This year's meeting took place on March 29 in the board room at Cupertino Union School District headquarters, giving the superintendents, staff and board members of Cupertino Union, Fremont Union and the Sunnyvale School districts the chance to address issues that affect all three districts.

The issues involved with language instruction inspired the most conversation among the gathered officials.

Sandra Skinner, associate superintendent in Sunnyvale, said that 40 percent of the students in her district speak another language as their first language, and for 25 percent of the total student population, that language is Spanish. The three districts compared notes on their various language programs.

Sunnyvale has outreach specialists and coaches in place to help English language learner students, and Cupertino Union has specific schools set up as English Language Development centers. The latter also has a unique situation with their Cupertino Language Immersion Program, known as CLIP, which teaches students in both English and Mandarin. The initial students in the program are middle school age and will soon be heading to Fremont Union high schools.

Fremont Union board member Homer Tong indicated that he's already heard from concerned parents who want to know what will happen to their immersion students when they enter ninth grade.

"There will be a place for your immersion students in the Fremont Union High School District," said Kate Jamentz, associate superintendent of teaching and learning in Fremont Union. She also spoke about the difficulties her district is having in maintaining certain language programs at its five high schools. Four languages are offered in Fremont Union schools--French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese--but Jamentz said that few non-Asian students are taking the Asian language classes.

In the coming year, Asian language teachers may have to teach sections at several schools to keep the program feasible, but the district's waiting for exact numbers before making that determination.

And the schools' finances will affect much of what happens in the future.

"We're just barely back to the floor level," said Fremont Union superintendent Steve Rowley, adding that the district will be able to reverse a 4.9 percent pay cut that all employees took during this school year.

The passage of a district-wide parcel tax in November has freed up some funds for the district, as have Fremont Union's ongoing attempts to verify the legitimacy of each student's residency. Rowley said that the district had about 400 families left to verify and about another 400 that had proven residency through highly suspicious means.

While Rowley estimated that the number of ineligible and non-returning students could potentially go up to 500, he also said that the numbers of families with falsified residences have been fairly uniform across the district's high schools. The two elementary school districts haven't seen a corresponding enrollment drop so far.

Joe Rudnicki, superintendent of the Sunnyvale School District, said his district is gearing up for the first round of construction that was given the green light by the passage of that district's bond last November. Columbia Middle School is first on the list, with a $19 million renovation to start this summer, and improvements will also start at an elementary school yet to be determined.

And while Cupertino Union's parcel tax measure failed by a few hundred votes, superintendent Bill Bragg said that the district is still reaping the benefits of its 2001 bond with the ongoing renovations and construction that will lead to the opening of Sam Lawson Middle School in August.

The exchange of ideas throughout the whole evening kept Cupertino board member Gary McCue, who was running the meeting, on his toes. "Now that you've all had your turn, I'm going to take a few minutes to say something," he said to laughs as he tried to wrap up the meeting.