When the Los Altos School District’s 10th Site Advisory Task Force convened May 31, Mountain View City Councilwoman Margaret Abe-Koga surprised attendees with her recommendation to relocate Egan Junior High School to a new, 10th campus in the north of El Camino Real area.
Abe-Koga’s proposal would leave the entire Egan campus to Bullis Charter School, which currently uses a portion of it. According to Abe-Koga, the merits of her proposal include:
• There would be no need to redraw attendance boundaries.
• The 8.6-acre parcel the district hopes to purchase for a 10th campus is the right size for Egan’s population.
• Egan would receive new, state-of-art facilities.
• Giving the current Egan campus to the charter school would enable the latter to consolidate operations on one site, with enough space to accommodate its projected growth, whereas the targeted 10th site would be too small for the charter school.
• Middle school students are old enough to walk or bike across El Camino Real on their own, so Egan’s presence wouldn’t generate as much traffic around the 10th site.
Objections to the plan
Some task force members objected to Abe-Koga’s proposal for the following reasons.
• Egan would be displaced from its longtime home in Los Altos.
• The move would cause disruption to the community.
• There would still be no elementary school in the area north of El Camino Real.
• It would be unfair that Blach Intermediate School remains in its facilities while Egan relocates.
• It would be expensive to construct a new Egan campus and convert the existing facility into a campus suitable for the charter school.
Bullis Charter School parent Jill Jene, a member of the task force, said the charter school’s staff is creative enough to turn some of Egan’s facilities into a good fit for elementary school children at a minimal cost.
Countering the argument that an Egan move would emotionally impact students, Abe-Koga said junior high school is only two years, so the proposed relocation shouldn’t have a significant effect.
As discussion on Abe-Koga’s proposal progressed, neither side convinced the other, but it will come up again as a third option – options 1 and 2 include placing the charter school or a neighborhood school on the 10th site – at the task force’s next meeting, the time and date of which are yet to be determined.
Before the end of the May 31 meeting, facilitator Manny Barbara asked task force members to specify their No. 1 and No. 2 choices out of four options, with the fourth alternative a magnet/choice school on the 10th site.
The majority of task force members marked relocating the charter school to the 10th campus as their first choice, and establishing a neighborhood school on the site as their second.
Residents weigh in
Among the local residents who attended the task force meeting, two spoke up.
Ying Liu said she opposed the acquisition of the 10th site, because she believes that the district already has enough land and that Measure N funds are not sufficient to purchase land, update facilities districtwide and cover litigation fees in the event of an eminent-domain battle over the site the district has its eye on.
David Roode suggested that a neighborhood school on the 10th site wouldn’t need to cover the entire area north of El Camino Real, just the east side of San Antonio Road. If the district puts the charter school there, Roode said some of the charter school students would have to remain at Egan, because the new site won’t be big enough to house the charter school.
Roode told the Town Crier after the meeting that he thinks the parcel where Kohl’s department store currently sits would be a better site for a 10th campus than the property the district intends to purchase against the landowners’ will, near the intersection of California Street and San Antonio Road.
