LASD Board Highlights

With aging school facilities and overcrowding at our junior high schools, the Los Altos School District Board of Trustees voted to place a bond measure on the November 5, 2024 ballot to fund needed repairs and upgrades to support all students’ education.

The bond would provide locally controlled funding to complete essential repairs and upgrades to school roofs, windows, bathrooms, plumbing, wiring, and heating and cooling systems to provide a safe, healthy learning environment for all students.

Additionally, many classes are currently held in old, deteriorating portable classrooms that are well past their useful age, presenting safety issues for students. The bond would provide funds to replace these aging portables with permanent classrooms.

Currently, ten of our community’s schools are forced to share nine campuses. Locally controlled funding is needed to construct a tenth campus so that we can finally solve our junior high school overcrowding problem and have an individual campus for each of our schools.

To complete identified repairs and upgrades across all our neighborhood schools, the proposed $350 million bond measure would cost taxpayers in the district a maximum of $30 per $100,000 of a property’s assessed (not market) value per year, while bonds are outstanding.

In addition to building a tenth campus to relieve school traffic and overcrowding, funding from this measure could be used to:

• Fix leaky roofs and windows and modernize aging heating, cooling, plumbing, and electrical systems

• Improve accessibility for students with disabilities

• Enhance science, technology, engineering, and math classrooms and labs

• Improve traffic flow and safety around schools

By law, the bond measure would require strict accountability protections, including:

• All funds would be controlled locally and could not be taken away by the State

• By law, no money could be used for administrators’ salaries

• An independent citizens’ oversight committee and mandatory annual audits would ensure all funds are spent as voters intended

• A project list outlining the specific use of funds

For more information, check out item H.4. on our agenda online.

Over the next five years, our school district will be guided by strategic priorities that emphasize preparing students for a hopeful, engaged future, empowering educators through support and collaboration, fostering strong family partnerships to enhance our diverse community, and improving innovative programs that ensure a world-class education for all.

Our teachers and staff will achieve these strategic goals by creating an excellent student experience in all of our schools. Our staff will connect with who each and every child really is, put them at the center of their learning experience, integrate their social, emotional, cognitive, and academic development, and develop learners as full people.

The focus will be to support student learning by:

• Developing skills, mindsets and habits to support their academic success

• Experiencing rich learning in the classroom

• Developing positive relationships with teachers and peers

• Creating environments filled with safety and belonging

• Providing integrated support systems

  
  

The Board reviewed these strategic goals and provided feedback to staff in implementing and analyzing success of the plan each year.

For more information, check out item H.2. on our online agenda.