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Board caught in the middle over district's space options

Parents reject scenario to create middle schools for grades six through eight

By Katherine Petersen

Parents who attended a Nov. 18 meeting of the Cupertino Union School District board told trustees that they're wary of establishing middle schools as a way to maximize classroom space.

The CUSD--which includes 2,800 Sunnyvale students and one Sunnyvale junior high--considered a report from its facilities advisory committee at last week's meeting. The committee was formed to find ways to create more space in the district to accommodate class-size reduction, but some committee members told the board they felt left out of the process.

Nearly 200 residents, mostly parents, attended the meeting. Although three scenarios for creating more classroom space were presented, the 20 parents who chose to speak seized on one issue--middle schools. All of them opposed the plan to put sixth-graders on campuses along with students who are now in junior high school.

"No one I've talked to is in favor of the middle school option," said Melissa Hilton, a Garden Gate parent. "We don't see it as solving the issue of facilities."

One issue parents worried about was placing even more students on already overcrowded junior high campuses. Another was mixing the students in those age groups, with several insisting that sixth-graders were simply too young to share a campus with older and bigger seventh- and eighth-graders.

The option calls for the district to convert one of its elementary campuses into a middle school in addition to reopening two of its closed school sites. Reopening schools would cost an estimated $5 million per campus, said Robyn Phillips, assistant superintendent of fiscal services.

The middle school scenario includes placing portable classrooms on junior high campuses to accommodate as many sixth-graders as possible before a fifth middle school opens in the 1999-2000 school year. The district would have to redraw boundaries to put this option in place, said Superintendent Bill Bragg.

Hilton, who has three children at Garden Gate, including a fifth-grader, felt the board had already made up its mind to go with the middle school option, a statement trustees said was not so.

Another option presented was year-round, multi-track schooling, wherein students on the same campus are on as many as four separate vacation schedules. Still another option is to reopen two school sites, keeping sixth-graders on elementary campuses and still having enough space for class-size reduction, which lowers the number of students to 20 per teacher in grades in K-3.

Boundary changes would also occur in the plan that continues K-6 education, Bragg said.

"I think they're trying to blow smoke and scare us with boundary changes," Hilton said. "I don't think boundary changes would be as bad as people think."

Board member Roberta Pabst emphasized that a decision has not been made, and the board will analyze the three options and the community's input before anything happens. Even before class-size reduction money became an option offered by the state, the board was considering switching to middle schools because of the academic benefits.

"It is by no means a done deal, but we are very interested in [middle schools] for the benefits it will bring to the students," she said. "We don't have firm numbers on scenarios yet. The numbers will be important but not as important as the children."

Most of the costs still need to be calculated, Phillips said. Both the middle school and continuing K-6 education options have high price tags, but she couldn't estimate the number of portables needed for either scenario. Portables are estimated to cost about $100,000 apiece.

Kathleen Dye, an Eisenhower parent with six children, wants to keep sixth-graders on the elementary campuses. She said that while year-round, multi-track schooling would be the cheapest, family vacations would be hard to plan.

But she'd rather pull one of her kids out of school for a vacation than see the board move forward with the middle school option.

"From what I've heard, I'm not happy with middle school programs," she said. She's concerned that sixth-graders would not be allowed to participate in extracurricular activities and would have only three electives a year rather than four--news she heard at recent school meetings on the subject.

"Why fix something that isn't broken?" she said.

Other parents at the meeting said they didn't have enough information to make an educated decision.

"I would like to see specific scenarios and cost analysis before I can know what I think is best," said Lisa Carpenter, a Garden Gate parent and member of the facilities advisory committee.

Carpenter expressed disappointment with how the committee operated. She thought the committee's mission was to develop scenarios, but these were instead created by district staff. Other committee members were frustrated at not being able to accomplish what they understood as their objectives. According to some committee members, many questions were left unanswered during the process, and the scenarios were incomplete.

"I don't have an issue with middle schools," Carpenter said. "It may be the right thing to do from a program perspective, but the facility scenarios regarding it should tell the whole picture. I don't like seeing the facitilies advisory committee being credited as a community group that came up with the scenarios presented, because we didn't."

Stocklmeir parent Mark Arams--also a committee member--agreed, adding that the committee wanted to create scenarios and make its own recommendation.

Bragg reiterated that no decisions have been made. "The final solution will probably be a combination of several scenarios, but it hasn't been decided as far as I can tell," he said. "We will continue to update the board and the community as scenarios become more specific."

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This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, November 26, 1997.
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