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In the Sequoia Union High School District, the status quo could be in for some rough going as an enrollment growth of kindergarten-through-fourth-graders, particularly in Menlo Park, makes its way toward and through ninth grade. District officials have begun a conversation on possible effects on facility use, school choice and neighborhood-school boundaries — a matter of great concern to parents in the Las Lomitas and Ravenswood school districts.
Projections by a consulting demographer — considered highly reliable — show 10,000 students in Sequoia district public high schools by the 2020-21 school year.
At the moment, enrollment is about 8,300, with room for more, Superintendent James Lianides said in a recent letter to parents. Woodside High is about 500 students shy of its 2,200-student capacity and Menlo-Atherton High, with the same capacity, has room for about 200 more. Because district officials are considering equalizing enrollment at at about 2,400 students at each comprehensive high school, both Woodside and M-A might have to fit in 200 students beyond their current capacities.
These projections assume full enrollment at the district’s four charter high schools. A new comprehensive high school is not in the cards: the Sequoia district’s capital budget sits at about $9 million, not even close to the necessary $200 million to build a new campus, and the district is all but built out, Mr. Lianides said. Adding second stories to existing buildings is not an efficient use of funds and efficiency is likely to be an important focus, he added in an interview.
Equal distribution of students and facilities is one of four proposed “tenets” that Mr. Lianides and the district board rolled out for community reaction last week. The other three: maintaining some student choice in picking a school, maintaining socio-economic diversity at Carlmont High in Belmont, and maintaining intact middle-school communities where possible, given a possible redrawing of the map that connects neighborhoods to schools.
Much of the Las Lomitas Elementary School District is assigned to M-A, which means that the district’s eighth-graders have automatic enrollment at M-A. Meanwhile, the Ravenswood City School District has its eighth-graders assigned to three schools: M-A, Woodside and Carlmont, despite being geographically closer to M-A than part of the Las Lomitas district. This arrangement came with a 1983 court-ordered consent decree when Ravenswood High School was closed. The consent decree expired after six years, Mr. Lianides said.
M-A is an appealing school academically. For the 2011-12 school year, its state-determined academic performance index is 820 on a scale of 1,000, and white students have a collective score of 952. Both numbers are highly meaningful to real estate agents and homeowners concerned about property values, and to parents with high ambitions for their children. At Woodside, the numbers are 744 and 852, respectively.
M-A is also appealing geographically for Ravenswood students, many of whom now have to catch an early-morning bus to Carlmont High in Belmont.
About 700 Sequoia district students annually apply for a school other than that to which they are assigned. Because there tend to be more applications than seats available, the district holds a lottery and about 500 students are transferred, Mr. Lianides said. In the Ravenswood district, about two-thirds of students assigned to Woodside and Carlmont apply, usually to M-A or a local charter school, Mr. Lianides said.
The Ravenswood district is not alone in being split. Part of North Fair Oaks divides itself among three schools, and there are households in the Las Lomitas district assigned to Woodside High. But Las Lomitas households are handled differently. In a November 2011 letter to parents, former Las Lomitas superintendent Eric Hartwig explained:
“For the past several decades, La Entrada students who reside in Atherton or Woodside have Woodside High School as their assigned school, but there has been a policy of allowing them to ‘transfer’ to Menlo-Atherton High School,” Mr. Hartwig said. “If this option is important to you, please be diligent in complying with the Sequoia District’s procedures; if you don’t follow them I won’t be able to intervene.”
The letter includes a link to an open enrollment form and adds: “It’s as simple as that. No lottery, no mystery. Even if M-A is declared ‘full’ at a future date, (La Entrada) students who have followed this process will be admitted to Menlo-Atherton High school for 2012-13 under existing SUHSD Board Policies.”
Go to this link to read Mr. Hartwig’s letter.
At a May 15 meeting in a multi-purpose room in East Palo Alto, a group of about 30 Ravenswood parents, teachers and staff met with Mr. Lianides and board members Olivia Martinez and Allan Weiner. “Many of the people are interested to hear specifically about the Las Lomitas district,” said one parent after having the lottery explained. Mr. Lianides replied: “They have to submit the application, but they come off the top.”
“It’s hard to look at that map and think it’s not awkward,”said one parent. “It’s a head scratcher. … Does this make sense if we’re building communities and community schools? I’m sorry, but I can’t help thinking of a gerrymandered district when I look at this map.”
Two days earlier, Mr. Lianides, Ms. Martinez and Mr. Weiner met with about 100 parents in M-A’s Performing Arts Center. A show of hands indicated that about three-quarters were from the Las Lomitas community.
Las Lomitas and its relationship to M-A is “an organically derived fragile ecosystem,” said one parent who said she was speaking for her husband. “It’s grown organically into an amazing system that works. It works because we’re all together. I anticipate that Woodside (High) will grow into something like that. … If you remove a small part (of this ecosystem), it has the potential to collapse the whole thing.”
Mr. Lianides comes to Woodside High at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 29.
INFORMATION
Another community forum on high school enrollment growth and its effects will be held at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 29, in the Performing Arts Center at Woodside High School, 199 Churchill Ave.
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If the Las Lomitas District students are all reassigned to Woodside High, there will be more than enough parents to file a charter school petition, which the Sequoia board will vote down and the State Board of Education will likely approve. The High School district is required to provided comparable facilities to approved charter schools. With approximately 500 Las Lomitas students matriculating to a charter over a 4 year period, that would significantly help with the overcrowding in the existing high schools.
Why do you assume that all Las Lomitas District students would rather go to a charter school than attend Woodside High School? What is so terribly wrong with Woodside High School other than the fact that a large number of kids are English language learners whose parents did not attend college? Does that mean that there aren’t dedicated teachers there? Does that mean that kids who seek challenging courses can’t take them? I have two good friends whose children currently attend Woodside High School (they both attended Catholic schools in elementary and middle school) and their kids are doing very well. I have a student at M-A High School now, but I would not be opposed to sending my 2nd child to Woodside High. It’s actually closer to us too. And, if the entire cohort was going there, it would automatically raise the API scores and the % of kids whose parents attended college and graduate school.
The SUHSD spent a fair amount of money at some point building a school on Myrtle in East Palo Alto. I know, because I’ve attended meetings there. It’s a gorgeous facility and no one seems to be using it.
I realize that it’s not PC to advocate for a school in EPA because the attendees would most likely reflect the socioeconomic/racial composition of the local population. But I’ll bet most families would rather have their teens attend a neighborhood school than get sent to school in San Carlos.
The school exists already and seems ready for kids! Why isn’t the board considering opening it? It would relieve pressure from the SUHSD and perhaps even eliminate the need to redraw boundaries for the near future.
Do you suppose anyone regrets closing San Carlos?
Just make sure that when the switch is made for Las Lomitas kids, they all go to the same place (except those who already opt for private schools of course)
This is the district’s best bet to fill Woodside. The Las Lomitas Foundation part of the Menlo-Atherton’s Foundation can happily move its influence to Woodside. Keep the KIDS together!!
If the NORTHERN schools are the ones really overflowing, why can’t they come DOWN 280 to attend Woodside??
Focus on really helping the other feeder schools stay intact as they move into high school. PAY for busing to Menlo-Atherton for those areas! Getting on a bus to Carlmont early in the morning is bad, having to spend an equal amount of time WALKING… is worse. Kids should be able to stay at school for sports and help in the afternoons without worrying about walking home in the dark!! This should happen REGARDLESS of what the district does with changing boundaries. Expecting SOME families, that are least able to afford the added cost, to pay for public buses is a crime.
Foundations should also try to focus on helping their sister-feeder schools with help and money! Right now, there is no easy way to do that.
The community is growing. Time to build a new school.
Maybe the highly reliable demographer is the same one used last time when they predicted a drop in enrollment in the districts affected.
Lets stop & think about our children first. Its all about how the Real Estate Market reflects Menlo Atherton High School as having the highest scoring Students.
Think about the Kids from EPA/ They should be able to attend MA.
What if you couldn’t afford to have a home in Atherton, or a nice location in MP. What if you, yes YOU, lived in EPA. Would you want your child to attend one of the best schools, of course you would. Its time to think about our Children, not the ratings on our homes!
Lets come up with a plan that makes sense to ALL the children .
I’m wondering why there is so much concern with keeping students from Portola Valley, Menlo Park and Atherton together as they transition from middle to high school, yet the most vulnerable students when ” they reach high school, students from Ravenswood are bused to various campuses in the Sequoia Union High School District including Menlo Atherton High School, Woodside High School and Carlmont High School” (from another thread).
Yes, I’m from out of your District, but my kids have had many friends from EPA over the years thanks to the Tinsley agreement.
Keeping the Ravenswood students together should be a GREATER priority the other students, not to mention the huge amount of time them spend traveling to far away schools. Unfortunately, the Ravenswood parents have much less $$ and political clout.
My understanding is that the EPA students WOULD attend MA under new boundaries. The whole point is to rebalance the schools, and to eliminate breaking up feeder schools or neighborhoods. Putting students on a bus for 80 minutes a day was a solution ordered by a court, and the district should have readjusted the boundaries a dozen years ago when the court order expired.
Las Lomitas parent – thanks! It would be great to keep the EPA kids together and so much closer to their homes!
Does anyone else think it is strange to have two tiny school districts – las lomitas and mpcsd with duplicate administration and have no high school?
Why did Hillview add French instead of Mandarin? I was told by a parent it was b/c MA had French and kids could not continue once they hit high school.
Merge las Lomitas, portola valley, mpcsd and open our own high school.
To Scott,
Your suggestion that the two districts merge and build a high school, is a valid suggestion. There are two more districts that could be merged into your proposal, Portola Valley and Woodside Elementary. Unfortunately, nothing is as easy as it seems.
First, merging the districts together would require a tremendous amount of work, and,I believe, approval from the County Commission of School District Organization, as well as a potential appeal to the State Board of Education from either side. Second, the district would have to organize into a ‘Unified” school district, meaning it serves K-12 versus the current K-8. It is almost certain that Sequoia High School District would fight this proposal tooth and nail, because funds they currently receive from the four merging districts, would be diverted to the new Unified district. Third, there would be charges of segregation and ‘white flight’. I still think it is an interesting and valid option.
If the existing High School District does redraw their boundaries, would the Tinsley program even be needed anymore?
As for French and Mandarin, Las Lomitas added Mandarin a couple of years ago, and MA said they would try to support their students. Woodside and Carlmont already offer Mandarin, although I am not sure about Sequoia.
Back when I attended Las Lomitas Schools (Las Lomitas, La Loma, La Entrada), all of the Las Lomitas kids had to attend Woodside. Deja vu all over again.