This is a wonderful opening-of-the-process to community organizers. My experience in Mountain View's elementary school district was that: the Board and Administration will often sit-on or obsficate even reasonable proposals UNTIL THERE IS A COMMUNITY ORGANIZER and ad-hoc citizen's organization to force things forward.

During the 2008-2014 period there was no budge on reopening a public elementary school in the NorthEast Quadrant of MVWSD. Only Bob Weaver, working to organize the Whisman/Slater neighborhood community, started to force a reexamination of position & policy. "A question of if"? This cannot be addressed/solved by a large public-meeting junta, but a focus set of junta leaders can easily draft a few extremely feasible and fiscally responsible plans (Plan A & Plan B).

It worked for Bob Weaver and the Slater School re-open team he inspired. The Voice education reporters have well documented the process in MVWSD.

best of luck!

S.N. is a retired Trustee of the MVWSD

As another former Mountain View Whisman School Board member, I recommend considering anything that Steve Nelson recommends with great skepticism. He was, and continues to be, extremely divisive.

This is a vanilla solution that MVWSD has used repeatedly. Put 2 schools on one contiguous parcel of land. It's a no brainer. There's not much about this that should be innovative. Stevenson shared with the district office and Theuerkauff. The Whisman school site is leased out to TWO different private schools. Slater is leased out to Google to run an infant day care, but MVWSD sites a new school on the same land. Castro School gets Mistral installed alongside it so now there are 2 schools where once there was one.

Much closer than the Castro school site to the LASD section of Mountain View along San Antonio Road is the 20 acre Egan Junior High. Now this site has for 15 years or so housed a 2nd school with some limitations because it was never done optimally, e.g. it is still "temporary" portable buildings with no purpose built buildings and no separate driveway off of San Antonio Road.

Since this site is completely normally distant from the new housing being built at San Antonio Center, why not use that 8 acres as a school site for that new housing, with well designed buildings? The argument to spend $80 Million buying land to get 4 acres (or even $40 Million with subsidies) is Weak. Those kids could have an 8 acre site in a more suitable location completely close to their neighborhood.

Then Bulis Charter could be relocated to be a 2nd school beside Covington School, which is on 22 acres of land counting the Los Altos Rosita Park adjacent.

Give the Charter School a site already. Stop all the fighting and figure it out. It is high time!

There is a simple and viable solution that benefits everyone.

1) Close Covington and move BCS to that campus
2) Move 6th grade to Egan/Blach middle schools
3) Spend measure N bond funds to upgrade existing schools