Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Campbell wasn't trying to merge with Los Gatos

By Susan Mayer

I'm a Campbell Union School District resident, and having attended a few of the meetings on the boundary study being conducted by the Santa Clara County Office of Education, I feel compelled to clarify a few issues. I believe that you in Los Gatos have a special, well-run and widely supported school district, and I want to assure you that we didn't initiate this study in an attempt to take over or merge with your district.

The county initiated this study as part of a direct response to the numerous petitioners who live within Los Gatos, Saratoga and Monte Sereno town and city limits but reside within the CUSD who want to transfer to their respective towns or cities. A neighborhood-by- neighborhood or piecemeal approach to redistricting is inefficient, costly and extremely time-consuming for the petitioners, our district, the county, the state Department of Education and the state Board of Education.

The county had the insight to realize that an area-wide study was the best way to evaluate all of the property-transfer requests in light of the cumulative impact multiple property transfers could have on the losing and receiving districts. I applaud them for this.

The primary reason that I am involved in all of this is because of an inequity that exists in the current Education Code that would allow my son's school, Marshall Lane, to be transferred into Saratoga if all of the surrounding residential property is transferred--without compensation to CUSD!

My son and 250 of his Campbell and San Jose classmates would be displaced and dispersed throughout a district that is already overcrowded. We might not be able to implement further class-size reduction in kindergarten and third grade, and we might have to implement a multi-track, year-round education program. I can honestly say that I am involved in this study because I am concerned about my son's education. I believe there are a number of the petitioners could not claim educational concern as their motivation for being involved. However, I also do not want to force anyone to remain in our district if they don't want to be in it, for whatever reason.

I also believe that I need to share with you the fact that I chose to live in Campbell, and I like it. I also like our school district, and I'm very supportive of it. We have an incredibly diverse student population, which our district views as an asset, and so do I.

Our district has a number of successful, innovative and creative programs, and it somehow manages to address the needs of this varied group of students in an exemplary way. I firmly believe that I could not have purchased a better education for my son at any other public or private school in the area.

And while I wholeheartedly agree that LGUSD could serve as a model school district for other similar districts, I'd like you to note that it could not be used as a model for our district because the needs of our population are so different. In fact, I believe that our district could serve as a model district for other similar districts. Believe it or not, the way that you feel about your school district is very similar to how I feel about mine. And just as you don't want the area-wide study to change things for you, I don't want it to change things for me by requiring the transfer of Marshall Lane to Saratoga.

Our perspectives do differ from each other, however, in one very distinct way. While you view unification as a process that would require you to lose control over your educational programs, I see it as a way that we could gain control over the quality of education from kindergarten through 12th grade. I think that the articulation of the K-12 curriculum has a lot of inherent benefits for students, parents, teachers and staff.

I believe that the specific needs of the elementary and secondary students can effectively be addressed through the use of a responsive, well-managed and well-directed board. But this is simply how I think we could benefit from it in our school district. I do not believe that the county has any intention of devising one plan for all of the study areas involved.

And just one other thing I would like all of us to think about is the fact that we are all dealing with an increasing student population, the desire to reduce class size throughout the elementary grade levels and a very limited number of available school sites. I don't want to see us thrown into an educational crisis or facilities crunch. And if unification isn't the best way to make us share our resources rather than horde them, then we all need to come up with a better plan. I just happen to think that we could attain better results for everyone if we provided a collective, broader-based community response to these unavoidable issues.

Susan Mayer is the parent of a student who attends Marshall Lane School in the Campbell Union School District.

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