Saratoga News

Committee will consider closed campus

By Michelle Alaimo

At the urging of Saratoga City Council member Paul Jacobs, a committee is forming to look at the issue of keeping all Saratoga High School students on campus during lunch.

Captain Robert Wilson, from the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department's Westside Station, briefed the City Council, the Saratoga Union and the Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union high school boards at a joint meeting on Sept. 23 regarding safety concerns he has for students and residents in the community.

While the SHS campus has been closed for freshman and sophomores since fall 1996, juniors and seniors are still able to use their 40-minute lunch to leave campus in search of food. Wilson said the students are having to travel quite a distance from the school to find somewhere to eat, and this is causing some safety problems.

One issue is that some students are speeding off out of the community to buy lunch at the same time senior citizens are on the road trying to run errands. "When you mix those two groups of drivers on the road together," Wilson said, "I don't want to be there."

Wilson added that deputies have stopped students as far north as De Anza and Stevens Creek boulevards and said; "When you're that far gone on a 40-minute lunch break, you can't do it without speeding."

However, Wilson stressed, the closing of a school campus is not a law-enforcement question. "It's a school-site issue," district board member Jackie Schmidt-Posner said.

Jacobs said it should be a policy issue as well; the high school board should give the school some direction on what they would like done.

District board member Nancy Crampton said the board has never been addressed before on the depth of the problem. She added that schools have changed over the years to the point where some students go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., with the lunch break as their only chance to leave campus.

Crampton said closing the campus would lead to expense issues as well, because additional people would need to be hired to patrol the campus at lunch time.

Having the campus open is also an expense issue for the sheriff's department, Wilson said.

"It's a matter of money for me. I'm expending officer time and hours of service available in and around the school during that time frame," Wilson said.

Wilson agreed to sit on the committee, along with high school board President Ron Adolphson and Superintendent Cynthia Ranii. SHS Principal Kevin Skelly said either he or a member of his administration will participate in the committee as well. Jacobs, who had the closed-campus issue placed back on the agenda after the school board removed it, agreed to chair the committee. No other details, such as when the committee will begin meetings, have been set.

Skelly, in an interview with the Saratoga News after the meeting, said his feeling is that there would not be any change to the current policy until next fall, because that would be the best time to change an open-campus policy, if that is what is decided by the committee.

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