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With the Palo Alto City Council just days away from taking action on Castilleja School’s contentious reconstruction plan, the Palo Alto Weekly is publishing opinion columns for and against the issue.
The proposal for the Bryant Street campus has divided neighbors in Old Palo Alto and the wider community since it was first introduced in 2016. Not only is the all-girls private school looking to modernize its campus by replacing existing buildings with a new structure, but it is also seeking an increase enrollment. The city is willing to have the school increase its student population under the condition that the institution doesn’t add to the area’s traffic. There also has been debate around a proposed underground parking garage, which isn’t allowed in single-family districts and which city staff recently determined could be deemed a basement based on Palo Alto zoning code.
The plan has gone through multiple iterations over the past five years in response to feedback from the city staff and community members. Hundreds of people have commented in support and opposition of the project before city advisory boards and most recently before the council on March 8.
Click the links below to read the guest opinion columns:
• Opinion: Compromise toward a better future for all
• Opinion: Who is being served and who is being harmed?
Watch our March 11 virtual town hall to learn about some of the contentious issues in the approval process and read our event recap here:
Clockwise from top left, Palo Alto Weekly reporter Gennady Sheyner, Castilleja Head of School Nanci Kauffman, Palo Alto Weekly editor Jocelyn Dong and Andie Reed, a member of Preserve Neighborhood Quality of Life Now, discuss Castilleja School’s proposed redevelopment at a virtual town hall on March 11.
I think one reason the division between those who fully support the school’s plans and those who prefer they be modified persists is that the details keep changing. Even at this point in the process. FAR is an important, determinative detail and definitions matter. Trying to pull off defining a garage as a basement reminds me of when Clinton said “it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.” If there’s even one adult in Palo Alto who doesn’t know exactly what a garage is, this City isn’t as smart as it likes to think it is. If the school – and Staff – want to be trusted, a good place to start would be to not play such games.
Also, how long has this been going on? Per this article the proposal was first introduced 5 years ago in 2016. Yet, in Ms. Kaufman’s statement the school has spent 8 years refining plans. If the neighborhood learned about the plan in 2016, refinements done prior to that must not have been in response to neighborhood concerns. It sounds like the school has changed the plans in response to neighborhood concerns, but it also sounds like Ms. Kaufman might be exaggerating that in terms of time.
Ideal for the school. Me me me. Not ideal for an R1 neighborhood. , Kauffman called it “an ideal number for us because it allows us to increase the high school really with minimal increase in staffing.”
“We get to improve our programs, our athletic programs, the arts programs, the language programs improve because we have a few more students to work with and we don’t really have to add many staff members,” Kauffman said.
Castilleja is one of several other comparable girls schools the peninsula and about 75% of the students are from elsewhere on the peninsula. So not expanding the student count and the size of facility, Castilleja is not going to deprive those who wish to attend Castilleja or a comparable school. Diddling over square footage doesn’t get at the core of this – do we approve of the expansion of a school which has consistently payed no attention to limits of student count. With that behavior, why should we believe they’d not do that with the proposed larger facility? Correspondly, it follows that whatever pitch they’ve made about traffic and such should not be believed. If the town buckles under and allows the expansion, that neighborhood is simply going to be deeper in the muck.
More broadly, why are they in a residential area, with a big or too big a facility?
When asked about the public/community benefits, Ms. Kauffman herself said there were none because the school is barred from offering public events and public access to the campus. Given how many years this has dragged on, why was this statement never questioned and why was no attempt made to FIND a public benefit?
She also cited an unidentified “pedagogical study” of ideal school size as a major justification for enrollment growth. I suspect there are other studies with other ideal school size numbers but without knowing more about the cited study evaluating that claim is impossible.
Given the lack of credibility to date re traffic, enrollment violations etc. with nothing offered in return, I agree with past officials like Jack Morton and others who wonder how and why this whole process has gotten so far.
What value does Castilleja provide for Palo Alto residents and the community at large? Confused.