Click here to listen to this week’s JAM: Community Counts
Friday was a glorious day on campus, capped off with a well-attended State of the School in the amphitheater. More than 75 people came together to hear about the school’s current and future initiatives, including a sneak peak at Vision 2030, our ambitious plan that will be formally presented to the community next Fall. Families also had an opportunity to socialize with each other and enjoy excellent food from Oren’s Hummus (a Hillbrook family-owned local business). It was the kind of event that has always been at the core of the Hillbrook experience, an event that highlights one of our biggest differentiators – our community.
As a school, we are committed to making our campus a community hub. Creating opportunities for families to engage with their children and with other adults is essential to building the trust and partnership that are key ingredients for children to grow and thrive.
One challenge that we face in using our campus is making sure that we remain in compliance with our conditional use permit, or as it is more well known, our CUP. Recently, we have had really high traffic counts, meaning we are close to having violations which result in fines from the Town of Los Gatos.
If you are interested in understanding the full details and history of our CUP, I encourage you to review the attached history and overview. At the most basic level, the key condition is that we are limited to having 440 trips off-campus each day (880 total trips, with each vehicle representing two trips – one trip on campus, one trip off). There is a counter buried in the ground outside the gate that counts every car coming off campus all day, every day (24/7/365). If we go over the 880 trips, we are fined by the Town of Los Gatos.
Our primary strategy to ensure compliance is to mitigate traffic during the major drop-off and pick-up periods.
The most important thing that all families can do is try to arrive and leave campus in the morning and afternoon in one of four ways – in a carpool, by bus, on a bike, or by walking. By minimizing traffic during those time periods, we have more flexibility to have families coming on campus for events and activities at other times of day. Put another way, the more we can collectively support these efforts, the more we can fully utilize the campus as a community hub.
Our families and students have been incredibly resourceful in finding ways to minimize traffic. We have had multi-family carpools through the years where the families first met when they realized they lived in the same neighborhood (you can use the Bear’s Lair to locate all of your HB neighbors!). A number of families take advantage of the bus stops at Kennedy/Gem and at Blossom Hill Park to avoid that last ½ mile onto campus. Several older students bike or ride motorized scooters to campus each morning.
Check out the detailed Resource Board in the Bear’s Lair. I also encourage you to chat directly with our Director Director of Afterschool, Summer & Transportation Programs Nicholle Cabarloc or with Front Office Assistant Deborah McCollum (aka Miss Deborah).
With blue skies and sunny weather in the forecast for the remainder of the year, you will see me on my bike nearly every morning and afternoon. See you in the streets!