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The Pleasanton school board majority provided minimal input while discussing two high school boundary adjustments options during last week’s meeting as the trustees gear up for the final vote later this month.
According to staff, the boundary change will help balance the student population between Foothill and Amador Valley high schools in light of the decline in enrollment over the past few years and will effectively remove two “choice areas” where students had the option to pick between either high school.
“One of the major changes is the current option areas are being removed and the rationale there is to create greater consistency and greater ability for the district to predict the patterns going into the high schools,” Ahmad Sheikholeslami, assistant superintendent of business services, said during the Jan. 11 board meeting.
“We’ve updated the elementary and the middle school boundaries and so now we have boundaries that neither match the elementary feeder pattern (nor) match the middle school pattern and continue to create challenges for us in terms of the two option areas. So in both options that we have created, it kind of cleans up and tries to now keep those groupings closer to the new boundary areas,” Sheikholeslami said.
Last spring, the Pleasanton Unified School District updated its elementary and middle school boundaries, which adjusted where certain elementary school students would go for middle school.
At the time, the board also committed itself to adjust the high school boundaries for the 2024-25 school year, which is what staff have been working on since then.
The district’s technical and stakeholder committees — which are made up of district officials, trustees, parents, teachers, school administrators and members of the city government — then came together in the fall to review the current boundaries and developed two options to bring to the table.
The first option would evenly split students living in southern Pleasanton between Foothill High School and Amador Valley High School, as opposed to the second option that would send the majority of those students to Foothill.
The first option would also directly feed elementary school students to the high schools in their zones and keep those elementary school groups of friends and classes together.
“In a nutshell, Fairlands, Donlon, Lydiksen and Hearst would feed into Foothill and then the others would all feed into Amador Valley,” said David Kaitz, a consultant from Davis Demographics who presented alongside staff last week.
Kaitz said the capacity numbers for each of the high schools would be in sync and would each be at about 70% capacity.
On the other hand, he said the second option would be more in line with the current high school boundaries and that even though it would make the capacity percentage a bit more disproportionate, by 2029 both the schools’ enrollment would be closer to identical.
After the boundary options were created, the district held two community meetings in early December and posted a survey on its website for people to share their feedback and provide input.
According to Sheikholeslami, the district’s survey results showed that about 60% of the respondents chose the first boundary adjustment option while 15% chose the second and 24% chose neither.
“There were a lot of comments that supported the options that kept the elementary schools grouped together as a whole, as they move in that kind of cohesion,” he said. “Keeping communities together that had developed relationships early on, was seen as something positive.
However, one issue that was raised during the past community meetings and in the survey was the choice areas being eliminated in both plans.
Choice areas represent neighborhoods in the city located in the Walnut Grove and Fairlands Park areas. Parents who live in those regions currently have the option to choose which of the two high schools they want to send their children to attend.
The argument there was that the parents who bought their homes in those areas did so in order to have the flexibility to make the choice on which high school they wanted their child to attend.
Sheikholeslami said that those families, especially one in the Fairlands community, brought up issues on transportation and getting their students to Foothill, which would be the case with either of the two new boundary options.
He also said that eliminating the choice areas was necessary in order to avoid imbalance with the two high schools’ capacities.
“The choice area, they’ve had a choice, but the rest of the students have not had a choice. So this is a change and I think going forward, I think it’s a good change,” Board President Mary Jo Carreon said.
Sheikholeslami also said that Wheels still has bus routes that go from that area to Foothill and that even so, the district will be convening with Wheels once the boundary adjustment decision has been made in order to work out any new routes that need to be optimized.
Another main issue, that Trustee Kelly Mokashi touched on during most of the meeting, was the plan for transitioning families to the new boundaries — specifically those who would be mostly impacted by the change.
According to staff, part of the transition plan would be to allow younger siblings to attend the same high school as their older siblings even if they are impacted by the boundary change. New incoming students for the 2024-25 school year, who aren’t affected by the grandfather rules, will have to attend the high school set by the new boundaries.
But the issue during the meeting was that while both of the new boundary adjustment options won’t have much of an impact when it comes to splitting up middle school friend groups to different high schools, it will impact Pleasanton Middle School students — but in different ways.
“Option one … PMS will be split,” deputy superintendent Ed Diolazo said. “However, option one keeps Valley View and Vintage Hills together to go to Amador and Hearst will go to Foothill. Option two, it splits … based on the current boundaries, not the feeder patterns.”
Trustee Justin Brown said that as a parent who will have three kids go through PMS, he worries about splitting up friend groups at a middle school level versus at the elementary level because the middle school friends are more current.
“Option one is very clean. But option two preserves more of the friendship groups that might have happened at the middle school level for the PMS students,” Brown said.
Even though historically, PMS has always had that split in students going to two different high schools, Mokashi said that she wanted there to be more discussion about the transition process and with the district’s “grandfather” transition plan.
The grandfathering clause in the plan would allow middle school students to choose which high school they want to attend. That way they can stay with their friends and continue their current academic plans.
She asked about possibly looking at maintaining that grandfather clause for current kindergarten students and to revisit the transition plan for choice area families, to which Sheikholeslami said would not be possible.
“It would wreak considerable havoc in the predictability and planning of our high school school sizes and stuff,” he said. “You have to at some point draw the line. When individuals buy homes, there is no guarantee that boundaries will remain the same. We just changed the elementary and middle school boundaries and we decided to draw the line at a certain point, so it’s similar to the high schools as well.”
The board will make a final decision on which boundary adjustment option to approve during the regular meeting next Thursday (Jan. 25).
