The Sun
Sunnyvale's Newspaper

HS district pulls plan for expelled students

By Katherine Petersen

The Fremont Union High School District had expressed interest in creating a program for expelled students at the Raynor Park Multipurpose Center in Sunnyvale, but withdrew its application after parents of children who attend a day-care center on the site mounted a resistance.

Parents felt that kids at the Child Development Center, who range from infants to sixth-graders, should not occupy the same facility as at-risk teens.

"What hits me first is these kids they wanted to put here are kids who have misbehaved enough that they can't go to a regular high school," said Curtis Lomax, a Sunnyvale parent. "Even if they were the best kids in the school, I would still be opposed because kids in the day care would be exposed to foul language and smoking and other behavior."

Lomax would like to select who his children spend their lunch hours with, he said. "They might think, 'Wow, those are big kids. I want to be like them,' " he said.

The district pulled its application reluctantly, said Joe Hamilton, associate superintendent of administrative services.

"It was a perfect site for a program like this," he said.

The school, which would have been a partnership between the Santa Clara County Office of Education and the high school district, would provide a local program for expelled students to attend rather than having them travel to San Jose. The program would have served about 20 students with a lot of parental supervision.

"The goal is to get the kids back into their neighborhood schools, where they can be successful," he said. "There's no reason these kids can't be as successful as any others, given the right opportunity."

All of the teens at the community school would have been first-time offenders, Hamilton said. Students can be expelled for a small infraction such as carrying a pocketknife because of the district's zero-tolerance policy.

"Some kids are caught with other weapons or get into fights, but they aren't bad kids," Hamilton said.

The district is not allowed to have a community school program on a regular high school campus, according to the education code.

"We think it would have been a positive program for this site, and it's too bad it didn't work out," Hamilton said. "It would have been an asset to that complex and could have been an asset to the community."

Lomax disagrees. The district couldn't guarantee him that all the kids at such a program were caught with only pocketknives, he said. Inviting teenagers to a well-kept park could likely have had a negative impact on it, he said.

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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, July 2, 1997.
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