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 from 315 students 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 am and 2:30 – 3:45 pm) 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 on-line 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 (http://www.hillbrook.org/discover/ms) for more information about our proposal, including our letter of justification and the full copy of the traffic study.