My statement to the CUSD board

Linked below is the statement that I made to the Cabrillo Unified School District in the three minutes I had before them.  I provide this as context for my reporting on the matter. Clearly, I went into this with an opinion. I’m still not convinced that Podesta is a better choice than Cunha.

Click "read more" to see my statement.

I was surprised in reading the list of criteria that the school board site selection committee used that "Community Impact" was not on the list. The only nod to the community was labeled "political implications" and it was given three of the 100 possible points. I was glad to see that Dr. Bayless had increased it to 10 points in his new evaluation.

Cunha is an important element of Half Moon Bay’s downtown.

Half Moon Bay’s rush hour isn’t at 5pm. It’s at 3, when the schools are ` letting out and hundreds of kids and their parents fill the downtown.  I’ve become a lot more familiar with downtown businesses since I started taking my daughter to Cunha.  I’m now a regular at La Di Da and I shop at Cunha’s Market or Moon News or Feed & Fuel before I pick her up in the afternoon.

By moving the middle school out of the core of the community, you’re affecting all the businesses downtown that serve those students.

But moving the middle school students out of the core of the community, you’re separating them from the city’s library at a crucial age.

The supposed advantages of the Podesta site: closeness to downtown, convenience for pedestrians and cyclists, and buildability, are all exceeded by the Cunha site.

The one clear advantage—proximity to the high school—is a mixed blessing at best.

I recently had a conversation with a Wavecrest supporter, in which he told me he came from a blue-collar community where they had torn down nicer schools than we have in order to build even newer ones. He said this with obvious pride, but I believe it’s the attitude that old buildings are somehow inferior to new ones is a major threat to the fabric of our community.

In the last two years that my daughter has attended Cunha, I have a chance to spend some time in its classrooms and was amazed at the spaciousness and light in those old beat-up rooms.

Do we really need to chew up more landscape to replace something that we already own and that many of us love?

I ask that the school district make community impact a important criterion in its evaluation of sites.