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The Pleasanton school board recently approved new high school boundaries, which staff and parents say will help students by keeping them alongside their friend groups from elementary through high school.
Those new boundaries, which will be in effect for new elementary school students and students entering the district for the first time starting in the fall, will also help balance enrollment between Foothill High School and Amador Valley High School and help staff predict enrollment for the future, according to district officials.
“The planning and the coordination amongst the high school, middle school and elementary schools can now be better defined,” said Ahmad Sheikholeslami, assistant superintendent of business services, during the Jan. 25 board meeting. “Right now we have to wait until … this month and then we tell Amador and Foothill how many students are going, so there’s a little bit of a guessing game going on.”
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 committed itself to adjust the high school boundaries for the 2024-25 school year, which is what staff has been working on since then.
Technical and stakeholder committees — which are made up of district officials, trustees, parents, teachers, school administrators and members of the city government — met over several months to develop two options for the board to choose. Staff first presented the two options to the board during the Jan. 11 meeting.
The first option 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.
While the first option still splits Pleasanton Middle School in half between the two high schools, it mainly aims to directly feed elementary school students to the high schools in their zones and keep those elementary school groups of friends and classes together.
The adjustment will also dissolve the two “choice areas” where students had the option to pick between either high school. 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 comprehensive high schools they want to send their children to.
Fairlands students will now go to Foothill while Walnut Grove students will go to Amador.
After the district held two community meetings and had a survey up on its website for people to provide their input, the overwhelming majority voted for the first option, which is what mainly influenced the board’s decision to move forward with it.
“I think it’s just very important that the elementary school stay together. That’s where you form the bonds, and the friendships and the sense of community,” Trustee Laurie Walker said during the meeting. “Option number one is a no brainer for me.”
Even though Trustee Justin Brown pointed out how PMS would be divided between the two high schools and how he and his kids will be directly impacted by the boundary change, he also said that it’s something that cannot be avoided and that it benefits more people.
“At the end of the day, I’m representing the city and the prevailing will of the people and so as a result, I’m in favor of option one, not because it benefits me — it actually does the opposite — but it benefits the community at large,” Brown said.
Some of the people that the new boundary adjustment will benefit spoke during the meeting.
One mom who spoke was Mary Hekl, a longtime Pleasanton resident who lives in the Kottinger Ranch neighborhood in south Pleasanton, which is one of the areas that will be greatly impacted by the boundary adjustment.
Hekl talked about her oldest daughter who went to Vintage Hills Elementary School and built a close relationship with a group of kids before they all went to PMS together.
Her daughter had suffered from an illness before eighth grade. She was supposed to start high school at Foothill but Hekl had her transferred to Amador where her friend group went, a decision she said allowed for extra pairs of eyes from her daughters friends and their parents when her daughter’s illness came back in 10th grade.
“These incredible girls who had known her for 10 years saw what was going on. Concerned, they told their moms who I knew from raising our daughters together and those moms called me,” Hekl said. “We collectively saved her life because she and my family had the community that we had built for years … intact and ready to support us, instead of being ripped away by some boundary that makes no logical sense and would have left us isolated with few community resources.”
Jill Schlicher, another mom who lives in the Kottinger Ranch neighborhood, said that her backyard fence was right on the now former high school boundary line, which meant her kids would have gone to Foothill while their friends on the other side of the fence would have gone to Amador.
She said that while she understood the few residents who didn’t like the options because both were going to eliminate the choice areas, option one was the best choice for students to maintain their friend groups who they have grown up with and lived next to for most of their lives.
“Friendships that children develop in elementary school are foundational and as children face an epidemic of loneliness, I believe it is imperative that my children have the opportunity to continue in school with their elementary school friends,” Schlicher said.
As part of PUSD’s transition plan for the new boundaries, younger siblings can attend the same high school as their older siblings even if they are impacted by the boundary change. Middle school students can also choose which high school they want to attend, if they are impacted by the adjustment and now end up in a different high school zone from before. That way they can stay with their friends and continue their current academic plans.
However, 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.
