plans.
School district officials have grappled for years with the question of whether to buy new land for a tenth school site or build a second school on an existing campus to solve the district’s enrollment-growth woes. In an effort to get moving with concrete plans, the school board set the end of the school year as the deadline to decide whether to continue negotiating a real estate deal or start looking at district-owned property for the new school.
The construction plans are fueled by the district’s $150 million Measure N bond, which voters approved in November 2014. The bond was intended to buy land for a new school site, possibly to house Bullis Charter School, but the lack of available public land and the expensive local real estate market have made it challenging to make those plans a reality.
Despite the hurdles, board president Pablo Luther announced at the June 13 meeting that the board has agreed to keep pursuing a new school site at 5150 El Camino Real, an office complex in Los Altos owned by Boston-based TA Realty just blocks away from the San Antonio Shopping Center. Luther said it was a tough decision to make, but the land scarcity within the district boundaries means the board needs to act now if the district ever wants to increase its footprint.
“One of the overarching factors was the fact that land is fast disappearing from our community,” Luther said. “We felt that getting land today was an opportunity that we should not pass up, because we may not have that opportunity again.”
Despite the commitment, real estate negotiations are still ongoing, and Luther said the board will have to go through a period of “due diligence” to look at the costs and appropriate designs for a new school site before deciding on whether to buy the property.
Board member Sangeeth Peruri agreed that buying new land ought to be the district’s priority, and said it was an important step in preparing the school district for the future. He said the Los Altos School District cherishes the small-school model, and that kind of school would be hard to preserve amid land scarcity and future enrollment growth.
“I don’t see how, if we don’t add square footage and acreage with this bond, we will be able to accommodate that growth 20 or 30 years from now,” he said.
Details on what the school would look like were scant Monday night. Luther described the potential new campus as “21st century” and “different” from what the rest of the district’s schools look like. Board member Tammy Logan said the classroom and teaching space would be significantly larger per student — on the order of 50 to 60 percent more room per student.
Cost estimates for the potential new real estate were also absent from the discussion, though previous estimates have shown that it will take a significant portion of the bond proceeds. A staff report earlier this year estimated that purchasing land in the area north of El Camino Real could cost between $15 million and $17 million per acre, meaning land acquisition for a school site could cost between $75 million and $85 million. Building a multi-story school facility at the site could tack on an extra $75 million, according to the report.
Board member Vladimir Ivanovic said he was mindful of the district’s need for more space, but that he still had reservations on supporting a land purchase because of the cost of building a school. He said he wanted to see how feasible the plans would be once the costs are laid out for board members.
Seeking help from Mountain View
School district administrators have long maintained that a new school site would be necessary to handle enrollment growth in the coming years. That growth, according to a recent district-commissioned study, is virtually all coming from housing developments in the pipeline north of El Camino Real in Mountain View. Although more than a quarter of the district’s students live in Mountain View, none of the district’s nine schools is located here.
In more than one letter, Superintendent Jeff Baier has made an appeal to Mountain View City Council members in recent months requesting that the city find more ways to help finance new school construction in the district. In a letter to council members dated May 4, Baier suggested that new housing developments could meet public benefit requirements in the San Antonio Precise Plan by facilitating the development of a public school in the area.
Baier sent another letter to the council on June 6 expressing “serious concerns” about the increase in residential units recently approved by the council, causing projected enrollment to spike at an “unprecedented” rate. Baier told council members at their June 7 meeting that developer fees are not enough, and that the school district would be interested in working with the city to find ways for developers to contribute to the school district.
The day before the council meeting, the school district received a report by the firm Lapkoff and Gobalet Demographic Research, which found that a big increase in housing developments approved in Mountain View is expected to add hundreds of additional students to the district. Shelley Lapkoff said the facilities are already strained and are not designed to accommodate existing enrollment — which was determined using the district’s own assumptions on ideal school and class sizes — meaning there’s no space to handle the bulge of new students expected to enter the district by 2018.
The most recently approved and proposed projects combine to continue that trend, Lapkoff said. The San Antonio Center East proposal, for example, would add as many as 2,650 new residences to the 33-acre section of the southern side of the shopping center plaza.
“I was flabbergasted when I saw this — 2,650 housing units are being proposed for this area,” she said. “Granted it’s a 45-year period and it’s uncertain, but if anything like that gets approved, that’s probably another 500 students in your district.”
Mountain View council member Ken Rosenberg, who served on the school district’s Enrollment Growth Task Force, told the Voice that it’s become a frequent occurrence for members of the Los Altos community, particularly parents of school-aged children, to tell him that Mountain View is overcrowding the district with its new development. The divisiveness between cities, he said, is a little strange when 27 percent of the school district comes from Mountain View.
The real problem, Rosenberg said, lies in the adjacent cities on the Peninsula that continue to ignore the jobs-housing imbalance, and cities like Los Altos ought to do more to take up the slack in order to improve the quality of life in the region.
“We’re not trying to harm the Los Altos School District by building more housing,” Rosenberg said. “We want workers to live near their work, reduce traffic (and) greenhouse gas emissions.”
5150 El Camino is a terrible site for a school. There is no pedestrian or bicycle access via the adjacent neighborhood. Every student will need to be dropped off and picked up by car. Can you imagine a line of 800 cars queueing on El Camino for morning drop offs and afternoon pick ups? Nightmare!
That school board is smoking something. They are talking about building a 3 or 4 story school building with underground parking after tearing down the office building. They think they can buy the property and build this monster building for $100 Million in bond money. This story says they want Mountain View to pay part of the cost, more or less, through some new tax or fee to be imposed. Well, this would be illegal. They could create a School Facilities Improvement District but this has nothing to do with the city and would require a 55% vote of the voters in the area. That’s not going to happen so they can use it for the charter school.
Then there’s the matter of the secret meetings they are having about this. They are keeping a concept drawing for use of the site a secret, which is strange. There’s no way this is required to do their negotiation optimally with TA Realty on the purchase.
This is a way to convert bond money to operating cash. They will buy this site and realize they don’t have the capital to build the school. So they will start leasing it out to tenants and getting operating revenue.
Beautiful scheme.
Maybe this is all about replacing the Los Altos Bus Barn at the community center site. There is a fund raising effort to build a new theater in downtown Los Altos. Maybe they are tapping into that money, and building a joint use facility on El Camino Real (in Los Altos, bordering Mountain View). Maybe that’s where $30 Million of the funding is coming from!
A lot of speculation, but no one here has a clue…
Stop building new housing! Don’t need to cram
more people in Mt View, we will look like NYC soon. Rosenberg so wrong about reducing traffic, more people equal mkre traffic period. Why? Because they think they get people ‘closer to their jobs’ Maybe 50 years ago when people stayed at one job their whole life, but a large % of people change every 1-2 years now. Stop lining your pockets with developer money, focus on real quality of life improves for people who want to live in a beautiful city. The monstrosity on San Antonio going in is only the beginning….
Um, be reassured, last poster. The big example they cite about the 2560 units is a ways out. That housing that Federal Realty has proposed to develop when WalMart moves out in 45 years. So, a few things might change by then.
Pulling in numbers like this is a dis-service. The LASD doesn’t play 5 years ahead,
let alone 45. They did it first, but the story doesn’t note their deception. There are other projects which will add smaller amounts of housing before then, mostly for Google workers. It all remains to be seen how much turnover there is in Google workers and if they start to have kids. If they leave the ares and are replaced by more recent graduates from colleges around the world, well, that won’t add to the kids in schools, not anywhere around here anyway. The google alumni tend to leave the area.
Umm as I drive down El Camino with walls of units towering over each side, and pass the giant Prometheus monstrosity that will block out the sun on San Antonio, those will be in place in less than a year… That’s a couple thousand more right there. That’s a couple thousand more cars on the streets and a few hundred more students… This is now not 45 years from now…
Here’s my concern. There seems to be massive expansion going on in our community with little (or no) long term planning. The City leaders / councils in both Los Altos and Mountain View appear happy to let businesses and developers build like mad but little (or no) thought is going into transportation, schools, and other vital community services.
But for goodness sake, to build a school site along El Camino Real is probably the most hair brained scheme I’ve ever heard of. It makes many of Trump’s insane proposals sound almost reasonable. Board members Luther, Peruri and Ivanovic, please do not throw your community’s money down the drain. For $50 million you could purchase the Fenwick place free and clear and still have $100 million to build a hilltop luxury school. I believe the charter school would love it.
But do you really need a new school site? Are there other solutions? What will happen when the anticipated bunch of new students have moved through the Los Altos School District and onto high school / college?
Tammy Logan, one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever worked with has decided to leave the School Board two years ahead of time. Perhaps she sees the writing on the wall.
“Although more than a quarter of the district’s students live in Mountain View, none of the district’s nine schools is located here.”
Springer Elementary is located in Mountain View – maybe the intent was to point out that none of the LASD schools are located in the North of El Camino area of Mountain View.
27% of LASD students come from Mountain view, or about 1260. Fewer than 600 live in the MV area north of El Camino. Another 30 or so live in Palo Alto north of El Camino and are districted in LASD. The school district predates the existence of cityhood for a lot of the land involved. The district bought a site on E. Portola when it needed to expand schools in the 1950’s, and this site served the north of El Camino Area. Around 1980, LASD sold this site, which was a mistake. The taxpayers of Mountain View PAID for the purchase of the Portola Elementary School site and it was not their decision to close the school that served their area. Notice how Portola Elementary was near to El Camino, but not right on that highway. Who puts a school on a state highway in an area with lots of other roads?
And yes, Springer Elementary School serves mostly Mountain View residents, but some form Los Altos, and it is in the city of Mountain View.
Oak Avenue Elementary School serves a lot of Mountain View residents as well, and it is near the border between the two cities with it being just an accident what city it is located in. Nearby Mountain View High School is in Mountain View. Big deal as to what school lies in which city. LASD crosses the boundaries of 4 cities.
It is questionable whether new land needs to be acquired given that the former Hillview Elementary School site (free public land) was kept by the City of Los Altos originally for that purpose and given the ample size of both the Covington and Egan campuses. However, the 5150 El Camino site is an ideal location given that it is adjacent to an existing Mountain View Kinder Care facility and a Sylavan Learning Center, one block from the MVLA Montesori School also on the El Camino, and yet further down the road from Palo Alto Pre School and Palo Alto High School. Also situated on another major arterial, San Antonio Road, are other schools such as the Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School, Athena Academy, and the former San Antonio School site.
1000 students. Every day. Monday through Friday. 8AM through 4PM. All converging
on 5150 El Camino Real.
Sure, that’s the same thing as the Sylvan Learning Center. It’s just like Palo Alto High School. Except there’s no side streets as alternate access to the location. That’s the problem. All this traffic is going to run down S. Clark and Jordan Avenue and turn into 5150 at the same time of day, into a site layout without adequate drop off buffering.
It would be worse than an In N Out Burger drive through!
Simple three step solution to this mess:
Step 1 – Close Covington and give that campus to BCS
Step 2 – Move 6th grade to Egan/Blach and re-draw school attendance boundaries
Step 3 – Spend the $150M of Measure N bond funds to upgrade existing schools
Done!
https://agendaonline.net/public/Meeting.aspx?AgencyID=77&MeetingID=35505
The LASD Board is meeting again Monday the 25th to discuss in closed session two options for land purchase to create a new school. The two choices are (1) St William Church adjacent to Covington School and (2) 5150 El Camino Real on the very edge of the district and behind the homes on Casita Way. See https://agendaonline.net/public/Meeting.aspx?AgencyID=77&MeetingID=35505 . Both parcels are just under 4 acres, but note that Covington is a 16 acre district property currently housing just one 500 student elementary school and also district office functions which are not necessarily colocated at a school site. The flexibility of St William property added onto Covington and with 6.5 acre Rosita Park on the other side is amazing. The session is closed but public comments are accepted at 6pm.