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The Mountain View City Council reluctantly agreed last week to update the terms of a deal for a long-awaited new school campus, despite concerns that it might not serve students living near it.
In a 4-2 vote, the City Council approved a 99-year funding and joint use agreement with the Los Altos School District that gives the district more discretion to determine what type of school will be developed on an 11.7-acre site in the San Antonio area often referred to as the “10th school site.”
Council members Emily Ann Ramos and Pat Showalter cast the dissenting votes while Council member John McAlister was absent from the Sept. 9 meeting.
The updated agreement makes three key changes to the original agreement. It extends the deadline for the district to construct a 4-acre outdoor area, including athletic fields, that will be shared with the city. It changes a funding structure related to development rights, giving the city the chance to potentially add millions to its coffers. And, perhaps most contentiously, it removes a requirement for the school to serve students living in the surrounding neighborhood.
The city doesn’t have the ability to compel the district to put a school on the site that serves neighborhood kids, according to city officials.
“It’s clear that we don’t have that land use authority,” Ramos said at last week’s meeting. “Our only option is to walk away or accept what we got. And it’s not entirely bad, but it’s not exactly what we want.”
For more than a decade, the Los Altos School District has wanted to build a new school to address overcrowding on existing campuses and to find a solution to the thorny issue of where to house Bullis Charter School.
In 2019, the district finally acquired a 10th school site at the corner of Showers Drive and California Street in the San Antonio Shopping Center.
From the start, the city has been heavily involved in the financing of the campus, which the district bought for $155 million. The city agreed to pay the district $20 million in exchange for 2 acres of land that it plans to turn into a park. It also pitched in $23 million for the use of 4 acres of recreational facilities during non-school hours, including public access to athletic fields and a gymnasium.
As part of the deal, the city and district negotiated a joint use agreement that stated the school would serve the surrounding Mountain View community, including neighborhood students. Per the agreement, even if a charter or choice school were placed on the campus, students living in the area would receive an enrollment preference. However, making that happen might have proved tricky.
Bullis Charter School does not have an enrollment preference for students living in the San Antonio area, and school officials have previously opposed moving to the 10th site in the first place.
As for the idea of the Los Altos School District opening a new school, expected enrollment growth has not materialized, with the district’s student body instead shrinking. This past school year, the Los Altos School District had 3,370 students, compared to 3,999 in the 2019-20 school year, according to state data.
The prospect of moving an existing school to the 10th site has also proved divisive. When the district announced plans back in 2019 to move Egan Junior High School to the new campus – so that Bullis could use Egan’s existing campus – it faced strong community opposition and the district ultimately backed off the idea.
The district’s plan to fund the new school site has also hit some roadblocks. The district expected to generate up to $79.3 million through selling “transfers of development rights.” This is a system in which developers buy excess density rights from the school site and apply it to other projects in the city. So far, the district has received $10.4 million in TDR payments, much less than anticipated, according to the council report
“Times have changed since this original agreement,” said Los Altos School District Superintendent Sandra McGonagle, who spoke at the Sept. 9 meeting.
McGonagle emphasized the need for the district to maintain maximum flexibility at the 10th school site. Recent plans show that the campus will have a capacity to serve up to 607 students from transitional kindergarten through eighth grade.
“Our main interest is that we’re serving all of the students within our district, including those students within the city of Mountain View… but we’re looking at the very long term of this 99-year agreement,” McGonagle said.
At a separate Sept. 8 school board meeting, the district trustees approved the amended joint use agreement in a 4-1 vote. Trustee Vladimir Ivanovic cast the dissenting vote, expressing concern that Bullis Charter School likely would be placed at the new campus, a major investment for the district.
“I think it’s disingenuous to say that we haven’t decided to put Bullis Charter there because the fact (is) we have. And the reason why we’re doing that is because this particular neighborhood preference has been removed,” Ivanovic said.
District trustees and administrators pushed back on the characterization, saying that all options were still on the table.
“It will be a public school, and we haven’t decided who’s going there,” said Assistant Superintendent Erik Walukiewicz. He also noted that a neighborhood preference would constrain the district and highlighted the benefits of a less restrictive agreement with the city.
The prospect of not serving neighborhood students, however, did not sit well with City Council members who expressed dismay at their Sept. 9 meeting that the amended agreement gave too much latitude to the district. At the same time, they also recognized that there was not much they could do about it.
“There are just simply things that the city does not have control over, and there are simply things that the city is not able to negotiate or tell the district what to do,” City Manager Kimbra McCarthy said. The city would be exposed to a significant risk of litigation if it tried to require the district to have a school of a certain size or for it to look a certain way, she added.
Backing out of the agreement also would create complications with the funding structure of the 10th school site, City Attorney Jennifer Logue said, noting that developers would still be paying for transfers of development rights from the district.
Under the amended agreement, rather than the district keeping the full proceeds from any TDR deals, the city will now get half the money generated on or after Oct. 1, 2024. That gives the city the potential to pocket up to $34.5 million.
Ultimately, the council majority backed the new funding and joint use agreement despite misgivings that they had little authority to compel the district to stick to a neighborhood serving school.
“What we’re left with tonight is to find a path forward that works as best as possible for both parties, with neither party getting everything that they want,” said Council member Chris Clark.
He also noted that it was important to respect the negotiation process and said he did not want to spend taxpayer money on litigation, especially when the two parties met and conferred in good faith.
“Does it hurt to support this?” Clark asked. “Sure,” he responded to his own question, adding that it was still the right thing to do.
If Los Altos doesn’t want to educate the apartment kids, then the city should give some of this money to the MV school district to help it augment the new burden it had not anticipated. After all, we were expecting this school to take in some kids in the neighborhood, weren’t we?
The city seems to have negotiated the MVWSD into taking on more students….without helping it out.
No, that’s not what any of this means. The San Antonio area is in LASD’s enrollment area, and no one is changing that.