Fremont Unified School District’s Board of Education voted unanimously Wednesday to approve edits to attendance area policies and to also affirm the “unassigned” status of students who will live in the future 500-home Patterson Ranch housing development.
Parents, students and teachers packed the board room and an overflow room with orange signs saying “Developers Must Build New Schools” and others reading “Responsible Housing Development.” They applauded the 26 speakers who supported the board’s policy and booed the developer’s legal representative.
The board of trustees approved changes to the attendance policy that was previously reviewed in July, after the developers of the Patterson Ranch — a single-family home development under construction east of Ardenwood Boulevard, between Paseo Padre Parkway and Alameda Creek — requested that the item be brought before the board for reconsideration.
In 2007 the board approved a procedure to provide itself more flexibility in assigning new housing developments to attendance areas other than the historically contiguous neighborhood areas due to overcrowding and the need to overflow students wherever there is space.
The contentious Patterson Ranch housing development which is being constructed was initially proposed in 2008, when a larger development (1,000 homes) was unveiled, including a school. The 500-home plan approved by Fremont City Council in 2010 did not include a plan to give land or funds to the school district other than mandated developer in-lieu fees.
The Patterson Ranch development, which is projected to produce 203 elementary school students, 43 junior high school students and 86 high school students, has not been assigned a “home” attendance area which developers can tell residents looking to move into the housing development.
Fremont Unified Superintendent Jim Morris clarified before addressing the agenda items, “It is the board’s intent to assign all developments to the school nearest to the development as much as possible.”
Morris said the development is being built in the American High School attendance area, which is already one of the most impacted parts of the city with schools already at capacity. He said students from the development could not be assigned to any single attendance area because not one single area has enough space for all the students. Instead they would be “overloaded” wherever there was space.
He added funding-wise the understanding is that developers, the state and school district will each put in one third of the funds needed to build schools. Morris said today’s developer fees are inadequate.
Many community members and board members referenced the elementary school that will be built in Warm Springs by developers and handed off to the school district per a letter of intent signed last May. The new school, touted as a district victory in getting developers to acknowledge the impact their developments have on overcrowding, was offered as an example by most speakers at the meeting as what Patterson should do if the developers didn’t like the attendance assignment policy.
David Lanferman, legal representative for KB Home, DR Horton and Brookfield Homes, spoke on behalf of the developers at the board meeting.
“We have been trying to find out what the status would be of the new homes … for the last two to three years Patterson is the few if not only that has been described as unassigned. We’ve been meeting with staff since June. The current district policy doesn’t provide for unassigned, we don’t know what unassigned means. Staff explained just because you are assigned to an attendance area that doesn’t mean that is where you will go,” Lanferman said. “We are not even at a starting point. Why shouldn’t we be treated like every other development in Fremont? We are not clear what the difference is … we don’t have a legal preference. We ask what is the purpose of this amendment, and it seems to bless what the district has already been doing … I think there is some unfounded thought that the people who will be moving into the development will be foreigners or outside the community so we can treat them differently … they are dropped in this unassigned pool simply because of their home … why can’t we have an orderly process?”
Loud boos from the audience drowned out Lanferman’s comments multiple times.
Lanferman reminded the board and audience gathered Wednesday night that the Patterson Ranch developers were not responsible for the district’s present overcrowding.
“It is also not our fault that the city government is allowed to regulate housing development and schools are assigned to educate those students,” he said. “I sympathize and understand as the superintendent mentioned it was not the intention that developers of new homes would 100 percent pay for a new school. We are committed to pay the full lawful fee and the new school being built in the south of Fremont is being built for other reasons beyond what were mentioned in order to get the development passed, they had to have some extraordinary concessions. There are thousands of homes coming out of that development. This is a modest development, 500 homes is large but not the scale that can build a new school.”
Board members were impassioned about what they view as a failure of city government to take the needs of the schools into consideration when approving developments, and also the failure of developers to step up, they said. They sympathized with families who are strained by driving to schools far from their homes (800 students were pre-overloaded this year and 1,800 continue to be overloaded at schools other than their attendance area school).
Board Clerk Larry Sweeney said, “We have seen developer fees cover 25 percent, we don’t have any leverage other than keeping the attendance area as unassigned so the children in one home could go to school five miles away and another could go six miles away. We are not going to overload schools that are already overloaded and put more pressure on the families that are already overloaded. We have the right and ability to assign those students anywhere we see fit … Some developers in southern Fremont have worked with us because they see the value if they build a school, they will see a return on their investment” from families coming to Fremont to benefit from the high-ranked schools.
“If they want to uphold their end of the bargain, we will uphold our end of the bargain and will do what is our end of the bargain, which is assign the students where we have space,” Sweeney said.
American High School students at the meeting spoke about difficulties enrolling in competitive classes, large class sizes, and as one student detailed, not being able to use restrooms during breaks because lines are so long.
Morris said in response to the developers’ need to tell potential homeowners where their students will be enrolled, “be honest with homeowners that the development is unassigned.”
Dax Choksi, a school board candidate last year, said, “There are hundreds of residents who are moving in and don’t challenge the board so why are you different… I wish there was some legal means to force them to build a new school … and for people who are trying to buy a house in this complex I would tell them, ‘Don’t buy this house, be more socially responsible.'”
Contact Aliyah Mohammed at amohammed@themilpitaspost.com or 408-262-2454 or follow her on twitter.com/Aliyah_JM. Visit us on our social media sites at facebook.com/FremontBulletin and twitter.com/FremontBulletin.
