School District Boundaries Leave Many Santa Clarans School Dazed

By Carolyn Schuk

Some of you found a flyer in your mail box titled, "Please Help Kids in our Neighborhood Attend Santa Clara Schools." The flyer is part of an effort by Santa Clara residents in the neighborhood west of Pruneridge Ave. to extend Santa Clara Unified district boundaries west from Pruneridge to Stevens Creek, and south from Saratoga Ave to Winchester.

You see, if you live in this neighborhood, you're in the Campbell Union School District, not Santa Clara Unified.

In the interests of full disclosure, I live in the west-of-Pruneridge neighborhood. My son graduated from Prospect high school this year, so I don’t have a dog in this fight any longer. But it would be unfair to say I'm impartial.

I got my introduction to the area's seemingly irrational school district boundaries – and California's schizoid school funding formula – when I was told that I couldn't enroll my son at Westwood despite the fact that it's three blocks from our house. When I inquired about a transfer, I was told I "could try," although the tone implied this would happen about the same time hell freezes over.

My call to the district office was transferred to a voicemail box and, as you might expect from the direction of this narrative, it was never returned. When I started writing for the Weekly years later, a then-member of the School Board was introduced to me with high praise for having successfully slammed the door on inter-district transfers. I wanted to say, "But my fingers were in that door."

I at least am in 95050 zip code. Pity the poor folks between Saratoga and Winchester with a San Jose zip code. When they want to take a class at the Community Recreation Center or register their kids for swimming lessons, they routinely must explain to skeptical city employees that yes, they are Santa Clara residents.

And not infrequently, they're incorrectly denied admission to activities and programs in the city because they're not in the school district. The subsequent apologies for the mistakes don't do much to lessen the feeling of being second-class citizens.

Parental stress also increases when they have to drive kids 10 miles to school when there is a school within walking distance, but it's in a different district. Not to mention the fact that students who go to school in another town don't develop close ties to their own hometown. (If you see an argument against school busing here, you're quite correct.)

Although I admit it's not a scientific sample, I offer my son as evidence. He has only one friend from Santa Clara – and that's because they met as freshmen at Prospect. He has no interest, for example, in Sister Cities' exchange student program, even though he's been studying Japanese for nine years. He wouldn't be able to find City Hall if he fell over it, although he can find Campbell's City Hall. In fact, he has no ties of any kind to Santa Clara. To him it's just a zip code.

There's a lot of talk about the fact that high school students from north Santa Clara have to cross 101 to attend Wilcox. But no one says anything about the fact that west-of-Pruneridge students are expected to cross 280 and 880 to get to Branham high school.

One of the selling points for the proposed 49ers stadium is the tax revenue that it will raise for schools; Santa Clara Unified schools. Sometime next year west-of-Pruneridge residents will be voting on the stadium with the rest of Santa Clara. And as they weigh the question, they might just wonder: what's in it for them?