191 million dollars for construction.
Where is the money?

The whole premise of splitting Castro from DI was filled with promises of more money for the low income students with no clear answers on how much money, where the money will come from, and under what circumstances the money would be available. At the time I wondered, if the money doesn’t come, who will be left holding the bag? It now looks like the kids in the Castro neighborhood will be left holding the bag. This makes me very sad!

Maybe they should have had a plan upfront on how to spend the money. Instead they said let's spend some money on the middle schools. Let's split Castro in two and spend some money there. Then let's see how much is left for the others. Oops, there isn't enough for the others even without the Slater idea.

MVWSD. isn't fit to budgets a piggy bank.

The rich get richer while the poor get screwed.

All the hemming and hawing about Castro and Mistral is because, deep down, it would appear that Board Member Gutierrez is the only one willing to stand up for the poor and underrepresented. Just read the other board members comments. Coladonato and Nelson are undermining it and Wheeler has lost all credibility given her long tenure on the board while low-income scores have never improved.

Castro School should be a state of the art facility while Mistral students could model and bring diversity to campus. That just seems obvious.

It's time for another parcel tax. The rich can vote it down and the low-income won't even get to vote for at all.

Any decision that delays construction is a bad decision.

The greatest mistake the school board made two terms ago, was to put the bond on the ballot with out a clear instructional vision driving the investments and a shovel ready plan the day it passed. That isn't the fault of the current board, since four out of five members were not on the board when Measure G started.

Yet the current board has a duty to not make things worse by further eroding public dollars by delaying construction. Mountain View construction only gets busier in the next few years, like Linkedin and Google.

While more nuanced, the idea one school deserves investments more than others because of social economic demographics is wrong. Each school community is deserving of the resources, each child is equally precious. The better approach is to ensure every child receives what they need, and needs are never equal for any child, for schools with higher social economic challenges, that means things like retaining experienced teachers, more training, more tutoring, and more enrichment beyond the school day, and those indeed cost funds, but more buildings don't directly address those needs. Measure G passed over 3 year ago, all schools are deserving of Measure G investments now.

Seriously Christopher Chiang, why are you here making comments? You say the current board has a duty to do something, while you just resigned and walked away from your duty. Or am I missing something here?

@call me a cynic

Well said.

Go away Mr. Chiang

I disagree with the above two commenters. I welcome Mr. Chiang's perspective as a former trustee. The board was dysfunctional and his resignation shocked them into some change, I hope.

@Abigail: "The board was dysfunctional and his resignation shocked them into some change, I hope."

One can hope -- unfortunately, with a board as dysfunctional as the Whisman School board, it would take a considerable housecleaning for things to change.

But good for you to counter the Nelson trolls that always seem to pop up here to slam Chris Chaing.

[Post removed due to disrespectful comment/personal attack]

According to the article, "Wheeler pointed out that board members want to do something about the poor test scores of the low-income and minority students in the school district, many of whom attend Castro Elementary. The construction plans, she said, are an opportunity to take action and help the students at the campus."

You don't improve student achievement or test scores through construction plans. You improve student achievement by making sure that all of the students come from well supported families with secure jobs, strong salaries, and full health care. In short, you make sure that the families of the students all have equitable resources well before they get to school.

Yes Cynic, you're missing everything. Our school community is not about one person. Blaming or faulting or even chiding Mr. Chaing for resigning his seat for the good of his family is pretty pointless, not to mention solidly uncool. It's also fruitless to dispute the issues he raised as they are valid points. I welcome his continued expertise and support of our schools.

I would argue that the school most needy is Monta Loma which drew the short stick on during the previous round of renovations. The district ran out of money during the last construction cycle and Monta Loma didn't even get started. Monte Loma should be first. All of our schools need to be state of the art and employ the best facilities we can afford. These facilities are going to be with us for the next 25 years and we need to do it right. The short fall reported whether it's $10 million or $20 million is not completely accurate. There are going to be further cost over runs once we start pulling back walls and revealing what's underneath. We, as a district, need to decide what we want for our schools. We can squabble about things done in the past, or we can sit down and figure out what we need to do, within reason, to make our schools fitting of the community they serve. I'm supporting the latter.

As Mr. Frink (who 'studied' under Mr. Tod Lee during the DFC) notes "the best facilities we can afford." Mr. Lee also (remember his multi-decade professional construction-project expertise) answered DFC questions with the same 'Monta Loma needs rebuilding first' response. Perhaps, Castro-site-first was a response to a communnity that had felt ill-used by previous administrations/Boards? Only "No One" knows.

Mr. Chiang has himself, as a high school/middle school teacher, gone through rebuilds and new school builds. I find his public prespectives (and ones he has also shared with me privately) valuable in this 'community thought process'.

Back to Castro neighborhood community. What is IMPORTANT? $5M for operations (from Shoreline $$) for Castro/Theuerkauf "turnaround" -OR- $5M for funding middle school extra facilities spending! Thank GOD Dr. Skelly convinced the rest of the Board - in early 2015, to reverse it's late 2014 vote [ Web Link ], and put the $5M into student-direct programs, and pull it from extra FACILITIES at the middle schools. AMEN!

these are Mr. Nelson's own opinions, Reporter Forestieri in his article did a good job of reporting on some of my other opinions

Not sure the Voice has the reporting right on the shortfall - looking at the Board materials from October 8th and 22nd, the $20M gap appears to include an as-yet-UNSPENT $10M contingency fund, which is a new addition vs. the budget numbers that were considered last year by the District Facilities Committee, and included in the initial $147M roll-up vs. $143M target (an overshoot which was deemed to be in the noise, as far as cost estimates go).

What's really going on:
1. District Staff is recommending addition of new budget contingencies of ~$10M
2. Castro/Mistral construction costs are increasing by ~$6M

It's also worth pointing out that the two projects presented at the October 22nd meeting also included contingencies IN the project budgets themselves... about $450K for the Monta Loma Phase 1 design, and about $7M for the Castro/Mistral project (these were clearly labeled in the Board materials). The way the discussion is going, it seems like the assumption is that all of this budget will get spent.

I have a 3 year old that I wish I could send to a neighborhood school. That's why I came to the last Board meeting, and why I've spoken at many other meetings in support of a plan to someday reopen a school in this neighborhood. I know that the delays in construction have shrunk the available money again and again. I can accept that the bond money is not available to go toward opening a Slater/Whisman area school. I want the best facilities we can afford for every single school, but I don't want to have to cross so many major streets to get my child to school everyday. I want a neighborhood center. BOTH schools in our neighborhood were closed long ago. And we are told again and again that we don't have enough kids here to merit opening a new one. I see kids going to private school. I see a whole lot of toddlers one my street. I want to see the new demographic report.

But I think the number one problem is the idea that EVERY school in the district must be 450 kids. The reason that the Castro/Mistral project has become a facilities behemoth when they need operations support is that 450 number. Increasing the size of the DI program/Mistral and increasing PACT has created very very densely packed areas at Castro and the Theuerkauf/Stevenson/DO. It means that there are no resources and no "demand" for a school in Slater. If DI and PACT were at 300 or 350 each, those campuses would be less impacted. Landels and Huff are overfull. There are enough kids. We will be happy with a small school full of portables, and we will work to make it a great neighborhood school. Please create a plan to use the rent money from Google and the German school to build a small K-3 local school. Involve us in a plan for the parcel tax (which drastically affects our area) or a new bond, BEFORE you vote in the bond. Please plan for us in the near future.

And Voice, please stop turning the Slater folks into the bad guys. We have been ignored and lied to for years. We don't want to move or close other schools. We just want a school to call our own.

I'm don't know why there are lingering questions over how the board would fill a 9th school. Slater was closed almost a decade ago partially because of a projected drop in enrollment, and but enrollment has increased by A THOUSAND kids since then.

The last demographic report showed that Whisman-Slater has the highest growth in the city, and that enrollment is projected to decline at Castro. Given this, it seems like deferring the 6 classrooms until another budget cycle seems pretty reasonable.

I agree with everyone who says that this could all have been avoided by having a coherent plan for what to do with the Measure G funds before Measure G was approved.

Can you even wrap your head around the numbers involved here? $50 MILLION should be the cost of the project, not the OVERRUN! What is the cost per square foot of these projects? Are they building luxury hotel suites or classrooms?

Put the government in charge of the Sahara, and in 5 years there will be a shortage of sand.

I am not convinced Whisman/Slater folks have really been lied too. I understand they are upset. Politicians can be wrong without being liars. Sometimes while campaigning they don't actually know what they are talking about. Sometimes they can forget that others have to be persuaded as well, since we don't elect kings.

$50 Million or more was spent on the two middle schools, trying to please both the folks that wanted to boost performing arts, and the folks who believe in perfectly equal facilities at every school. That last is now the kicker. We can save money across all elementaries and be stuck with mediocre for two decades, we can adjust the program at some schools to not require certain facilities, or we can raise the rest of the money we knew would be required based on the phase one SFIP. Measure G is short due to rules about assessed value that had an impact while we were coming out of the recession. Yes it would have been nice to have more fully evolved programming available when Meas G. passed, but how would we have paid to develop any of it without the bond proceeds? Let's figure out how to move forward. As Yogi might have said, "We are where we are, let's do what we need to do."

@Richard: If you can start up or find a construction company who can get this work done, to the standard, for less money, I'm sure there are a bunch of people who would love to speak with you. I think it all gets back to cost of living - if I were a contractor in the Midwest and had the opportunity to come out here and get paid what contractors are getting paid these days, why wouldn't I do it? Well, if I need to pay $5000/month just to house my family in something that's half the size of where I used to live, with no yard... and then had to find workers who would be willing to do the same... it's not happening. This is basic supply & demand in a free market... unless more construction companies can afford to do work here, there's not going to be more competition, and all these costs are going just keep going up because (1) the few construction companies left can charge what the market will bear, and (2) construction companies' expenses are going up so they don't have a choice.

So much of this connects back to affordable housing... if we want competition in the local service industries (in order to make these services more affordable), we need to make it possible for them to live nearby at a lower cost, and reduce their cost of doing business. Otherwise, say hello to double-digit inflation in the local service industries...