Four days after the Los Altos Hills City Council decided to form a new K-8 school district, the Los Altos School District voted to reopen Bullis-Purissima — the elementary school that has been the focal point of a three-year dispute between the Hills and the school district.
“We have the best of all possible worlds,” said LASD board president Margot Harrigan. “We have a school in the Hills that will be renovated, we will have small neighborhood schools that the community really cherishes, and we can afford to do it.”
The unanimous school board decision on June 12 came two months after the Los Altos Hills City Council voted to create its own K-8 district, then allowed a waiting period for negotiations between the Hills and the affected school districts — namely, the Los Altos, Palo Alto, and Mountain View-Los Altos Union high school districts.
During the waiting period, some compromises had been made. The original Hills redistricting plan would have formed a K-8 district that would send all of its high school students to Gunn High in Palo Alto Unified School District, while the plan approved on June 8 would keep high school attendance boundaries the same, with students splitting off to Palo Alto and Mountain View-Los Altos.
But before LASD made its decision Monday night to reopen the Bullis-Purissima site, council members said negotiations with the school district had failed, and decided unanimously to pursue redistricting.
Hills council member Craig Jones said negotiations flopped because LASD was unable to agree to terms — which would have allowed the Bullis Charter School to occupy the district’s closed Bullis-Purissima campus and give enrollment preference to Hills children — by the June 8 deadline.
“They weren’t able to prioritize our need for a community school that would allow them to meet our timeline,” he said.
Three-year fight
Due to declining enrollment, LASD closed Bullis-Purissima, the last elementary school in Los Altos Hills, in 2003, sparking a dispute that has included hefty lawsuits and the formation of the Bullis Charter School. The charter school currently uses portable classrooms on the site of Egan Junior High in Los Altos.Expecting enrollment to increase in coming years and facing pressure from the Los Altos Hills council, LASD trustees discussed various options for accommodating those additional students. They decided to renovate Bullis-Purissima and reopen it in time for the 2008-09 school year, the same time that a redistricting plan could appear on the ballot.
Mayor Breene Kerr said that although reopening Bullis “would return public education to Los Altos Hills,” which would follow the desire of Hills council members and residents who spoke at last Thursday’s council meeting, it may not provide an adequate solution for the Bullis Charter School or for Los Altos Hills kids.
“The issue would be who’s going to go to the school and where do they come from, and does it take on the nature of a neighborhood school,” Kerr said in a phone interview on Tuesday.
However, a functioning public school at Bullis-Purissima in Los Altos Hills may make it less likely for the county to approve a Hills redistricting proposal, which had not yet been submitted as of press time, Kerr said.
“I think that is very, very unlikely to succeed,” said Bill Cooper, an LASD trustee, before Monday’s meeting. “I truly believe the vast majority of Los Altos Hills residents are very satisfied with the education their children have received at the Los Altos School District.”
‘Eliminate a potential enemy’
The current redistricting plan includes a strategic move by the Hills council to cut Mountain View-Los Altos out of the equation. Hills council members voted on June 8 to pursue the redistricting plan but keep high school attendance boundaries the same. As a result, the high school district will be spared the loss of 200 students and $3.7 million in revenue, which were aspects of the original Hills plan.Removing Mountain View-Los Altos from the picture takes away the district’s financial concerns over redistricting, and makes the plan more likely to pass at the county level, according to Kerr.
“It’s far easier to win this fight if we eliminate a potential enemy, that enemy being Mountain View-Los Altos, by neutralizing their financial concerns,” Kerr said at the meeting.
“The elementary situation is broken and that’s what needs fixing,” he added.
Rich Fischer, departing superintendent of Mountain View-Los Altos, told the Hills council, “I strongly encourage you, if you do have to go forward, that you go forward with the suggested changes. Clearly, MVLA’s interest is being met by the first proposal.”
But while Mountain View-Los Altos would be off the hook, the Palo Alto and Los Altos school districts would still stand to lose elementary students, and LASD would lose its basic aid status, according to Randy Kenyon, the district’s business manager.
Hills residents who spoke during the meeting were largely in favor of the revised redistricting plan and wanted to move forward, though some still demanded that Gunn High School should be the sole high school for the new K-8 district, referring to those who must send their kids to Los Altos High as living on the “wrong side of the line.”
“It causes me to worry about the motives of the people who want to leave Los Altos High School,” Fischer said after the meeting. “Is it because we have some diversity?”
E-mail Molly Tanenbaum at mtanenbaum@mv-voice.com
