By Kathleen Acuff

Twenty-eight local citizens working for three months have produced no recommendations for resolving the conflict between Bullis Charter School and the Los Altos School District, but they are on better speaking terms.

“The fact that these people can talk to each other and know each other will be positive for the community,” Roy Lave said of his hand-picked Community Process for Reconciliation committee in late January.

Lave, the executive director of the Los Altos Community Foundation, was unavailable for comment at press time.

In a closed study session with district trustees before Monday’s regular board meeting, Lave was to present a summary of the options the committee considered.

Superintendent Marge Gratiot said earlier Monday that the mediation expert’s report “really represents pretty accurately what went on at the committee meetings” and “presents ideas that would be useful in working through this.”

A member of the CPR committee, Gratiot said the group had not been given the task of recommending a solution.

“We weren’t invited to be on the committee to find a recommendation but to improve communication among the people involved in the situation,” she said.

Lave had said earlier that the committee’s final report would be “a community document that could lead to identification of a superior option, but that’s not the goal. The value-add of what we’re doing is identifying more options than anyone has before.”

The CPR process was facilitated by Geoff Ball, whose services were paid for through a grant from the Packard Foundation. Participants were affiliated with, though officially not representing, 11 community groups.

Many people in the community had expected the committee to find an equitable solution to almost two years of contention between the parents of 84 district students from Los Altos Hills and the parents of 4,000 other students in the district that began with the closing of Bullis-Purissima Elementary School. Currently, 305 Hills children attend district schools, 231 are enrolled in the Palo Alto Unified School District, and an estimated 382 attend private schools.

The charter school’s directors brought an unresolved lawsuit against the district in September, demanding use of the Bullis-Purissima campus. The Los Altos Hills City Council filed a companion lawsuit at the same time.

The committee studied the following six options in dept

1. Bullis-Purissima as a neighborhood school; Bullis Charter School at another site in the district or an independent site

2. The charter school at Bullis

3. Lease or sell the Bullis site; the charter school at another district site or an independent site

4. Fold the charter school into a magnet school at the Bullis site

5. The charter school as an “internal charter”

6. Bullis-Purissima as a neighborhood school sharing the site with the charter school (could refer to any site)

In Monday’s regular meeting, the superintendent planned to present for board approval the draft preliminary offer to the charter school of the Egan Junior High School camp for its use next year. The district will make the approved preliminary offer to the charter school March 14 and the final facilities offer April 1. The charter’s directors will have until May 1 to accept or decline.