Yay! Thank you to the elected officials and staff members from LASD and the city of Mountain View for working together cooperatively to bring a school and park land back to the San Antonio area. It is sorely needed here. Let's keep this moving forward.

One way to alleviate school traffic issues in the San Antonio area, as well as other school areas, especially those involving parents dropping off and picking up children, is to have school buses drive students. Caregivers would only need to drive children if they had to go to or leave school at odd hours. This would eliminate a lot of cars and emissions on our roads.

It must be a neighborhood school that benefits the Mountain View residents, not the bulk of Los Altos and Los Altos residents, since the trade off for space elsewhere in the city is in MV. A charter school by definition draws from all over the district (in this case Los Altos) and would diminish any benefit gained from LASD's Mountain View residents.

There are actually many MV kids who attend BCS and if that school were to allow a larger percentage of students from MV as part of locating a school there, I'd see it as a win for MV. Having a neighborhood school would be great too.

But what I didn't read in the article was any notion of where this land would be located or come from. Is there a site in mind or is this purely theoretical?

This doesn't make sense:
1. If the school is for the NEC kids then it doesn't solve the BCS site problem. 2. If you locate BCS there, it doesn't solve the need for a neighborhood school for the NEC kids because only a small portion of that group will be attending BCS via the lottery. You can't give NEC kids preferential admittance to BCS as there is no rationale for that and I'm guessing that the majority of NEC kids would not opt for BCS anyway.
3. Locating a school for 900 kids in that extremely busy corridor would make a huge traffic mess and would be unsafe for the children attending there.

It's still hard to believe that 3 years after passing a $150M bond, the LASD BOT still hasn't solved the BCS site problem. One can only surmise that the BOT isn't interested in solving the problem. They should have moved those 6th graders to the middle schools years ago, solving all the overcrowding issues and then located BCS at Covington. It could be easy but it doesn't meet their political agenda so the taxpayers suffer.

However well intentioned or malevolent the idea of this school is, it is clear that using eminent domain will face a court challenge. One pair of property owners who feels under the gun are the owners of the proposed Greystar project on the Safeway/201 San Antonio Circle site. Their lawyer, an eminent domain export, spoke to the city council at the meeting. He indicated they plan to break ground in January and they value the land at $400 Million.

This is described in city docs as a mixed-use development with 641 residential units and
approximately 21,400 square feet of commercial space with below-grade parking to
replace an existing 70,000 square foot office building and 53,000 square feet of
existing retail, a Lot Line Adjustment to merge two lots into one lot, and a Heritage
Tree Removal Permit to remove 82 trees on an 8.63-acre project site. These
properties comprise the North of California Street Master Plan Area and are located
on the north side of California Street between San Antonio Road and Pacchetti Way
in the P-40 (San Antonio) Precise Plan.

Surely the district cannot lowball them with a price of $12 to $14 million per acre which is ludicrously low and offers them nothing for the opportunity cost and all the time put into planning, plus keeping the property idle while developing the project.

LASD are amateurs and they have not had a good team working on this proposal. It will blow up on them, meaning it is just another stalling tactic.

@Stalling Tactic - Exactly! This is nothing more than another stalling tactic. The LASD BOT comes up with one hairbrained scheme after the next while ignoring all the land they currently own which is suitable for additional school sites. You'd think they'd be tired of playing this game by now but apparently not. We'll be back in court with BCS soon wasting more taxpayer dollars on lawsuits.

I should say it's a time wasting tactic. Once you get past the eminent domain issues,
you're faced with the fact that this would need to be a charter school, because
they've used up all their funds and have no room to construct an expanded school for the charter on district owned land. There are 850 kids in the El Camino area
spread around across the Jr High and 3 main elementary schools. There are 4400
kids total. The charter has been keeping a lid on growth due to the expiring 5 year
agreement. It's up at 875 kids this year. Projecting the growth means they will
be at least 1000 by the time a new school site could be ready, with plans to grow
to 1200.

So no matter how the district designs the site, they have established the precedent
that the charter school can be split. It's troubling for them to remove the charter's
location at Blach, because this is so far away. If the charter makes a facilities request, they will be talking about 20% of the students in the district. The law
says they are entititle to 20% of the land. THe district owns 115 acres of land.
If the new site is 8 acres, the charter will be entitled to 20% of the new total of 123 acres, or 24 acres. They will need to assign the charter 1 full sized existing school of 10 acres in addition to the San Antonio School.

They are completely incompetent at planning. They're making decisions that would have worked 5 years ago, but this is TODAY.

I should say that 18 acres would still be less than 20% of the total. The effect is substantially the same. But what they can't do is retaliate against the success of the charter by cutting down the quality of the facilities the charter has, essentially refusing to expand the facilities with growth of the charter. They have claimed that Blach is worth 6 acres of land, with 3 acres dedicated and 3 acres shared with Blach.
They have given them use of 8 acres at Egan. They would be moving the charter without addressing their only justifiable reason for a forced relocation. They would not
be addressing growth in population in the San Antonio area by giving those kids a school. They would remove the charters location in the South Los Altos area. They would provide about the same size the charter has now at Egan and expect that to replace Blach use and handle any growth.

They are pinning their hopes on a comment the judge put in his ruling which said that
they could make up for less land by having nicer building. But this does not justify any extreme. They can't put 1200 kids with 4 acres of outdoor space while they have previously allocated the charter 8 acres of outdoor space for fewer kids, and the number of kids NOT in the charter has actually decreased. They have access to 6 acres of outdoor space per school site, or 54 acres for 4400 kids. It's just too much discrimination.

seems BCS still tears at the fabric of our community. So disappointing, but they reap what they sow.

This is great! Yes, please build a school at San Antonio for the NEC kids. That will free up enough space at Almond/Santa Rita/Covington that one of those schools can then be closed and campus handed over to BCS.

It's the wacko LASD administration that tears at the fabric of the community. They could have made plans to use the bond money to house the growth that has been absorbed by BCS, but they haven't. LASD would have needed a school bond 10 years ago if they had not had BCS to rely on to take on all the growth in the district.

What BCS does is be a district-wide school, which is valuable. With the population
within LASD shifting so that 20% of it is in Mountain View north of El Camino, LASD should have been moved to action long ago. Instead they neatly disposed of fair treatment
for the San Antonio area kids the same time they short changed Los Altos Hills back in the early 2000's. First they built Covington with no plan as to who would go there. Then thye closed the Gardner Bullis school because they didn't need that with Covington. Then they realized they had more and more kids in Mountain View show they rejiggered where they were sent to school, removing them from schools they had gone
to for a long time and using some of them to fill Covington.

The result is that over the years has the El Camino area school population has grown,
reaching 600 and then 850, they were invisible, split between Almond, Santa Rita and Covington.

It's just a question of honoring the school needs of some kids more than others.
Honored are the families that live in Los Altos close to Oak, Loyola, Santa Rita, Almond, Covington and some of the Moutain View families near Springer. Over time,
Gardner Bullis has honored that part of Los Altos Hills. THey are the only ones with the so called neighborhood schools.

Everyone else is mistreated. Having a district wide school like BCS gives them some redress for the mistreatment.

LASD should project to the future, not about BCS, but about the San Antonio area. What will the picture be when that population reaches 1000 kids, 1200 kids? What happens if the school age population in Los Altos continues to decline?

Continually playing the victim while espousing the rhetoric. Sad. They'll get no support from me in any way.

BCS will thrive no matter what weird decisions LASD makes. They are not
the victims. The district operates for the benefit of a minority of the
population. It's about 50% that get the benefit of what they say is their
standard neighborhood school and then 50% do not. That's why BCS has such an
easy time recruiting students, and that's why LASD in fear has
negotiated limits on how fast BCS can grow. BCS is headed to be
50% of the district, because of LASD policies just as much as BCS.

If 1/3 of the LASD population is from Mountain View, then that is 1500 kids. 300 in Junior High, 1200 elementary. Why shouuld only the 500 living near Springer
get a smalal neighborhood school? If there are 700 NOW living near San Antonio,
then the planning should be for the growth of the 700 to 1000. This is not
very far in the future. They need TWO schools for San Antonio, not one.

Implicit in their saying that this MIGHT be a neighborhood school for San Antonio
is the idea that this would be a 1000 student school. That's not fair treatment,
and not honest. A 1000 student school is not the same as a 450 student school.

LASD has 7 elementary schools currently, average size 480, but 3 are under 450. The San Antonio area is already up to 850 LASD students. It should be made clear that best case
just a portion of the students that live there could attend this new school, unless
there are two of them on the site, or unless it is very big. The number of students
in the area is still growing.

If they put the Charter school there, that's a 1000+ student school, so it's like
2 of the regular schools. It's still grown too, having added 250 students in the last
4 years, to reach 875 today.

We already had a school in the San Antonio are. It was called Klein. Then they sold it and built condos in 1988.

We had a school on Independence. Now it's a storage facility.

We also had wonderful high school downtown that could have been rebuilt. Now it's apartments.

I can't fathom why one would ever give up such a precious resource as a school site.

Klein school was in a different district. The dividing line runs down Ortega. Klein was on the very edge of
MVWSD. Its area is now served by Castro, which has been expanded to home 2 separate schools on one site. The original LASD school for the area on the other side of Ortega was Portola Elementary. In MV on that side of San Antonio, the ground area is very small--only about 10% of a square mile. It was included into the attendance area
of Portola Elementary School in Los Altos. Now Portola was sold off. LASD decided it had enough land in the area given that Egan was 19 acres of land quite near to Portola Elementary. Now they suddenly got a desire to relocate the Charter School from Egan where it has been for 15 years and put it in Mountain View. Go figure. The discussions have all been in private.