Consider the plight of the K-8 German-American International School in Menlo Park, which in March was evicted from the former public school campus it had leased for over 20 years. The landlord, the Menlo Park City School District, had three crowded and growing elementary schools of its own, hence the rush to kick out the renters within the year, vielen Dank.
While the MPCSD hopes to seat some 360 students when it reclaims its O’Connor Elementary site, the German-American School’s fate isn’t clear. Perhaps not so shockingly, the 25 year-old institution can’t find open campus space anywhere on the Peninsula. "There is a good chance that we'll have to close doors," the school’s president told the Mercury News recently.
Which brings us to the plight of the Californian-American public schools on this side of the bay: Classrooms are packed, and the kids just keep on comin’. There just isn’t any place to put them.
Here in Belmont and Redwood Shores, the school district this week announced that nearly 3,800 students are enrolled so far for the upcoming year. That’s over 200 more than those enrolled at this time in 2012, and 400 more than in 2011, and about 665 more than in 2010. All elementary schools in the district are now officially at or above capacity.
Maybe Menlo Park was prescient or perhaps it’s just dumb luck that they had a school to spare, even if it won’t be cheap to bring its Eisenhower-era campus up to code. The district could have just sold off its valuable property like many of its neighbors in the 1970s and 80s, a time when schools hastily built for post-war boomers were suddenly empty and the future seemed more, well, childless. Imagine what it would cost to buy the land back now.
The former Belmont Elementary School District owned and filled six elementary schools from the 1950s until roughly when Frampton Comes Alive charted, after which my own baby bust generation could barely fill three of them.
It wasn’t long before a train of long forgotten school trustees shuttered several schools before selling two entire campuses and a good portion of another in mid-80s to early 90s.
Selling schools on the SF Peninsula – the proverbial land where they ain’t making any more of it – must’ve seemed like a good idea at the time. In Belmont’s case it’s hard to figure out what that good idea actually was because there’s evidently no cash left to show for it.
But what’s the use of second guessing decisions made in the seventies, back when dystopia was just around the corner and our impending overpopulated Soylent Green doom quickly morphed into the dreary Omega Man resignation that the future didn’t actually include humans.
When the 1990s came and the future looked less like Ehrlich and Malthus than it did Borlaug and Bieber, it’s not clear that school districts would have made the same choices if given the chance.
The notion of permanently declining birthrates might not have been part of the calculus behind selling off schools years before, but it’s rich irony that if you look out the window at a public school today it seems more like the standing-room-only planet Gideon in Star Trek than a ghost town.
In nearby Burlingame $13 million is being spent renovating just ten classrooms at the Hoover Elementary School site previously sold off in 1979, which the local district repurchased from its interim owners for nearly $5 million a few years ago. Menlo Park is contemplating as much as a $30 million bond issuance just to get its old school up to code and reconfigured for modern classrooms. Even getting state and local authorities to allow you to use a school you never sold isn’t cheap.
Which is why the Belmont Redwood Shores district really couldn’t reclaim any space sold long ago even if the opportunity arose; just as it's the case for nearly every neighboring district, the money just isn’t there. So, portable classrooms, crowded campuses, and a vague wish we were smarter a few decades ago are the immediate future.
