What you are about to read isn’t at all how I envisioned this column turning out.

This column was supposed to be feel-good, nostalgic, sentimental, a circle-of-life tale.

The Los Altos School District invites the community to share its perspectives through a convenient and confidential online forum called ThoughtExchange, which is a critical next step in our bold collaboration with the city of Mountain View to provide a 10th school site. We want your perspectives because we believe that the district will best serve the needs of all of our students and community with the new school when everyone’s voices are heard.

Your participation will help us resolve school overcrowding for decades to come. Current student enrollment exceeds 5,000 students, including Bullis Charter School – a level last reached in the 1970s when we had 12 school sites rather than the nine we have now. We house 10 schools on nine sites, with Bullis Charter School sharing campuses with Blach Intermediate and Egan Junior High schools.

It’s early June, another election is behind us, school is out, summer is around the corner and we’re all thumbs.

Thumbs-up: To the Mountain View Los Altos Union High School District, whose students will get to enjoy updated and expanded facilities thanks to voters’ June 5 approval of Measure E. The $295 million bond cleared the 55 percent threshold required for passage quite comfortably and, with 67 percent of voters in favor, would have cleared the two-thirds majority required of such measures in the past. As a result, work on upgraded cafeterias, libraries and modernized classrooms is scheduled to begin next year and wrap up in 2020.

When I was quite young, my parents took my brother and me to the Natchez Pilgrimage, a semi-annual tour of antebellum mansions organized by the Natchez Garden Clubs back in 1932 as a way to bring tourists to Depression-wracked Natchez, Miss. Club members dressed in crinolines and hoop skirts guided us through the white-columned mansions. A pageant was a major part of the Pilgrimage, with children dancing around a maypole, a king and queen, and tableaux depicting Natchez history. One of the tableaux, titled “Cotton Pickers,” depicted a “land of laughter, love, and song” where “fields … whiten (with ripe cotton bolls) and darkies … sing.”

A few weeks ago I was back in Natchez as part of a tour group cruising down the Mississippi. This time there were few “Gone with the Wind” moments. We toured a plantation, but we spent more time in the slave quarters than in the mansion, and even more time in the exhibit showing the hot, heavy and dangerous work of getting cotton picked and prepared for market before the ginning and baling were mechanized. On the way back to our boat, we stopped at Forks of the Road, site of the second-largest slave market in the U.S. back in the day.

What’s to study? Put parks issue on ballot

Thank you to the Town Crier for its recent articles on the parks initiative in Los Altos. From what I’ve read, the group that organized this initiative has met all of the legal requirements for putting this measure on the ballot, including obtaining almost twice the number of signatures necessary.

Why does the Los Altos City Council talk about “studying” the measure and producing their own “counter initiative”? Put it on the ballot and let we the people study it and vote on it. That’s how democracy is supposed to work.

Quake preparation requires unity

Regarding the May 16 letter “LAH not prepared for the next big quake,” I found it curious that one of the biggest earthquake problems is freeway collapse “cutting the town in two,” presumably meaning “west” of Interstate 280 cut off from “east” of the freeway.

It seems to me the town has always been cut in two between “north” and “south” – there is no way to go from one side to the other except by leaving town via 280 (owned by the state) or circumnavigating the edge of town at Summerhill Avenue (one direction of which is part of the unincorporated county).