By Kathleen Acuff

The Los Altos School District’s long-term plan for the now-surplus Bullis-Purissima property is to renovate it and reopen it as a regular school, according to the board president.

“We want to keep Bullis as a school site so we can reopen a district school there sometime - maybe in 10 years,” Duane Roberts said.

Supporters of the Bullis Charter School, however, see a different future for the property.

“I believe that ultimately the district will give us the site. This community will never support another bond measure or partial tax while it’s divided,” said Craig Jones, chairman of the charter school’s board of

directors.

According to Roberts, the LASD is growing faster than any other district in this area. More schools will soon be needed if it is to maintain its policy of no more than 550 students per elementary school.

Meanwhile, to avoid losing money on the Bullis property, the district is looking into leasing the site to day-care providers, in accordance with Education Code 17458. Roberts, one of the two board members on the construction subcommittee, estimated that the LASD could gain from $150,000 to $250,000 per year through such leases. Assistant Superintendent Randy Kenyon announced at the last board meeting that at least three child-care providers have shown interest in leasing Bullis. Kenyon also showed the board how the site could be configured for those services as well as for a district preschool special education class.

Although the district must allocate $5,000 for each student who attends a charter school, it has an obligation to find a site for a charter having an enrollment of more than 80 in-district students. The Bullis Charter School’s 60-day open enrollment period began Oct. 15. Supporters and opponents of the school estimate that at least 155 K-6 students will enroll for 2004.

Jones said that the school will “very likely” have more than 155 students in its first year. He said that the target enrollment for the school is no more than 300 students.

The LASD board is discussing criteria for siting the charter school. Jay Thomas stated at the Oct. 6 meeting that the three possibilities are to locate the school on the same campus as a regular school, at an alternate site — perhaps in portable camp school buildings that will be vacant at the end of this school year, or at the Bullis site.

“The two schools in one idea has already been proposed, fought and withdrawn,” Jones commented. “The camp school is an extremely expensive alternative — much more so than the Bullis School site.”

Jones said that the charter school group has offered to rent the Bullis site, but “the district thinks it can get more from child-care providers.”

Thomas, also on the construction subcommittee, said that his presentation to the board emphasized the need for objective evaluation to make the best financial decision for both the district and the charter school.

Bullis-Purissima School was closed at the end of the last school year, following the board’s March decision. The smallest school in the district, Bullis had a formidable physical defect. The portable classrooms that supplemented the 10 classrooms in the main building stood in the path of the site’s drainage runoff.

“When the teachers left at the end of the day [during the rainy season], they had to put sandbags at their classroom doors,” Roberts said. “There was a lot of mold, and some of the portables weren’t fit for human inhabitants.”

The children and staff using leased rooms in the Bullis facility will not be endangered by the runoff and mold, Roberts said, because the district will be “a responsible landlord.”

“We won’t lease the portables, only the rooms not in the drainage path. We’re looking at ways to mitigate the drainage problems without tearing down the buildings,” he said.

Roberts said that Bullis had been first on the list of elementary schools slated for renovation but slipped to last place after assessments by two architects, consulted in January and February.

“The estimate for the necessary repairs was $9 million to $15 million, and we didn’t have the money to do it. That was the final weighting factor in our process,” Roberts said.

The LASD has closed five schools over the years, he said. Statewide, thousands of schools have been closed in the past 40 years, he added.