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One of the highest-performing charter schools in the state has quietly staked out plans to create a second school in Santa Clara County, aimed at enrolling low-income children.
For the last year and a half, parents and school staff at Bullis Charter School have been exploring the idea of opening a second school, entirely separate from the existing Los Altos campus, that would serve a “high number” of students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. The ambitious plans are baked into the school’s strategic plan, and would help satisfy ongoing concerns that Bullis Charter students are almost exclusively from wealthy families.
Plans to replicate the charter school’s successful education model has been in the works for more than a year, but top school officials have deliberately avoided talking about them publicly, said John Phelps, chair of Bullis Charter School’s board of directors. The reticence to make a big announcement is not to say that the school is trying to hide the plans, he said, but more of an acknowledgment that it’s only at the start of a very long process.
“We do certainly see a lot of demand and strong interest, but we also need to do this in a very methodical way,” Phelps said. “We’re not in a position to talk about specific (school) locations at this point at all, unfortunately.”
The effort is entirely separate from the Los Altos School District’s plans to acquire land for a tenth campus in the San Antonio Shopping Center area of Mountain View. It’s not yet known if the district will opt to make it the new site for Bullis Charter School, which is housed in portables on two other LASD campuses. Phelps stressed that the idea of opening a school for lower-income students has nothing to do with the tenth site plans or the ongoing debate on a permanent campus for Bullis.
The school has a 19-person team exploring what it would take to open a new school that replicates the education model used at Bullis Charter School, which puts an emphasis on individualized learning and what it calls “focused learning goals,” closely tracking performance as well as aspirational goals set by the children themselves. The group has since created a short list of possible locations for the school, governance models and strategies for financing the school.
Huge wait lists
The demand for a new satellite campus created in the mold of Bullis Charter School is certainly there, Phelps said. During the lottery held in February each year, the school typically receives 10 applicants for every one kindergarten space, which is partly due to the school’s 900-student enrollment cap set by the Los Altos School District in the so-called five-year agreement. The terms of the agreement are currently under negotiation behind closed doors and may be revised.
Grace Yang, a parent whose children recently graduated from Bullis, is one of the longtime leaders of the team seeking to extend the charter school’s reach to more students. She said opening a new campus has been in the works for several years, and that it now represents a “near-term” plan of action. Recently, she said the goal was revised to include the “many opportunities” to open a school in San Mateo County as well, and that the search for a school site isn’t constrained by Santa Clara County boundaries.
The long line of families applying to get into kindergarten at Bullis frequently reaches 1,000 students, Yang said, which means that the education programs at the charter school are clearly resonating with a community extending beyond Los Altos School District. Prospective students from outside of LASD’s attendance boundaries are allowed to apply, according to Bullis’ charter renewal. It’s incumbent on the school, Yang said, to explore ways to share what’s worked at Bullis with more people.
“If you look at the wait list numbers for BCS, clearly many, many community members, including those in surrounding districts, are interested in what it has to offer,” she said. “It’s kind of our responsibility to make that available to anyone who wants it.”
Concern over lack of low-income students
During the lengthy charter renewal process that Bullis went through in 2016 with the county, it was abundantly clear throughout the 1,063-page petition that staff from the Santa Clara County Office of Education were concerned about the charter school’s “continued challenge” in enrolling lower-income students. The county’s charter school staff cited data from 2015 showing that only 1 percent of students in the school have household incomes that qualifies them for free and reduced-price meals, compared to 5 percent throughout the school district. The low number was flagged as a “concern,” and staff requested that the district find ways to enroll a more equitable number of low-income families.
The report says that plans for a school serving low-income students would not fix the problem, and that the charter school should consider more immediate measures to solve the imbalance.
“BCS’s strategic plan of opening a new school to remedy this issue, while admirable, does not provide remedy to their current lack of a reflective student population at their site,” according to the county report.
Though the figures have been hotly contested in the past — Yang and Phelps both told the Voice that the student demographics are reflective of the population that Bullis serves — Bullis Superintendent Wanny Hersey acknowledged during a May 2016 charter renewal hearing that it has been a struggle.
“We are trying a lot of different things, (but) that is the one group that is very difficult, that we haven’t been able to crack,” she said.
County school board members Rosemary Kamei and Darcie Green suggested that Bullis could modify its admissions preferences so students from lower-income backgrounds would get higher preference during the lottery process, making it easier to balance out the student demographics. Phelps said that Bullis Charter School’s board of directors had not explored the idea at that point.
In recent years, the school has launched multiple initiatives aimed at helping lower-income and minority families, including those living outside of the Los Altos district’s boundaries. Six years ago, Bullis parents launched the Bullis Boosters Camp, an all-expenses-paid summer bridge program that serves close to 50 disadvantaged youth in the Mountain View and Los Altos areas.
The school also created a Stretch to Kindergarten program for incoming kindergarteners who did not attend preschool, and may be missing key socio-emotional, language and math skills needed to keep up with their peers. The vast majority of the 16 enrollees each year are low-income Latino students. Although the program is sponsored by Bullis, children enrolled in it are not given any priority for admission into Bullis.
Yang said it’s a given that a new charter school campus serving primarily low-income students would need to be modified to better suit the needs of the students, given the different demographics. But the core elements of the education programs at Bullis — hands-on learning projects, closely monitored learning goals and extended-day programs — would all carry over to the new school.
Financing for the prospective charter school is also expected to vary significantly from Bullis, which relies on private contributions from the school’s nonprofit community foundation. Multi-year projections show that more than a third of Bullis’ annual budget — $4 million — comes directly from parents of students and community members, fueled largely by families who are encouraged to donate $5,000 per student each year.
Phelps said the 19-member team is still researching how the finances would shake out, but said there are many school districts that rely on per-pupil funding and would be better positioned than Los Altos School District to fund a school with mostly lower-income students. There are also plenty of state, federal and private grants for the kind of charter school that Bullis is seeking to open, he said.
“We are very excited about this, and we’re doing our homework to ensure we do this in the best possible way,” Phelps said.
@Gary, relegating “those” children to a “separate but equal” school is called segregation. Not a shock that BCS would respond to the legitimate concern about their “continued challenge” to enroll lower income kids by attempting to ship them off. If they carried a normal 5% ratio of lower income kids, of course their test scores would drop, but they would be doing the right thing.
@ Ron MV
This isn’t “dumping” on Bullis. It is looking at the history and the facts.
It’s not a surprise that Bullis would want to create a “special” school (separate, of course) to try to combat the bad press they get for not having lower-income children at their campus in the same percentage as they occur in the district as a whole. They can claim altruism and still keep “those” kids separate from their little darlings. They will also be able to continue to claim that they provide a superior education relative to the rest of the district because the separation will allow them to continue to exclude the scores of those children who are likely to score lower on standard tests.
The truth of the matter is that Bullis has a history of excluding lower-income children and children with special needs. They claim to be a public school (they proclaim that on their literature and signage), yet they shame those who don’t pay their $5000 per child per year “donation” and they actively exclude children with special needs, claiming that they should attend district schools where their issues “can be dealt with” since they don’t have educators capable to do the job.
What is the result? The district has to educate everybody, so they expend money on the more difficult to educate children while Bullis is free to use their endowment funds to provide special opportunities to their children (trips to China, for example) and they still get classroom space and other benefits from the district, all the while complaining that they are somehow being abused.
The fact is this. Bullis has used the charter school law in this state to wage a war on LASD. Charter schools are meant to provide an alternative in under-performing school districts. LASD is NOT an under-performing district. As a matter of fact, ALL the district schools are top-performing California schools. The difference between Bullis scores and LASD district scores is negligible, so the fact they continue to exist is pointless.
If Bullis really wants to help anyone, they should stop pretending to be a public school and re-brand themselves as the private school they are in everything but name.
@Ron MV: my immediate reaction to the article was “separate but equal”. However, I am sure the Bullis people mean well and are sincere in their effort to offer an excellent education to underprivileged students. I certainly believe that they would do a superior job to anything government might propose.
Kudos to BCS for trying to help low income kids. A separate school will be more conducive to advancing these kids as the program can be geared specifically to them. For many of the low income kids (not all), trying to mainstream them into the very challenging program at the main BCS site could become an exercise in frustration as they have trouble competing with the higher socioeconomic kids coming from more educated families. We’d like these kids to see themselves as successful, not failures.
One really has to admire the Bullis curriculum for its inflexibility in addressing the needs of low income students… so inflexible that a whole separate school should be set up! That had to take some effort.
Perhaps they could learn from studying differentiated instruction and personalized learning. Like we have in Mountain View public schools, who happily serve kids from all backgrounds and allow them to mix socially, athletically, academically, etc. and move between learning levels as they grow as students, without having to change schools, make new friends, or drive cross-town (thank you, new boundaries and Slater!)
Can’t wait to see how these groups (and their parents) mix when they get to high school… one group of students who has learned segmentation and division by economic class, and one that has learned flexibility, diversity, and reward for individual achievement. Should be interesting!
To THANKS BCS and others who’s posts smack of this. Please get this…LOW INCOME DOES NOT HAVE TO EQUAL LOW INTELLIGENCE. Sure, there are many challenges to being low-income, but having a working brain isn’t automatically one of them. The main problem is access. Families with enough money have better access to many things. When talking about academics, the label low-income should be removed from the conversation. The “low-income” kids don’t need to be mainstreamed into quality, challenging education. ALL kids should have that. If learning issues sow themselves, which occur across income levels, then you start looking at different ways to meet those challenges. Please stop looking at this as a way for privileged, educated people to come in and help the less fortunate.
An interesting question is the disparity in free and reduced price lunches between Mountain View Whisman and Los Altos school districts. LASD is under 5%, and they have to work hard to keep it that high. There are free and reduced price lunch students at the schools serving their most expensive areas, such as Oak, Loyola, Gardner Bullis. However, it gets down to below 1% in these areas. Where do you find 5 low income students in an area like that served by Oak? It’s also interesting that in Jr high numbers are so different. 238 FRPL kids in the whole district. 25% of enrollment is split between 2 junior highs. 47 of 650 students at Egan Jr High and only 11 of 500 kids at Blach get FRPL.
Anyway, contrast this to MVWSD. There are 45% or so free and reduced price lunch in MVWSD across all schools fairly evenly. Of course they have been picking attendance area components to bump up the total at Huff. Some kids there come from the Whisman area.
Anyway, the point is that some of the people commenting here make it seem like Bullis could recruit a lot of FRPL kids if they only tried. It’s not like MVWSD. There aren’t 3000 to draw from. District-wide it’s only been a number like 238, 25% in the Jr Highs.
If you look at the family income from LASD students compared to Bullis, it’s about the same. Both are way way more than in MVWSD. The real “crime” is the disparity between MVWSD and LASD
@Sadly amused- who said low income = low intelligence? One only has to look at the scores in any distric to see that the low income kids are performing significantly below their higher socioeconomic peers. That’s a fact, not conjecture. While IQ might play a part in some instances, the fact that the higher socioeconomic kids come from more educated families with education as a high priority for their kids is a strong determinant in outcome.
And while you seem to have a chip on your shoulder against affluent residents, I applaud the “privileged, well educated” folks for trying to help their less fortunate neighbors. Your attitude won’t help these kids but a specialized program might.
Seems divisive the have’s and the have nots.
How sad for all the students.
@Thanks BCS and @Let’S Be Thankful, addressing both of your comments…
No chip on my shoulder. Not sure how or why you’ve made an assumption that I am not affluent. I don’t understand why you think low income parents don’t value and prioritize a good education for their children. My son was in the choice DI program at Castro elementary with many, many low income families. You would be hard pressed to find a more committed, enthusiastic, and active group of parents. The same was true for many, many families in the traditional program at the school. I don’t know the exact figure, but Castro had a high percentage of kids eligible for free and reduced price lunches. The problem, again, is access. If parents are mono-lingual in their native language, they may not know about or understand other opportunities that are available, or that scholarships might be available. If parents didn’t go far in their own education, they may not know how to navigate a school system very well, or may be very intimidated by it all. This should not be interpreted as not wanting their kids to have a great education. I’m sure you’re not intending this, and people with the misperceptions you have don’t recognize themselves this way, but I must tell you…your elitism and classism are showing.
It’s worth noting that the LASD board talked of a school along California Street in their district as being a school in need of intense social support for the students. I.e., although they do nothing like that in any of their schools, they went on at length about how the 10th site committee might consider that. But is this an area where that would be appropriate?
This Bullis idea of going into East Palo Alto would make more sense as a location needing intense social support, since that school district already has programs like that in their schools. They have 90% lunch program eligibility.
But LASD has only 5% low income students overall, and 5 of the 7 elementary schools have only 1%. How is Bullis expected to be different than these 5 other elementary schools at 1%?
Meanwhile, Mountain View Whisman has declined from 43% lunch program eligibility to 34%. In the area around San Antonio/California Street, LASD has under 20% lunch program eligibility.
So what the heck is LASD talking about? This San Antonio/California Street area is above their low district-wide average, but it’s not highly deprived. It’s not a good place to establish a program for low income kids. LASD already has two schools with higher low income presence, with 10% and 13%. If a social support program is warranted for 18% low income presence, it is about the same in the case of a 13% low income presence. Why isn’t LASD already acting if they feel this is appropriate?
LASD is all talk and no action when it comes to caring for its lower income students. They also don’t do such a good job on other concerns. The interest in the charter school proves that. The article here says the charter school is all high income kids, which is just not true. It’s about the same income level as the overall LASD population. The Bullis program doesn’t depend on extraordinary support.
If Bullis opens a school in East Palo Alto with 90% disadvantaged students per state rules, they will qualify for about $5000 more per student than at their LASD branch. The LCFF dramatically increases funding to each disadvantaged student, and even more so when the proportion exceeds 50%.
So with ZERO private contributions per student, such a new school would have the SAME funding as Bullis uses for its first school.
I applaud the Bullis Charter School. They are filling a need — without them, the parents in Los Altos would be forced to go to a private school. By subsidizing these parents with public money, they are able to keep their children in a public school, while getting all the benefits of a private one.
These are well spent tax dollars, and we should encourage Bullis in any way we can to help them with this mission.
@ Sadly Amused: I’m not sure what your point is. The article is about BCS consideration of a program exclusively for low income kids using innovative techniques in attempts to improve their education. In every LASD and MVWSD school the LI kids are performing well below the non LI kids. You tout Mistral DI but that school shows 92% proficiency for non LI kids vs 32% proficiency for LI kids. You can stand on your soap box all day long proselytizing about my “elitism” but your way isn’t working. Again, my hat’s off to BCS for wanting to try something to actually help these kids rather than spouting about egalitarianism which is nothing but feel good rhetoric for the spouters.
BCS receives approximately 10 applications for every space available. Students residing in LASD receive priority in the school’s lottery so ALL of these seats are filled by LASD residents. BCS is not trying to segregate students within LASD. They are looking to launch a new school in a different school district to bring their proven curriculum methods to an underserved community. How can you argue with that?
John,
Like most public schools, charter schools receive funding from the state based on the # of students attending.
From http://www.edsource.org:
“Charter schools are public schools that get funding from the state and have greater flexibility in hiring, curriculum, management and other aspects of their operations. Unlike traditional public schools that are run by school districts with an elected school board and a board-appointed superintendent, most charter schools are run by organizations with their own self-appointed boards.
In general, this independence gives charter schools more room to experiment and to come up with instructional and other innovations. That was one of the chief reasons California lawmakers passed a law in 1992 allowing charters to operate. California was the second state to pass legislation allowing charters (Minnesota was the first).”
It is understandable that Bullis parents would not want any preference the admission of children from low-income families and that they would prefer a separate school for “those” children. What do readers think? How about making the new school at the Safeway site on California in Mountain View just for children from low-income families? What possible sites have been identified? How about in San Jose? Can Bullis Charter open a “satelite campus” in any city or county in California? El Camino Hospital, remember, expanded to Los Gatos. Just asking.
@Gary
Wow. Way to start off the discussion with snark and pointing fingers. They look at offing education to low income students and immediately you dump on them for it. Nicely done.
I would applaud BCS for opening a school to specifically serve lower income children. It would be a great test to see if their much vaunted and “innovative” curriculum delivers superior results in populations that are disadvantaged vs the elite of the elite they serve today. I’m not sure how effectively they could replicate their program without the $5K average “donation” per student, but it’s worth a shot. However, this should in no way absolve them of their responsibility at their existing school to serve both the lower income, and learning disabled students in the same proportions that LASD does. They need to improve outreach and take concrete steps to balance their population to better reflect the community they serve. One thing they could easily do, is to have a first round of admission lottery with only lower income and learning disabled children until they hit the appropriate percentages, then continue with a round of all applicants (including those unchosen from the first round). This would ensure balance and even allow for the possibility of serving slightly more than the rest of LASD. Charter laws were originally intended to help disadvantaged and underserved students. BCS should take action to comply with the spirit of those laws both in their existing school, and any new school they open.
So California charter schools can expand to other districts in the county and offer whatever program they can fund with public and private money. The public money would be taken from the school district(s) from which the students are drawn. Is that how it works?
Bullis Charter will make use of the San Antonio site that should be a. neighborhood school. LASD will put Bullis there to get them out of Los Altos. Right? There are some slick PR specialists at work for LASD and Bullis Charter. No wonder they only communicate with each other through their lawyers.