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The Mountain View Whisman School District is calling on community members to apply for a leadership position overseeing Bullis Mountain View (BMV), a newly approved charter school set to open this fall.
In December, the district’s board of trustees approved BMV’s petition to open an independently operated 320-student campus in Mountain View. Despite the autonomy, the district holds a number of oversight powers as the chartering authority, including the ability to appoint someone to the charter school’s board of directors.
District board members are planning to exercise that power, and agreed earlier this month to hold an application process soliciting members of the public interested in the leadership role. Details are still hazy on the timeline, but board members are expected to review the application template prior to its distribution.
The at-large application process was an easy decision. The school board expressed little appetite for having a district trustee join BMV’s board of directors, and Superintendent Ayinde Rudolph cautioned against appointing a district staff member to the roster. District employees are already pretty busy, he said, and may face a number of uneasy conflicts of interest overseeing BMV’s business.
“If it was me in their (BMV’s) position, I would say that staff is privy to information and could also share that information with the intent of getting an outcome that’s favorable to them,” Rudolph said. “I don’t want to put ourselves in that position.”
The composition of BMV’s board of directors has changed since the school submitted its petition in November. The school website now touts that half the roster is made up of Mountain View residents — Bertha Alarcon, Greg Brauner and Jordan Hwang. Also sitting on the board is Clara Roa and David Jaques, who serve on the board of directors for Bullis Charter School in Los Altos, and Patrick Walsh, a regional director for the California Charter Schools Association.
Biographical information on the members is not available on BMV’s website, and it’s unclear if the charter school has any meetings scheduled. The school’s website does not have any agendas posted, and representatives from the school were not available to comment on the board’s activities.
Mountain View Whisman’s school board will rely on the appointed member to monitor the charter school’s actions and could frequently request reports and updates from the appointee, Rudolph said. Other oversight functions, like reviewing BMV’s budget and planned spending under the Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP), would skip over that process and come directly to the board.
The appointment of a board member is one of several moving parts as the charter school prepares for its debut in Mountain View this year. BMV is required to respond to the district’s offer of facilities — the old Stevenson Elementary School campus on Montecito Avenue — by March 1, and the charter school’s enrollment lottery is set to take place early next month.
Following BMV’s enrollment process, district officials are expected to make hasty revisions to their own student counts and plan for potential staffing cuts and facilities changes at the affected schools. Past projections from BMV suggest the largest decline in enrollment caused by the charter school will be at Landels Elementary School.
I personally think that a Charter school is not good for Mountain View. For example, here at Graham, we can’t get the same level of cleaning on campus because the district cut funding in favor of a charter school. I also think that instead of building a charter school which promises better education, we should invest the money in improving education in existing public schools. It’s not fair to have our funding cut and our normal education to become even worse in favor of ONE new charter school. It is also a bit hypocritical that the Californian government endorses the charter schools after making poor education decisions for the existing system. Don’t get me wrong, it’s just that from a student’s point of view, I don’t agree with this.
@Graham Student: You have a legitimate concern about funding. But keep in mind the funding cut did NOT come because of the money being needed for the charter school. Funding was cut because the district mismanaged its money and had to make cuts. They are happy to give the charter school the blame, but it has already been pointed out that there are other reasons for these cuts.
How much does it pay? Sounds like a cushy gig….since that board doesn’t seem to ever meet 🙂 More seriously SB126 can’t come soon enough.
I’d like to know which of these Mountain View residents live within the MVWSD boundaries. Saying they live in Mountain View isn’t telling the entire story.
@MV Parent… just Google it. You can find them. Which is exactly why this job sounds like nothing but trouble.
How does one apply for this oversight position? There is no link or info.
STEVE NELSON!
@ Woohoo a resident of Gemello
“STEVE NELSON!”
I second that Emotion, but I think you are assuming Mr. Nelson would bring the same …. atmosphere to the BMV board as he did to the MVWSD board and I think that would not be the case.
BMV leaders may well find Mr. Nelson would be right at home on the BMV board.
Several weeks ago, I started making efforts to spread the word for people to start thinking about applying to the Board for this critical position. I just hope someone reasonable steps up and the MVWSD make an appropriate selection.
Perhaps we could ask former candidate for the MVWSD, Tamara Becher Patterson, to step up and apply for the job?
I would prefer someone who clearly can provide balance of opinions, even if they only have one vote out of 5 and probably cannot sway the decisions of the BMV leadership.