By Kathleen Acuff
The arrival of a new extended-day kindergarten pilot program, announced at last week’s Los Altos School District board meeting, met with mixed reaction among district supporters and anger from Los Altos Hills residents supportive of returning K-6 classes to the Bullis-Purissima School site. The kindergarten program is targeted for that site in the fall.
With newly named Superintendent Tim L. Justus looking on, the board approved an extended-day program of three to six classrooms of regular students who will share the campus with the district’s autistic preschool students and at least one commercial preschool. Students from throughout the district, and from other districts, may enroll there. LASD residents will be guaranteed a place in their regular ten lar school when they enter first grade.
The shorter morning and afternoon kindergarten sessions will continue at the six elementary schools, where principals “can try different models in the freed-up class space,” said current Superintendent Marge Gratiot. Gratiot is retiring from the district June 30.
Gratiot’s proposal sought to accommodate the large number of district parents who indicated in a recent survey that they want extended-day kindergarten for their children. It was unanimously approved by the five trustees, but met two very different expressions of anger in the audience.
Amanda Terry, an Oak School kindergarten teacher who was president of the Los Altos Teachers Association last year, said that extended-day kindergarten “is the wave of the future” and agreed that the district should have such a program, but she expressed personal frustration that little time is left in the school year to prepare for it. Gratiot responded that in-service funds are available for three to five teachers to develop the curriculum while classrooms are prepared this summer.
Duncan MacMillan, on the Los Altos Hills Public Education Committee since its inception, told trustees that he spoke for himself in saying, “Bringing more non-LAH people into Bullis-Purissima will not lessen the angst … (of) the people of Los Altos Hills.”
In an e-mail to the Town Crier, MacMillan added, “(This) latest scheme will serve nothing more than to further inflame and annoy a town which has been injured by the reopening of Covington in the face of near-zero growth and the simultaneous closure of the last school in Los Altos Hills. With 12-17 empty classrooms elsewhere in the district, one has to believe that sites closer to neighborhood Los Altos schools could be found for this experiment, if the superintendent cared to do so. We hardly need more non-LAH kids coming into town while our school continues to be unavailable to our children.”
According to Gratiot, the district built several “flex rooms” into each school for music, art and other programs. She said the district has one empty classroom, at Covington, but the flex rooms are used regularly.
Before the vote, trustee Bill Cooper said he approved the plan because it is “a baby step toward reopening Bullis as a public school.” Trustee Margot Harrigan spoke next, saying she was “leveraging on” Cooper’s remark to ask Gratiot whether starting the extended-day kindergarten was the same as reopening Bullis as a public school. Gratiot said it was not. Both the preschool autistic program now on the campus and the regular kindergarten planned for some of the classrooms are public education programs, but the district has made no decision to open classes for higher grades there.
The extended-day kindergarten is a pilot program that can be scrapped if it is unsatisfactory, Gratiot said. Students will be in school for six hours rather than the three or four hours of other district kindergarten classes. She suggested that the extra hours will give children “more time for play, music and art, things that got squeezed out of the kindergarten day” when the state beefed up the curriculum.
Gratiot said there will be no principal at Bullis. The kindergarten will be overseen by a teacher-in-charge, who will also work with the preschool autistic center, at a salary of about $40,000. No classroom teachers will be hired for the program. Extra aide time will probably cost $5,000 per class, and instructional materials will probably cost $1,000 per class, the superintendent said.
“Part of that money has been donated anonymously by someone who really wants to make sure the class is successful,” Gratiot wrote in an e-mail to the Town Crier last Friday. “We will garner rent from the people who run the after-school child care (probably about $20,000). So if you add up the costs and subtract the rent for the child-care center, we are left with an incremental cost of about $50,000 (for five classes.) All we need to do is attract nine students (at $6,000 each for revenue-limit funding plus class-size reduction incentive) who would otherwise attend private school because they want a longer day, and we will break even or better.”
