Despite his unhappiness, Larry Russell has been relatively quiet about the efforts of his neighbors to withdraw their children from Los Altos and Palo Alto elementary schools and form their own district in Los Altos Hills.
Same with Mindy Ryan, Joanna Beyer, and many of the other 200 people who packed the multi-purpose room Monday night at Bullis Elementary School, the closure of which three years ago touched off the latest and most bitter fight between this city of 8,000 and the school districts that serve it.
Russell, Ryan and Beyer were among those who organized the meeting, calling it a chance for the “silent majority” of Hills residents to voice their opinions before the Los Altos Hills City Council votes on a redistricting proposal Thursday night.
“We want the town council to know that the ‘silent majority,’ a sleeping giant so to speak, is being awakened and will rally to defeat a redistricting measure at the polls should it go that far,” Russell said in his opening statement.
The meeting began with a panel that included representatives from the Palo Alto Unified and Los Altos school districts, as well as the Mountain View-Los Altos High School District. All three districts stand to lose hundreds of students and millions of dollars in revenues if the redistricting plan goes through, and have announced plans to oppose such a measure by any means available.
The impacts of a proposed redistricting are still unclear. Under the current proposal, Los Altos Hills students would attend Gunn High School. That would cost Mountain View-Los Altos nearly 200 students and close to $4 million annually in property taxes, a loss Associate Superintendent Brigette Sarraf said would lead to bigger class sizes and fewer electives.
“Obviously that cannot happen without impacting the level of education we provide our students,” said Sarraf. She added that Los Altos Hills students “are among our highest performing students, and we believe they are being served very well.”
But Palo Alto Unified board chair Mandy Lowell said after the meeting that state law does not appear to allow two districts providing the same type of schools (elementary in this case) to overlap, meaning any new district would need to send children to Mountain View-Los Altos.
She said redistricting proponents had tailored their proposal to the results of a survey conducted for the town’s Public Education Committee last year, and included the possibility of attending Gunn to win votes even though it is on doubtful legal ground.
“There were a lot of holes in the proposal, and that was just one of them,” Lowell said. “This is a problem they knew about.”
Los Altos Hills Mayor Breene Kerr and council member Craig Jones said they were optimistic about a settlement framework that representatives of the districts and the town have negotiated over the last month.
The framework, yet to be approved by any of the parties involved, would leave district boundaries unchanged in exchange for renovating the Bullis site and permanently sharing it between a reopened Bullis school and the Bullis Charter School. Los Altos Hills would pay to build and maintain new playing fields at the site.
Jones, who originally led the push for Bullis Charter School, said his only complaint about Monday’s meeting is that the group should be calling itself Los Altos Hills Residents for a Negotiated Settlement rather than Los Altos Hills Residents Against Redistricting.
“I don’t think that a Los Altos Hills resident can credibly argue that we’re well-served, being the only community on the Peninsula without a public school. That cannot stand.”
Declining enrollments and aging facilities were the main factors in the closure of several local schools in Los Altos Hills over several decades, generating the initial anger believed to be at the root of the redistricting push.
Like redistricting, the proposed settlement has a number of potential red flags, including support for a preference for Los Altos Hills residents to gain admission into the charter school. That same provision — which would require an amendment to the charter from the county and an exemption from state law barring discriminatory admissions policies — was in the original application for Bullis Charter School.
The Los Altos school board pointed out the geographic preference in its stinging rebuke denying the charter, which was later approved by Santa Clara County.
“The law’s pretty clear about that,” Los Altos school board member Mark Goines said.
Many of the parents who established the charter school advocate redistricting, and have dominated public discourse and politics in the Hills in recent years.
Organizers advertised Monday night’s meeting as a chance to speak against redistricting without getting shouted down. On several occasions, Ryan ignored grumblings from one side of the room and reiterated that the discussion was meant to be one-sided. At another point, applause from the rest of the crowd drowned out redistricting proponents, who had turned out in large numbers.
But for most of the evening, calls for unity and an end to the divisiveness dominated.
Nikki Beyer, whose two children both attended Bullis, was among the many people who said they were proud to be part of a great school district (Los Altos) and lamented that the more outspoken of her neighbors did not seem to feel the same way.
“This is not ‘them and us,’ this is ‘us,'” said Beyer (who is not related to Joanna Beyer).
Goines, finally leaving the old school around 10 p.m., said he hoped the community would be able to work out its differences and once again use the Bullis site.
“I ran on a sharing platform,” said Goines, “and we’re going to share, dammit.”
E-mail Jon Wiener at jwiener@mv-voice.com
