By Eliza Ridgeway

The Los Altos School District Board unanimously assigned Bullis Charter School to the Egan Camp School facility for the 2006-2007 school year, to much shaking of heads from charter school supporters in the audience. This is the third year the district has reviewed and denied the charter school’s preferred facility option, the Bullis-Purissima campus in Los Altos Hills.

The board prefaced its recommendation with a review of four court decisions from the litigation between the charter school and the district over the last two years, all of which confirmed the legality of the district’s placement of the school in the Egan portables.

Proposition 39, passed in 2001, requires that school districts provide charter schools with “reasonably equivalent” facilities. The district uses three elements to determine reasonable equivalency for the charter school’s assigned facility: comparison group, capacity and condition. Almond, Covington and Santa Rita schools are the group to which the charter school’s facility was compared. Capacity needs are based on projected enrollment for the coming year, and condition evaluates the site size, building condition, technology and furnishing of potential sites.

“They’ve done a good job of defining a pretty nice environment inside their portables,” board member Mark Goines said. “It didn’t seem any more crowded than the other schools.”

Board member Bill Cooper described poor conditions at Bullis-Purissima that led, in part, to its rejection as the charter school site. “The back classrooms flood, there’s mold on the baseboards, poor noise mitigation, no hot water in the sinks and the campus is not wired for computers,” he said. The district plans to renovate the school in 2008 and reopen it as the seventh elementary school, Superintendent Tim Justus said earlier in the meeting.

Other justification the board gave for the reassignment to the camp school included the existing programs at Bullis-Purissima and a desire not to relocate the charter school from its current position unnecessarily.