KPAO by Dave Cortright

NeverWet super-hydrophobic coating

This looks like a really amazing product. I can't wait to get my hands on it. I think I'll start by covering my car with it.

SCCBOE, Whose data did you use to measure Bullis' racial and ethnic balance against LASD?

From: Dave Cortright
To: The Santa Clara County Board of Education
Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2011 9:03 AM
Subject: Whose data did you use to measure Bullis' racial and ethnic balance against LASD?

Members of the Santa Clara County Board of Education (SCCBOE),

I had a wonderful meeting yesterday with Julia in-person. I do feel like I understand your position a bit better, in that there are only a few factors that can be used when evaluating charter renewal. It is a travesty the California charter law is so poorly written that it does not allow you to take into account the fact that conditions in LASD have significantly changed since the charter was originally founded. I'm referring specifically to 47605(d)(1). Since Gardner-Bullis is currently an open, thriving public school, the geographic preference in the Bullis Charter would be illegal today.

But what I do want to focus on in this letter is 47605(b)(5)(G): The means by which the school will achieve a racial and ethnic balance among its pupils that is reflective of the general population residing within the territorial jurisdiction of the school district to which the charter petition is submitted. The primary reason I was surprised and disappointed that SCCBOE renewed BCS was that it seemed so clear to me that they were making no effort to meet this requirement. I looked at data from two different government sources: Ed-Data and the California Department of Education (CDE). Here are the direct links to the data:

http://tinyurl.com/cb3zfqr (you may need to click the "Students" tab to see the demographic data)
http://tinyurl.com/bnae75a

According to the CDE, in the 2010-2011 school year BCS had 3.7% Hispanic/Latino compared with 55.0% in LASD. Conversely, BCS had 53.3% white vs. 18.0% in LASD, and 28.8% Asian vs 18.0%. The Ed-Data numbers from 2009-2010 are comprable to these (and are in fact the same data on the CDE site if you choose to view the 2009-2010 school year).

These are not numbers that are "in the ballpark"; not even close. These are egregiously different. The Hispanic/Latino difference alone is off by a factor of 15! And to be clear, this is not a new condition. If you go back through all of the years of BCS' existence, a discrepancy of this magnitude has always existed. BCS has known about this problem since the beginning. Yet here we are 8 years later with absolutely no progress on fixing the issue. BCS' consistently excellent API score shows they know how to focus efforts to achieve results. So my only conclusion can be that they are willfully ignoring the letter of charter law here. What I don't understand is why the SCCBOE is letting them get away with this.

Which leads me back to my meeting yesterday with Julia. She admitted the numbers I showed her looked really bad. But she said the numbers you were using during your deliberations were not nearly so extreme. So my question for you is: Whose data did you use to measure Bullis' racial and ethnic balance against LASD? Frankly, I'm surprised you aren't using the California Department of Education's own data since SCCBOE is a member of that organization. 

I am meeting with Michael this Friday. Michael, I do hope you have a chance to find the data and the source and bring them with you to our meeting. If not, I would appreciate a reply to this email with that information.

As always, thank you for your time and consideration.

Respectfully,

·Dave Cortright 

Michael Chang, why aren't you representing your constituents in Area 2? (Bullis Charter School))

From: Dave Cortright
To: Michael Chang 
Cc: Santa Clara County Board of Education
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 6:06 PM
Subject: Michael Chang, why aren't you representing your constituents in Area 2?

Santa Clara County Board of Education (SCCBOE) Member Michael Chang,

In the course of my research to understand the history behind the recent SCCBOE decision to approve the Bullis Charter School (BCS) for 5 more years, I discovered some troubling information. As the Area 2 representative on SCCBOE, your duty is to represent the interests of the Los Altos school district (LASD). As I certainly hope you are aware, the LASD has some serious issues in their relationship with BCS, and has equally serious concerns about how BCS is run. My understanding is that many members of LASD—board, parents, teachers, and staff—all reached out to you in the time leading up to the vote wishing to discuss with your their views on the BCS issue. And you conveniently ignored their calls, did not return their voice messages, and refused to engage in a discussion with them about BCS.

I hope you can see how these actions appear to those in the community. That you will not even deign to show a modicum of respect by acknowledging receipt of said communiques—let along engage and respond to their content—creates a perception in the community that you not working for us. Actually, it's worse than that; the perception is that you are actively working AGAINST us. You avoided engaging with members of your community regarding BCS, and then—despite all of the issues brought up at the meeting (most notably by your fellow board member Anna Song)—you went ahead voted to approve BCS anyway.

Michael Chang, you are a publicly elected government official, and you are supposed to represent the interests of everyone in Area 2. Judging from past performance I don't expect a response, but still I must ask you to please explain your behavior. "Why did you not respond to these requests for an audience? Why did you vote to approve BCS? And what do you say to all the people in Area 2 who in 2 years time will be deciding who to place as their representative on SCCBOE?"More than one person indicated to me that because of this, they would vote for anyone but Michael Chang in the next election.

Thank you for your time and attention in considering my points. Respectfully,

·Dave Cortright

Los Altos parent Andrew Towell speaks out on Bullis Charter School

On request from the LASD board, I reached out to my brother-in-law, Andrew Towell, to get his thoughts on the Bullis Charter School issue. He writes:

---

I have two children: one current LASD student (a 6th grader at Springer), and one former LASD child (a 9th grader at MVHS).

 

Having been in the district since the initial closure of Bullis Purissima, there is a lot of historical stuff that can be dredged up, but I think that is pointless now.  Both sides need to accept the situation on the ground as it exists now, and figure out the best way forward.

Impact of the charter on my kids

 

• The ongoing costs of housing the charter impact the LASD budget, in that we are operating one more campus than we need.
• The ongoing costs of litigation also impact the budget, although it's not a huge sum in the overall budget.
• Board and staff time that could be better spent on the core educational mission of the district.
• Charter skimming off of non-special needs, non-ELL families will leave district with proportionally higher costs per student. 

Impact of the charter on the community

• Hostility and endless bickering has created a fracture in the community.
• Egan school and neighborhood communities have been unfairly impacted with traffic and overcrowding.
• Closure of a school site in order to house the charter will be very disruptive, across much of the district, and will further contribute to the fracture in the community.
• Sharing of a school site with the charter will be disruptive, but less so if fewer children are re-homed to different campuses.
• Buying a new school site and building a facility would require a bond I assume, and that would be a hard sell, but this would be the least disruptive to the children.

How would I feel if my local school site (Springer) is closed and handed to the charter?

 

As an aside, we went through this thought process during the previous school closure cycle, as there was a Springer closure scenario.  It was not that bad for us, as Loyola is almost equidistant from our house.  We were willing to go along with what was deemed necessary at the time for the district's budget.  Not surprisingly, many other parents did not see it that way, and there was a mobilization of Springer parents strongly opposed to closure.

 

Closure of Springer (or any campus) to house the charter is a different animal.  This creates a neighborhood school that the neighbors may not want to attend (that would be my case), or even if they do want to, they have to get lucky in the lottery.  And one campus closure does not necessarily spell the end of the disruption, as the charter continues to grow.

 

For me personally, it would create a thorn, a constant reminder every time I drive by, of how public education is being usurped by skilled tacticians, using the letter of California charter law to maximum advantage while ignoring the spirit of that same law.  If my children were younger, and our campus was handed to the charter school, I would probably move them to private school, and I say this as a strong believer in public education, including the education my children have received from LASD.

 

My final thoughts: while CA charter law has created an untenable situation (county as supervisory authority, LASD as financially responsible authority), there must be an agreement between all three parties that creates some predictability.  The hot air flying around—about BCS growing to 2, 3 or all the campuses if they feel like it—is unacceptable.  The district must have a reasonable forecast in order to allocate facilities fairly and responsibly for all the public students it is responsible for.

 

Thanks for your time,

Andrew Towell

 

Conversation with Joseph Di Salvo regarding making Bullis a county charter

From: Dave Cortright 
To: Joseph di salvo
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 9:34 AM
Subject: Re: Kudos on approving the 3 additional Rocketship charters

While I do appreciate your sentiment and intentions, I would much rather see results. Merely asking them to petition is not good enough. Actually getting them to do so is what counts. Frankly, I don't see them doing this unless you force the issue by rejecting/revoking their current district charter. You must wield the power you have, else you cede it to BCS.

Let me know if there is any way I can assist in making this happen.

---

From: Joseph di salvo
To: Dave Cortright 
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 9:53 AM
Subject: Re: Kudos on approving the 3 additional Rocketship charters

Mr. Cortright,

I agree with some of your points. I have urged Bullis to petition us for a countywide benefit charter for under-served students, K-8, in San Jose's east side. The entire village must come to the aid of it's most vulnerable members.

Sent from my iPad

Kudos on approving the 3 additional Rocketship charters, Santa Clara County Board of Education

From: Dave Cortright
To: The Santa Clara County Board of Education
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 7:52 AM
Subject: Kudos on approving the 3 additional Rocketship charters

Members of the Santa Clara County Board of Education (SCCBOE),

While work commitments prevent me from attending your board meeting this week, I was heartened to see that you used that time productively, approving 3 more Rocketship charters as county-wide charter schools. While I am not as familiar with the history of Rocketship, from what I have seen they embody the true intent of charter schools: to provide a significantly better education to under-served children in the community. I did find it a bit ironic that the district is complaining the charter didn't come to them first. Ah, if only we could trade places with them.

Sadly, this makes the contrast with Bullis Charter School (BCS) even more stark. BCS does not provide a significantly better education, merely a different curriculum. And they also do not help the under-served children in the community. Their charter admissions requirements are written specifically to favor the already well-served children in the county. If BCS did not exist, do you think that the overall quality of the education in all of Santa Clara county would diminish in any significant way? I don't. Those kids would either get absorbed back into LASD schools—which is one of the top districts in the entire state—or they would go to a proper private school because their parents can afford it. These kids would still end up with an excellent education.

One of the things that bothers me the most about your relationship with BCS is that there doesn't appear to be any real give and take between you two. You are not negotiating at all with them to encourage, nay DEMAND, that their charter serve more than the special interests of the wealthiest families in the best district in Santa Clara County. You have not wielded your veto power over them well enough (if at all), and as a result, you have conceded far more to BCS than you need to. And your rubber-stamp approvals means you are leaving so much potential on the table.

There is a basic concept in economics called "opportunity cost". To me, it feels like you are not taking the opportunity cost of BCS into account with your approvals. What if all that cost and time and effort that has gone into BCS was instead redirected towards a charter with broader impact?

Imagine if BCS were actually a county charter like Rocketship that had no geographical restrictions on admissions. Don't you think that would better serve the under-served students in the county? I certainly do. Yes, it would require them to withdraw their current charter and rewrite and resubmit it. And yes, they might choose not to do so and go to the state to appeal your decision. And yes, it might even involve them bringing a lawsuit against you (history has shown they have a proclivity for that sort of thing). But so be it. Don't you think that path and extra effort is worth it in order to bring an LASD/BCS-level education to anyone within the county?

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this, and for your thoughtful consideration of my points.

Respectfully,

·Dave Cortright

BusinessWeek article: Taxpayers Get Billed for Kids of Millionaires at Charter School

From: Dave Cortright
To: Santa Clara County Board of Education
Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2011 8:22 AM
Subject: BusinessWeek article: Taxpayers Get Billed for Kids of Millionaires at Charter School

Members of the Santa Clara County Board of Education (SCCBOE),

Read the article appended below. This is how your charter school is being perceived by outsiders. I hope you really understand the implications of your actions. Through your continued approval of Bullis Charter School, you are actively "undercutting the original goals of the charter movement". LASD is most likely the top-performing district in Santa Clara County (or if not, very near it). The district is also in one of the wealthiest areas of the county. So what line of logic leads to to believe that there is a real need for an alternative choice in public education here, of all places a charter could serve in the county?

Sure, BCS test scores are excellent, but then so are those in LASD. If you were to further refine the comparison by correcting for the geographic areas where the BCS kids tend to come from, and account for any relative differences in how many special ed kids are in the numbers (and I do plan to do this), I'm sure you will find that the numbers are within the margin of error.

But the real travesty here is the fact that the geographic discrimination built into their charter—that same geographic discrimination approved by you on three separate times over 8 years—means that BCS will NEVER reach the most under-served students in Santa Clara County. Yes, they may have a few kids from the North-East side of the district, and a very small handful from outside the district. That's good, but let's be honest: they are the exception. They aren't moving the needle. BCS is essentially providing the same overall educational experience (yes, with a slightly different curriculum) to the same set of students already served by LASD.

There are clear costs to allowing BCS to exist, as this article shows (as well as the continued drama around the Prop 39 court case, the complaints you hear from BCS parents, or even the fact that I feel the need now to write you a letter every week or so to keep this issue at the top of your mind). The benefits are low. BCS is not providing a measurably better educational experience than the LASD alternative, and they aren't providing it to a significant number of under-served students. So tell me, how do you continue to justify BCS' existence? 

The full article is below for your reading convenience. 

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this, and for your thoughtful consideration of my points.

Respectfully,

·Dave Cortright

----------

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-16/taxpayers-get-billed-for-kids-of-millionaires-at-charter-school.html

Taxpayers Get Billed for Kids of Millionaires at Charter School

Nov. 15 (Bloomberg) — In Silicon Valley, Bullis elementary school accepts one in six kindergarten applicants, offers Chinese and asks families to donate $5,000 per child each year. Parents include Ken Moore, son of Intel Corp.’s co-founder, and Steven Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse.

Bullis isn’t a high-end private school. It’s a taxpayer-funded, privately run public school, part of the charter-school movement that educates 1.8 million U.S. children. While charters are heralded for offering underprivileged kids an alternative to failing U.S. districts, Bullis gives an admissions edge to residents of parts of Los Altos Hills, where the median home is worth $1 million and household income is $219,000, four times the state average.

“Bullis is a boutique charter school,” said Nancy Gill, a Los Altos education consultant who helps parents choose schools. “It could bring a whole new level of inequality to public education.”

The growing ranks of U.S. charter schools in affluent suburbs are pitting neighbor against neighbor and, critics say, undercutting the original goals of the charter movement. Families who benefit cherish extensive academic offerings and small classes. Those who don’t say their children are being shortchanged because the schools are siphoning off money and the strongest students, leaving school districts with higher expenses and fewer resources for poor, immigrant and special- needs kids.

Bullis Charter School offers its 465 students a rich, interdisciplinary education unavailable in regular schools, said Principal Wanny Hersey. She compared Bullis to Silicon Valley companies such as Apple Inc. — whose leader, the late Steve Jobs, grew up in Los Altos.

Valley’s Spirit

“It really speaks to the spirit of the valley, trying to be a model for innovation and unleashing human potential,” Hersey said in an interview.

Bullis’s popularity shows that even parents in wealthy, top-performing school districts such as Los Altos have become disenchanted and are seeking alternatives. Bullis has higher state standardized test scores and offers more art and extracurricular activities than the Los Altos district, which is cutting music and increasing class size. Bullis has achieved this success while receiving about 60 percent of the conventional system’s public funding.

Every child deserves a good education, Buffy Poon, a Bullis mother of three and former EBay Inc. executive and Merrill Lynch & Co. banker, said in an interview.

“It takes all of us, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ (I cringe to use such blunt distinctions), to help improve the world.” Poon wrote in an e-mail to the Santa Clara County Board of Education, which oversees the school.

Netflix Founder

Parents in Los Altos Hills created Bullis in 2003 because they were angry after the district closed their neighborhood school, said Mark Breier, a founder of the school and former chief executive of Beyond.com.

To get advice on starting Bullis, Breier said he consulted with Silicon Valley luminaries and charter advocates. They included Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix Inc. and former president of the California State Board of Education and venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers.

The founding parents won a charter from the Santa Clara County Board of Education after the Los Altos district twice rejected them. After giving spots to current students and their siblings, Bullis reserves half of its slots for residents of the neighborhood that fed into the old school.

First Charter

Last year, U.S. charter schools received $14.8 billion in local, state and federal money, up from $4.5 billion in 2003, according to an estimate by Washington-based Aspire Consulting LLC, which analyzes public-education finances.

One out of five of the country’s 5,200 charter schools is in a suburb, including affluent communities like Los Altos, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. In Minnesota, where the charter school movement began in 1992, charters in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region initially focused on black, urban neighborhoods and have since spread into wealthy suburbs, where schools are often predominantly white, according to research from the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race and Poverty.

A quarter of U.S. charter schools don’t participate in the federal free and reduced-price lunch program, compared with 2 percent at conventional public schools, according to a 2010 study by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Racial Balance

That means they aren’t serving a significant low-income population, Erica Frankenberg, co-author of the report and an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, said in an interview.

California’s 1992 charter law — the second in the U.S., after Minnesota’s — says schools should place “special emphasis” on “academically low-achieving” students and make an effort to reflect the “racial and ethnic balance” of the population in its district.

Last year, about 2 percent of Bullis students spoke English as a second language, compared with 11 percent in the district, county data show. Bullis had about half the percentage of Hispanic students or those with disabilities.

The charter school makes it tough for non English-speaking students to attend because it doesn’t have materials in Spanish, Doug Smith, a trustee on the Los Altos school board, said in an interview. Lower-income families aren’t even aware that the school is an alternative, he said.

‘Private School?’

On a recent afternoon, Anna Barragon, a 33-year-old immigrant from Mexico, picked up her kids at the Los Altos district’s Santa Rita Elementary School, down the street from Bullis. Every day, she drives by the charter school.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Barragon said of Bullis. “Is it a private school?”

“Bullis doesn’t fit with the spirit of the law,” said Gary Rummelhoff, a former president of the Santa Clara County Board of Education who sits on the board of a charter school in nearby San Jose. “It only existed to serve a very wealthy area.”

Bullis doesn’t discriminate because it accepts children through a random lottery and broadly reflects the demographics of the community, said Moore, son of Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.

“Bullis is a public school, free and open to all,” said Moore, who chairs the Bullis board.

The school plans to translate materials into Spanish and advertise in Spanish-language papers, he said. Bullis offers free lunches to low-income students and doesn’t participate in the federal program because of administrative costs, Hersey said. Less than 1 percent of students would qualify for the program, she said.

Broadway and Stocks

On a recent school day at Bullis, a kindergarten class studied Mandarin. Second-graders, sitting cross-legged under pictures of Bach, Mozart, Liszt and Stravinsky, learned to read music. A seventh-grade math class worked on algebra — a year or two before most U.S. schools — while an advanced student did linear equations at a high-school level. The school offers electives in Broadway dance and the stock market.

“We’re lucky to have so many different things we can study here,” said third-grader Ishani Sood, 8, taking a break from her Mandarin class.

A foundation set up to help fund the school asks Bullis parents to donate at least $5,000 for each child they enroll. Those who can’t afford to pay should discuss the reason with a foundation member, “recognizing that other school families will need to make up the difference,” the foundation said on its website.

‘Aggressive’ Requests

In an interview, Anna Song, a member of the Santa Clara County Board of Education, said she received about 20 phone calls from parents who felt pressured to give because of repeated solicitation in school parking lots, e-mails and phone calls.

“They are very aggressive in asking parents for money,” said Laurie Uhler, a former Bullis parent. “If you don’t pay it, word gets out that you aren’t doing your part.” Parents often refer to the payments as “tuition,” she said in an interview.

Donations are “purely voluntary,” Moore said. They are necessary because Bullis receives less public money than the district, which has a foundation that asks for $1,000 per child, Moore said. The Los Altos School District last year spent about $10,000 per student, according to state data. Bullis receives about $6,000 in public funding, primarily because it doesn’t qualify for money from a local tax that the school district receives. On average U.S. charter schools get 19 percent less local, state and federal money than traditional districts, according to a 2010 Ball State University study.

District Cuts

The Los Altos school system is cutting back. Since 2009, the district’s budget has fallen 9 percent to about $40 million. Los Altos cut 20 teaching and other positions and eliminated many of its music programs. Maximum class sizes in kindergarten through third grade rose to 25 from 20. Bullis averages fewer than 20.

Along with leaving the district with the hardest-to-serve students, Bullis-related expenses have hurt the Los Altos school system in other ways, said Randy Kenyon, the assistant superintendent.

For each district student who attends Bullis, the system loses about $5,000 in per-pupil funding, Kenyon said. Los Altos pays about $300,000 a year for the school’s facilities, he said.

Hersey said Bullis can provide its enriched education with the same amount of funding as the district, including donations, because it has less bureaucracy and overhead.

Bullis last month won an appeal of a lawsuit against the school district saying Los Altos must provide more space and buildings under the state’s charter-school law. Bullis currently operates out of portable classrooms. The case cost Bullis $900,000 in legal fees, according to its tax filings. The district spent about $700,000.

‘Sense of Entitlement’

Song, who originally supported the school, changed her mind when Bullis’s charter came up for renewal last month.

In an open letter, Song cited the school’s “sense of entitlement and lack of understanding of what it means to be part of public education.”

Bullis “performed abysmally in serving socioeconomically disadvantaged students,” she wrote. After a more than four-hour session, attended by 200 people, many of them Bullis parents wearing school T-shirts, the Santa Clara County school board voted to renew the charter, 5 to 2.

During a break, Arash Baratloo, a Google Inc. software engineer and Bullis parent, said he considered the $5,000 donation requested every year by Bullis to be “money well spent.” He previously sent his child to a private school where tuition was about $25,000 a year.

“It could be considered a bargain, but that’s not why we came,” Baratloo said. “We were looking for the best education out there, and that’s what we found.”

—Editors: Jonathan Kaufman, Lisa Wolfson

To contact the reporter on this story: John Hechinger in Boston at jhechinger@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Kaufman at jkaufman17@bloomberg.net

Techno Fan by the Wombats

East London's not a bomb site
It is a treasure chest
We use our penguin costumes
More than our evening dress

...

Shut up and move with me, move with me, or, or get out of my face
I didn't queue for an hour to leave straight away
Shut up and stay with me, stay with me, or, or let go of my hand
The lasers fill our minds with empty plans
I never knew I was a techno fan

http://grooveshark.com/s/Techno+Fan/3IoBHT

My email exchange with Leon Beauchman, member of the Santa Clara County Board of Education (Bullis)

From: Dave Cortright 
To: Leon Beauchman 
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 11:33 AM
Subject: Re: Scheduling a phone meeting

Leon, I am going to pass on your offer to talk to you on the phone regarding charter school issues. It's obvious that this isn't a priority for you. I explicitly moved my 1pm meeting to 2 pm on Fri, 10/28 in order to talk to you, but then you were not available as you had promised in your email. If you can't even tell me the simple truth about your schedule availability less than 24 hours in advance, I do not believe cannot trust you to tell me the truth about a much more complex topic such as charter school law.

I leave you with a simple request: if you are such a stauch supporter of BCS, then back it up with action. Get in there and actively help them resolve their conflict with LASD. Give them the resources they need to be successful. Hold them accountable for building up an enrollment comprising more diverse and under-served students. Go above and beyond for them. To simply vote to approve the charter and then wash your hands of it is the poorest for of superficial support. To me it says that you don't really support them. You just are voting for them because it is the politically expedient thing for you to do. But I would be delighted if you proved me wrong.

Sincerely, 

·Dave Cortright

---

From: Leon Beauchman 
To: Dave cortright 
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 5:06 PM
Subject: Re: Scheduling a phone meeting

David . . . Thanks for reaching out to me. I should be available tomorrow between noon and 2pm. Thanks. <phone number redacted>

--- On Thu, 10/27/11, Dave Cortright wrote:

From: Dave Cortright
Subject: Re: Scheduling a phone meeting
To: Leon Beauchman
Date: Thursday, October 27, 2011, 11:24 PM

Leon, sorry I keep missing your calls. It has been a very busy week for me. I'm in a meeting now in fact. 

I do appreciate your persistence. If you let me know when you're available tomorrow, I'll do my best to give you a call then. 

Thanks,
·Dave

On Oct 24, 2011, at 12:27 PM, Leon Beauchman wrote:

David . . . I gave you a call earlier today. You can reach me in my office. Leon --- On Sat, 10/22/11, Dave Cortright wrote: From: Dave Cortright  Subject: Scheduling a phone meeting To:Leon Beauchman  Date: Saturday, October 22, 2011, 9:22 PM Mr. Beauchman, Thanks for taking the time to reach out to me and help me to better understand BCS and charter schools. I checked my schedule and I am free on Monday10/24 from 12-2 or 3 onward. I am also free Tues 10/25 9-11. Let me know if any of these times work for you. Thanks again, ·Dave Cortright

 

 

2 suggestions for giving Bullis Charter School the minimum facilities as required by Prop 39

From: Dave Cortright 
To: Los Altos School District board
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2011 10:35 AM
Subject: 2 suggestions for giving BCS the minimum facilities as required by Prop 39

Members of the Los Altos School District board,

I wanted to follow up on my spoken comments to you at last Monday's meeting with this letter. I do realize that public speaking is not my forte, and I fear that my first impression on you was not as positive as it could have been given the unstructured and perhaps a bit rambling nature of my speech.

I have already written many letters to the Santa Clara County Board of Education (SCCBOE) on the topic of Bullis Charter School (BCS). These are all published on my blog if you're interested in reading them (when I moved my blog to a different host company recently, it broke both the tag view and search, so the best way to find these posts is via a Google site search of kpao.org). But to summarize, I have had no respect for BCS and the immature, entitled attitude they have taken (and continue to this day) in response to the necessary and temporary action you took in closing and renovating the old Bullis-Purissima school in Los Altos Hills.

Let's be 100% clear on the reason BCS was formed 8 years ago: they wanted to reverse your decision and force a public school to reopen in Los Altos Hills for their own children to attend, ideally in the old Bullis-Purissima site. And they used and abused the charter school law as the weapon. The simple fact that they chose the name "Bullis" for their school gives away their true intent, as well as all of the attempts they made to acquire the Bullis-Purissima site for their charter, the geographic discrimination written into their charter (which went through several revisions before it was even legal)... and the list goes on.

Sadly—for reasons I cannot fathom—the SCCBOE has chosen to be a willing pawn in BCS' game and continues to renew BCS despite the fact that it is a huge net negative. Yes, on paper BCS has slightly better academic achievements than all of LASD. But then BCS students are primarily coming from the very rich and well-educated section of LASD (due to the geographic discrimination in their charter), and studies have shown that the strongest factor correlated to academic performance is the education level of the parents. But the positive must be weighed against the negatives: BCS drains both time and resources from the already excellent LASD, feeds divisiveness in the Los Altos community, and does nothing to actually improve education for the most at-need children in Santa Clara County. Why the SCCBOE does not demand that BCS become a county charter and serve these children is beyond me.

So, it is my perception that SCCBOE is an absentee parent: they have given birth and continue to approve the existence of BCS, but they do nothing of substance and give no resources to ensure the success of BCS. They merely point the metaphorical gun to the head of LASD and force you to deal with this mess they have made. And while I do not like what BCS is doing, I find it hard to fault them. To me they are the scorpion and you are the frog. SCCBOE are the ones at fault here. They hold the gun on the shore and force the frog to carry the scorpion, even though the frog knows full well what an awful idea that is.

Given the poor hand you have been dealt, I think you have done an admirable job over the years accommodating BCS. I personally find it gratifying in a schadenfreude way that BCS has been stuck in the reasonably equivalent portable classrooms at Egan these 8 years. For a group that formed for the sole reason of getting a neighborhood school in Los Altos Hills, I wonder how that must feel to fail so spectacularly? And the sad thing is, they now have that neighborhood public school again, in the form of Gardner-Bullis. I am confused as to why BCS continues to exist given this fact. They got what they wanted. It seems they have grown more and more ambitious over the years and now want to effectively take over LASD from you and run it through the cabal that they call the BCS school board.

All that preamble aside, the most pressing issue for you is what facilities to give BCS to meet Prop 39, especially given their tendency for unchecked growth. I have two suggestions for you.

The first would be the simplest and most straightforward. Give BCS the Gardner-Bullis site. They have been quite clear about their desire for this particular site since the beginning. Yes it pains me to think that we might actually end up rewarding them for their bad behavior, but it might prove to be the best way to resolve this issue. It may not be currently big enough to house the BCS school body, but portables be installed on the property there to give them the required capacity. My hope is that BCS still places a high value on getting that particular site, and thus would be willing to concede on other points in a legally binding contract in order to do so.

The second is to continue the portables strategy. Yes, you are already at the dizzy limit on the Egan site. But you can start installing portables at other schools to accommodate the ever-increasing enrollment of BCS. It is not unreasonable to split their elementary classes and their middle school classes across sites; it is exactly equivalent to how LASD works. I like this strategy because it is scalable and relatively inexpensive. Yes, it is a bit disruptive to the schools you have to put the portables on, but I think you agree we are talking about the lesser of evils at this point. No solution is going to be perfect. Plus by going to a second site for BCS (and perhaps eventually a third or even fourth), it enables you to give them access to playing fields at that new site, which should hopefully rectify any shortcomings regarding Prop 39.

As you can see, I am passionate about this issue. I would be happy to be a resource to you if you feel you can use me constructively in any way on this issue. If not, well then I will continue to send you my unsolicited advice and opinions. And no matter what, know that you have my full support on this issue. Do not go quietly into that good night.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and consider my position.

Respectfully,

·Dave Cortright