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The Pleasanton Unified School District has mostly completed its transition to its new headquarters at West Las Positas Boulevard — with the exception of a few departments — and will be set to host the first school board meeting there on Nov. 9.
“The West Las Positas office provides centralized and professional spaces that will better enable staff to collaborate as a team and deliver effective service to site staff and our families,” PUSD Superintendent David Haglund said in a statement to the Weekly.
On July 14, 2022, the Board of Trustees gave the green light to acquire the two-building property, located on 5758 and 5794 West Las Positas Blvd. The district purchased the complex, also known as the Arroyo Center, from former owner ECI Four Arroyo LLC for a total of just under $23.5 million.
The district was also presented with an updated lease agreement during the July 2022 meeting for the sole tenant currently renting a portion of the Arroyo Center, electron microscopy firm Gatan Inc. — which made the district the landlord of the lease. The company will begin paying the district about $80,000 every month from now until 2027.
Those tenant payments coupled with a certificate of participation of $30 million, which is a type of financing where an investor purchases a share of the lease revenues of a program, will be used by the district to pay for the space.
Since last year, district staff have been working with design teams and architectural firms to make general tenant improvements in order to begin moving staff from the Bernal Avenue headquarters to the new building in early August.
Currently, there are still three main departments that are still working out of the current district headquarters on the edge of downtown Pleasanton, at 4645 and 4665 Bernal Ave., one of which being the adult education programs. Maintenance, operations, transportation, graphics and the district warehouse will also remain at the Bernal site for the time being.
The Pleasanton Virtual Academy, which was located in the building at the very top of the Bernal site hill, moved down into where currently the purchasing and technology department is on the corner of Abbie and First streets.
The school board will also continue to host its meetings at the Bernal site for the remainder of this month while the board room at the new district office is under construction. The new meeting room is set to be finished soon and will host the board meetings starting Nov. 9, PUSD director of communications Patrick Gannon told the Weekly.
PUSD is also planning on putting seven acres of the Bernal site — estimated in value between $31 million and $34 million — up for sale, which would help pay off the newly purchased Arroyo Center.
The plan for the three remaining acres of land, which includes Village High School, will be to construct a new Educational Options Center, Haglund said.
When district staff began moving out on Aug. 17, Village began moving students out of classrooms located at the top of the hill, to areas on the bottom where the district offices are currently located on the Bernal property.
The plan was to get the students out of the old buildings while Village staff and administrators continued to work with architects to come up with initial designs for the new building, which was one of the main projects proposed in the $395 million Measure I bond project list.
“With the passage of Measure I, Pleasanton voters funded the replacement of Village High School with a new Educational Options Center to serve the nearly 500 students enrolled at Village High School, Pleasanton Virtual Academy and our adult transition programs,” Haglund said.
He added that the move also paves the way to begin talks about addressing workforce housing by building some housing for staff at the Bernal site.
“As housing costs continue to rise, we have committed to investing in our certificated and classified staff by building housing that allows them to live within the community they serve,” the superintendent said.
While Haglund said there is still much work to be done in regards to the two projects, the transition to the new office space at West Las Positas represents the “first steps in making them a reality.”
“We are committed to working collaboratively with site staff and our neighbors as plans are developed and the process of design and construction begins in the months ahead,” Haglund said in a Aug. 25 district newsletter.
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