Opinion: Let Hillbrook School Grow Enrollment
New conditional-use permit would allow private school to add 99 additional students and increase traffic car count by 20 during peak periods; school has taken mitigating measures.
Hillbrook School has been a vital part of the Los Gatos community for more than 75 years. Originally founded as a boarding school for wards of the state, we have grown and evolved to become a dynamic, JK-8 school that provides an extraordinary educational program preparing students not only for school but for life. As we have for generations, we continue to serve many families from Los Gatos—44 percent of our students live in Los Gatos.
Throughout our 75-year history, we have continually sought ways to make our good school ever better. A key component of our current strategic plan—Vision 2015—was to identify our school’s optimal enrollment. After nearly a year of conversations, we identified the need to increase the school’s enrollment by 99 students, from 315 to 414 students.
The increase allows us to address two important issues. First, the increase enables us to avoid the cap-induced under-enrollment we have faced in certain grades. Our current enrollment cap—315 students—has no correspondence to a logical enrollment model, thus we end up with some grades with fewer than 30 students while other grades have up to 40 students. The enrollment cap limits our ability to deal with normal attrition from families moving and we sometimes end up with classes that are small and unbalanced in terms of gender. Each year we turn away many students and their families.
Second, we believe that the addition of one section of middle schoolers in grades 6-8—growing our middle school to 54 students per grade—will enhance our educational program. Expanding enrollment will strengthen academic departments and allow more academic flexibility in subjects like math and foreign language, provide more opportunities for activities such as dance, drama, band, and robotics, increase participation in our athletic programs, and create more social opportunities for our students during this critical stage of growth and development.
In order to increase our enrollment, this past week we submitted an application to the Town of Los Gatos to modify our conditional-use permit. In our application, we have asked the Town to allow us to change our enrollment cap from 315 students to 414 students. We have also asked to increase our traffic car count from 165 cars leaving campus each day during our peak periods (7:30–8:30 a.m. and 2:30–3:45 p.m.) to an average of 185 cars leaving campus during those same peak periods.
We recognize that traffic is a concern in our neighborhood, and we have already taken steps to mitigate our traffic. During the last year we have added two buses moving our average morning car count into the 130s and the average afternoon car count into the low 140s. In addition, we have an extensive carpool program, including easily accessible online maps for our families, allowing them to locate potential carpool partners from throughout the school community. We have placed signs throughout the neighborhood asking families to follow the speed limit, and we have a staff member who stands at different places in the streets several times a week reminding people to drive carefully.
As part of the pre-application process, we decided in consultation with the Town of Los Gatos to commission an independent traffic consultant to ensure that our proposal would be viable. The consultants, who expect the increased enrollment to generate 45 outbound trips in the morning and 42 outbound trips in the afternoon, concluded that intersections in the greater Marchmont neighborhood would continue to operate at acceptable levels of service, and that the school would be able to contain the increased traffic on our campus.
As part of our application, we have proposed to install a permanent counting device at our gate that would relay information electronically to a computer that could then be easily shared with our families, the Town, and the neighborhood. We are committed to creating a process that is transparent and that ensures that everyone is able to see evidence of our school’s traffic patterns.
I have met with a number of neighbors throughout this process and remain open to further conversations and to identifying additional solutions that will help mitigate the impact of traffic in the neighborhood.
In the end, we are committed to ensuring Hillbrook remains an extraordinary school for the next 75 years and beyond, while also doing our best to be good neighbors. I encourage you to visit our website for more information about our proposal, including our letter of justification and the full copy of the traffic study.
Dr. Mark Silver is the head of schools at Hillbrook in Los Gatos. He wrote this guest opinion piece for Los Gatos Patch in response to resident Barbara Dodson's guest op-ed opposing Hillbrook's expansion, which ran in Thursday's edition of this publication. Los Gatos Patch would love to publish your guest commentaries and letters to the editor. Please send your submissions to Sheila.Sanchez@patch.com.
In This article
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Hillbrook School
300 Marchmont Dr, Los Gatos, CA -
Mark Silver
Joined Patch Thursday, February 2, 2012 -
Barbara Dodson
7:23 pm on Saturday, February 4, 2012
I’d like to make several points about Dr. Silver’s comments.
• Where are the benefits of Dr. Silver’s plan for Los Gatos? Dr. Silver never mentions any. But according to the Los Gatos Traffic Policy, he has to because his project will generate more than 20 am and pm peak hour trips. The project can be approved “only if it is determined that the benefits of the project to the Town outweigh the impact of increased traffic … Where benefits to the town are required to be shown, applicants shall submit a letter of justification which clearly states housing or economic benefits and/or specific sections of the General Plan and any applicable Specific Plan which show that the type of project will benefit the community. … The burden of proof of community benefit is on the applicant.”
• Dr. Silver had a year of conversations about his new school plan, but none of them were with neighbors. He behaves as if the school exists in a vacuum and can do anything it wants. But take a look at the school’s location. It’s completely surrounded by residential neighborhoods. There is only one access road in and out. The location of the school should prevent any consideration of growth. Hillbrook is part of the real world; it does not exist in a vacuum. It DOES have to recognize that any growth will have a disastrous impact on the neighborhood.
Barbara Dodson
7:26 pm on Saturday, February 4, 2012
I'm afraid I have a couple more points.
• If Dr. Silver needs an enhanced educational program for middle school children, he should look for a more appropriate site, a site that can support the traffic. There is nothing sacrosanct about the K-8 model. Dr. Silver is welcome to build a “robust” K-5 school with 315 students at the current site and create a middle school in another setting, preferably one with appropriate access roads. The K-8 model is not even currently considered to be the best for young people. Look around. Los Gatos children go to K-5 schools and then switch to Fisher Middle School. Harker, an excellent private school, has a separate middle school campus. The middle school at Stratford School is also in a separate setting. Separate middle schools have been the trend for the last 20 years exactly because, as Dr. Silver says, this is a “critical stage of growth and development.”
• Dr. Silver gives different numbers in different places, depending on the people he’s talking to. The Hillbrook website says that “nearly two-thirds of our families” come “from outside the Los Gatos area.” This means 33% of the students live in Los Gatos. However, in this article, Dr. Silver puts the percentage of Los Gatos children at Hillbrook at 44%. The fact is Hillbrook provides very little benefit to Los Gatos in terms of educating local children. Most of the students come from outside the borders of Los Gatos.
Joseph Sordi, Sr
7:59 am on Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Dr. Silver states that the 2011 traffic study "concluded that intersections in the greater Marchmont (Mm) neighborhood would continue to operate at acceptable Levels of Service".
I say, "So what". Level of service measures traffic through an intersection. It does not measure the amount of traffic on the streets around the intersection. In other words, it DOES NOT mean there won't be a significant traffic increase on those streets to accommodate the additional 99 students asked for by Hillbrook (Hb).
For example, traffic will move through the intersection at Mm and Hilow efficiently (Level of Service = "A"), but it will ADD to the volume of traffic on Mm from Hilow up to the school, making a very bad situation even worse.
The fact of the matter is that the 2011 traffic study is virtually useless with regard to the impact of added traffic on local streets around Hb.
Dr. Silver would do well to again study the 2000 traffic study for Hb. I'm sure the Level of Service at Mm and Hilow was also "A" back then, yet that study concludes that peak a.m. traffic on Mm leading up to Hb is 267 % of recommended max. With the increase of 98 a.m. trips estimated by the 2011 study, conditions return to somewhat WORSE than in 2000 when that study also concluded, "...traffic is correctly perceived by Mm residents as too high...".
Gretchen Moore
11:19 am on Tuesday, February 7, 2012
I live on Hilow Road, the other main residential artery into Hillbrook’s campus. Fully one-third of Hillbrook’s traffic funnels down Hilow Road each morning and afternoon, clogging the narrow one lane Hilow cut-through to Marchmont Drive.
Dr. Silver states he has met with several neighbors however, he neglected to invite the impacted residents of Hilow Road to the Hillbrook expansion information session. At this meeting, Dr. Silver confirmed that Hilow Road is impacted by Hillbrook School traffic.
Dr. Silver states Hillbrook places signs throughout the neighborhood. However, there are no signs on Hilow Road. I have lived on Hilow Road over four years. I have only seen a Hillbrook staff member on Hilow Road one time, and that was last week.
Hilow Road is busy with pedestrians. I walk my children to and from Blossom Hill School. Along the way I meet other parents doing the same, students walking, biking and scooting to Fisher Middle School, neighborhood residents exercising or walking their dogs and families walking to Blossom Hill Park. Everyday we encounter excessive amounts of Hillbrook traffic; traffic that is threatening the safety of neighborhood children and residents.
Barbara Dodson
9:10 am on Friday, February 10, 2012
I’d like to draw attention to factual and logical errors in Dr. Silver’s opinion piece.
• There is no single “logical enrollment model.” The school is perfectly capable of creating a logical model within the 315 cap. How about this:
o Pre-K: 20 students
o K: 20 students
o Grades 1-5: 2 sections—22 and 23--or3 sections—18, 18, and 19
Since attrition occurs in the middle school and causes the school to have classes that are too small, why not eliminate the middle school and focus on the area where the school is strongest, the elementary school? The K-8 model is not even considered the best model nowadays.
• Hillbrook’s efforts to mitigate traffic have failed in the past. Why would they be more successful in the future?
• Dr. Silver puts his recent car counts at 130 in the morning and the 140s in the afternoon. This flies in the face of car counts done by local residents, which put the counts in the morning and afternoon closer to 185 (which is above the current CUP limit of 165).
• The traffic study says intersections operate at acceptable levels. This just means that cars can flow without too much stopping at intersections. It says nothing about the huge number of cars inundating the neighborhood. It’s volume, not flow, that is of concern. The study also fails to even look at the intersection at Shannon and Cherry Blossom, surely one of the most impacted intersections in the area, or at traffic coming in along Short Road.
Michelle Vaughan
3:56 pm on Monday, February 27, 2012
The number of cars and impact to the community as stated by Dr. Silver are quite simply unbelievable. I wholeheartedly agree with the comments of concern posted above by community members and while I have no new comments to add I do want to make my voice known as another Los Gatos resident who has grave concerns about the Hillbrook proposal.
Joseph Sordi, Sr
12:22 pm on Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Dr. Silver, You state that the increase in enrollment will enable the school to avoid a cap-induced under-enrollment that they have faced in certain grades. The current cap has been in place for a long time, yet no previous administration has complained that the 315 cap induced an under-enrollment in certain grades. Can you explain why they did not ? Can you explain in more detail how an increase from 315 to a 414 would allow you to solve your perceived problem of being under enrolled in some classes and over enrolled in others ? It would help if you would give the current enrollment distribution by class and class session along with how you propose to distribute the proposed 414 enrollment by class and class session.
HC
2:08 pm on Tuesday, May 1, 2012
I live on Englewood. My children attend Blossom Hill Elementary. Any change to Hillbrook's operations that would increase the amount of daily traffic is unacceptable to me and, i'm sure, most of my neighbors. If this is viewed as selfish so be it. If Hillbrook wants to expand, they need to become more creative about mitigating any impact to the local traffic, including, for example, increased use of shuttle buses and additional enforcement. Until that happens, you don't expect my support.