I thought we were the Popular Front

My alma mater may change its name today.



Says kindergarten teacher Pam Loebner:

"For the past 3 years we have had parents go to the wrong schools (both ways) substitutes go to the wrong schools (both ways) and there is concern that in an emergency situation that someone might be confused and go to the wrong school."

Unlikely. We all know nothing bad ever happens in Los Altos. But just in case, I suggest "The Real Bullis" or asking the splitters to change their name to "Bullis Charter School for White Kids." More specificity never hurt.

Hi guys

I don't know if you remember me, but I used to write for this blog.

With finals approaching, I've been spending a lot of time studying recently (and, it turns out, inspiring the creation of other blogs). A few things I've learned:

Everybody in Los Altos Hills is rich, which, as a matter of federal law, means its okay to keep poor people out. Ybarra vs. Los Altos Hills, 503 F.2d 250. (9th Cir. 1974).

I live next to the stupidest bike lane in America. The only one that might be dumber is one I lived near last summer.

Minimum sentencing laws still suck. We can blame them both for the large-scale disasters like the unconstitutionally shameful condition of the health care system in our state prisons as well as for the more personal tragedies like the harsh prison term facing troubled Iraq veteran Sarge Binkley. Binkley may yet catch a break from the District Attorney, but other defendants from different backgrounds are unlikely to get the same treatment.

I've got to get back to studying administrative law, so I can explain why the County Board of Education inexplicably prevailed against the Los Altos School District's case alleging that Bullis Charter School's charter was too racist for the County Board to approve. I know that part of the answer has to do with the chemicals used by downtown Los Altos dry cleaners. Stay tuned.

Yes, we have nothing better to do

Speaking, as I often am, of the Bullis class of 1992, Becky Remmel has launched one of the best online stalking efforts I have ever seen. "Where in the World is Molly Curfman" is a Facebook group dedicated to tracking down former classmates who moved before the time capsule was buried underneath the Bullis Bear -- not just Molly but also the tall kid known as "Joshua Giraffe" and our one and only Latino classmate. (For the record, I was not the one who made Ms. Kates cry.)

Readers can infer a number of things from our ongoing obsession with elementary school. I choose to focus on the fact that growing up during the drought wasn't so bad -- our parents inability to water our lawns was a small price to pay for it being 80 degrees and sunny every day.

NOE's Recycled Bullis Bench: Finished or Poised for Revival?

In 1991-92, with help from Karen and Bruce, NOE established an environmental club at Bullis. The hallmark achievement of this group was the acquisition of a bench made from recycled plastic. The bench was subsequently commemorated “from the class of 1992” and proudly placed in front of the school next to the famous Bullis Bear statue.

Sadly, however, NOE’s bench now sits dejectedly among some rusting exercise equipment (that BigDra still uses) behind the school. Perhaps decision makers at Bullis are saving the bench for eventual reinstallation at the front of the new school?

We shall overcome

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., I figured today would be a good time to direct readers to the lawsuit LASD has filed against the County Board of Education for its preposterous approval of Bullis Charter School's effort to restrict poorer kids from enrolling.

After the Voice editorial blasted LASD for picking a fight with rich people, one commenter equated the lawsuit to "ultimately the greatest sin in American history."

Bullis Charter School: not just for poor kids anymore

The County Board of Education believes that allowing Bullis Charter School to reserve spots for the richest areas of Los Altos and Los Altos Hills will increase its minority enrollment.

Which minorities could they mean? Children of people who think Toni Casey ought to hold elected office? Gypsies?

As a sidenote, BCS board president Ken Moore cites Bullis's historical efforts to serve rich neighborhoods as a reason to let it continue to do so. Aside from the fact that appeals to tradition tend to be logical fallacies, Bullis has been around for fewer than 3.5 years. By comparison:

• This blog has been around for 2.1 years
• The Red Sox have been officially better than the Yankees for 3.2 years
• The Navy has been promising to have a final proposal on Hangar One for 3.5 years
• Major combat operations in Iraq have been over for 4.6 years
• And the "tradition" of private individuals illegally trying to reserve portions of the public-right-of-way for themselves in advance of the Festival of Lights parade has been around for 9 years

In conclusion, sucks to your history.

Stair-stepping

One difference between good and bad water polo teams is that the good ones know how to stair-step. Stair-stepping is a tactic used when an offensive player manages to get free near the goal. On good teams, defenders leave offensive players they are guarding to cover the next nearest one, requiring everybody to do a little extra work in exchange for covering the open player much more quickly. Bad teams tend to be unable to figure out this concept, and instead force the defender who had been guarding the now-open offensive player to swim after him or her, regardless of the distance in between or the time it takes to cover it.

The Los Altos School District is a bad water polo team.

Despite having given up its plan to punish the secessionists in Los Altos Hills by sending Mountain View kids to Bullis, the school board is still planning to make kids travel past (in some cases right in front of) schools close to them in order to get to their new school. I haven't looked at the demographic data, but the alternative approach -- shifting kids so that a lot of people have to travel a little bit farther, but nobody has to pass by one or more schools in order to get to their own -- seems to make much more sense.

Coincidentally, this will have the greatest impact on kids from Mountain View.

They would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling adults

The mystery of the headless Los Altos Hills cows reads like a Scooby Doo episode in reverse. The vagrants terrorizing the local populace for no apparent reason are teenagers, while the motley crue of detectives who implausibly solve the case are adults.

Hard to say this story isn't still amusing, but aren't we forgetting who the real criminals are?

Haikus for the Hills

Dear secessionists,
Neener neener neener. Love,
Bullis alumni.

County board rejects
racist redistricting plan.
Too many white kids.

Lowland and Hill folk,
can't we all just get along?
We are all still rich.

Those darn kids, with their skateboards

It's a good time to be a rapscallion in Los Altos. Maybe too good. Monday night, the city council followed Mountain View's lead in entertaining the local 'hoods by finally approving the concept of making tentative plans for a permanent skate park. Not to be outdone, Mountain View is finally going ahead with the plans, on hold for the last three years due to bizzarre concerns about gender equity concerns, to build a BMX park out at Shoreline.

Of course, give those kids an inch and they'll take a mile. For the perspective of the square community, we turn to the award-winning (seriously) editorial pages of the Los Altos Town Crier, which implores readers to "Grow up and leave the cows alone."

Regardless of how we feel on the subject of public education in Los Altos Hills, we can all agree that stealing and defacing plywood cows erected on town land is beyond the juvenile.

The cows, conveying the "Got Milked?" message of discontent following the 2003 closure of Bullis-Purissima School, are continually vandalized, according to their creators, and the incidents go up or down depending on the surge of publicity regarding town public education issues.

Some cases are the work of pranksters, but others surely result because perpetrators don't like a message that conflicts with theirs. Such protest and debate belongs in open public forums, not played out in petty, stealthy acts of vandalism. We strongly urge the guilty parties to recover their maturity and leave the cows alone. If town residents choose this option to express themselves, so be it.

I have to say that it speaks poorly of the investigative abilities of the reporters at the Town Crier, Daily and Mercury that not only can they find nothing better to write about, but that they also can't seem to sleuth out the fact that the people behind this dastardly political espionage are just a bunch of bored high school kids.

By the way, this might be a good time for me to apologize to Patricia Williams and other city council candidates whose campaign signs we removed in 1994 and hid in another candidate's bushes.

What took you guys so long?

A video camera captured footage of three thieves making off with a wooden cow in Los Altos Hills last week, predictably tickling the Mercury and even showing up on the United Press International wire.

You know what this means? I can now claim to have broken international news.

A tale of two schools

The Los Altos School District is pledging to reopen Bullis-Purissima Elementary School in 2008, after a unanimous vote Monday. It may not be enough to satisfy leading Hillspeople, though. Only four days earlier, Los Altos Hills leaders decided to move ahead with a plan to pull out of LASD and form their own district.

This morning, on the other side of the tracks, Slater Elementary is holding its last day of class. Much like Bullis parents, Slater parents have organized well and argued forcefully and emotionally against the decision. Mountain View residents are even readying a charter school petition, although they say they would have done so even if the board had not closed Slater. The essential difference between the two situations is that while one group of parents lives in one of the richest communities in the country, the other lives near a Superfund site. Guess which one got its way.

As a sidenote, I can't help but feeling like the reopening of Bullis somehow makes me less cool. Yes, I know many of you will say that's impossible. After all, I live with my parents, wear a bandanna and maintain a local news blog (ostensibly) about Mountain View and Los Altos. But consider the bitter, "I've-forgotten-more-about-this-town-than-you-will-ever-know" sort of pride that some graduates of old Mountain View High School have when they talk about their alma mater. We are all going to miss out on the chance to be like them.

Silent majority silent

The Los Altos Hills Town Council (which, by the way, is the body's official name despite the fact that Los Altos Hills is technically a city) voted tonight to move forward with a redistricting proposal that officials from local school boards are calling selfish.

"Fuck 'em," said a certain outgoing Mountain View-Los Altos high school district superintendent, who added some other more relevant things that were way less interesting.

The Town Council had given the Los Altos elementary school district board until this week to agree to a compromise proposal that would have given control of at least part of the Bullis site to Bullis Charter School. The final version of the redistricting resolution maintains the boundaries that send some Hills kids to Gunn High School and others to Los Altos High School -- LAHS supporters had attacked the earlier plan to send all kids to Gunn as racist.

The plan requires special legislation and is sure to face a court challenge. If it goes through, the two local elementary school districts (Los Altos and Palo Alto Unified) will lose a fair amount of property tax revenue, but, by pretty much any standard, they are likely to continue to do just fine. Ultimately, the people likely hurt worst by redistricting will be Los Altos Hills kids themselves, who are now going to grow up in even more of a bubble than they already do.

Los Altos Hills taking ball, going home

A closed-door meeting yesterday between officials from all over ended boringly, according to this morning's Daily News, with Los Altos Hills mayor Breene Kerr telling a crowd of people who had nothing better to do than wait outside that there was a "reasonable chance for agreement" over the town's threat to form its own school district.

I suppose there might be a "reasonable chance" that The Heights Hills town council is serious about all of this, and is not just trying to annoy Los Altos Elementary into permanently reopening Bullis (which is just as decrepit and overly paved as it was when it was closed three years ago). But given the previous stunts apologists for my alma mater have tried, this looks like just another ploy.

Unfortunately, my father didn't fare quite well enough in last year's election to win a seat on the school board (you should have stuck to the talking points Dad). So, for the best analysis I have yet seen of this issue, we'll have to rely on the board's original message rejecting the application to form Bullis Charter School:

"Education is the child's right, not the parent's."

El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido

Erik Koland's two truism's of education in California:
1) People only care about their own children.
2) Rich parents generally get their way.

The closure of decrepit Bullis Purissima in 2003 appeared to be an exception to rule #2. But now Los Altos Hills officials, clearly still bitter about that decision, are poised to form the town's own elementary school district and send their children to high school in Palo Alto. According to the Voice:

They hope to unify Los Altos Hills kids at one elementary school instead of dividing them between Los Altos and Palo Alto.

This is a frightening proposition, given the carnage that ensued the last time the children of Los Altos Hills all got together.

I can hardly wait for the inevitable proposal to change the name of the town to Palo Alto Hills, or maybe something like The Heights. At least they'll get rid of those silly protest cows.