BY ALLISON LEVITSKY
Daily Post Staff Writer
After an outcry from parents in the Los Altos School District, the school board has decided to postpone voting on a proposal to give Egan Junior High School to Bullis Charter School.
At a meeting on Thursday (April 25), board members said they wanted to make sure district parents had adequate opportunity to understand and voice their opinions on the 10-year agreement before the district signed off on it.
“I feel that this is our land, not BCS’ land, and I feel that we should make the decision,” Trustee Vladimir Ivanovic said. “I want to hear from BCS parents, but I don’t want to hear from an organization that has spent the last 15 years distancing themselves from LASD, and then to tell us how we can use our land.”
Ivanovic said the 15 years of disputes were part of a broader battle between school districts and charter schools, urging parents to defend public education.
His comments were met with applause.
He went on to quote Winston Churchill in saying: “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
The short-term agreement would keep Bullis in its current portable buildings at Blach and Egan schools while capping Bullis’ enrollment at 1,111.
Bullis, on the other hand, threw its full support behind the agreement on April 22, when the school board voted to approve the 10-year agreement.
Bullis Board President Joe Hurd told the Post that the agreement was a fair compromise: Bullis would get its own campus, while the school district would get to cap Bullis’ enrollment at 1,111 for 10 years.
“Each side gets things from this agreement,” Hurd said. “That’s the definition of a good agreement.”
Under the 10-year agreement, the district would open a new junior high school at a school site that the district is in the process of buying in the San Antonio area of Mountain View.
Los Altos school board President Jessica Speiser said the board was not rejecting the 10-year agreement, but postponing a vote on it.
“This process must be inclusive, include both LASD and BCS board members, begin immediately and end no later than January 2020 so that our community can move on to working on what we all care about: excellent education for our children,” Speiser said.
LASD trustee Vladimir Ivanovic does not understand state law if he believes school facilities belong to one subset of the population. 20% of LASD’s in-district students choose to attend BCS and state law mandates that these public school students have equal access to the public school facilities Vlad and his fellow trustees were elected to oversee. His inflammatory remarks do a huge disservice to a community searching for a fair solution.