After a burst of activity in 1996, we have yet to break ground for a new middle school. In March of that year, the board adopted a Facilities Master Plan. In June, District voters approved a $35M bond issue for construction. In October, the board received & approved the report of a Site Selection Committee.
Nine years later, the middle school is mired in controversy, tied to an environmentally destructive coastal development boondoggle.
The district proposes to build a new middle school with a capacity of 1,150 students (half again as large as Cunha) at Wavecrest and convert Cunha to an elementary school, across the road from Hatch.
While our school board has been focused on Wavecrest for the last nine years, our circumstances have changed significantly. Overall district enrollment dropped from a high of 3,889 in 1997 to 3,489 this year; middle school enrollment dropped from 982 to 800 over the same period. Busing has been eliminated, resulting in long drives, congested traffic, and disrupted schedules.
Using some imagination, we see that there are interesting alternatives that have not been seriously considered. Here's one.
If middle school enrollment grows significantly, this plan would dramatically reduce in traffic, with many more students, especially on the midcoast, able to walk to school, and parents having a much shorter drive. The middle schools would be smaller, leading to behavioral and academic improvements.
Instead of the mega-campus of Hatch+Cunha, we'd have another neighborhood elementary school for the southern half of Half Moon Bay, or else a more manageable Hatch, with smaller sub-campuses.
Some people claim that the Cunha site is too small for a middle school. This is simply not true.
With over 17 acres, the Cunha site easily meets state site guidelines. Why the confusion? State guidelines also allow for larger sites (20+ acres) with more extensive football fields. Cunha already has playing fields. Surprisingly, the Wavecrest plans show only one baseball field, one softball field and one soccer/football field surrounded by a track.
When the Site Selection Committee applied the existing state selection criteria to the sites under consideration, Cunha ranked #1 out of five sites; Wavecrest ranked next to last. With size a significant factor in the rankings, Cunha scored 90 out of a possible 100 points, the highest of any site.
In his analysis of potential middle school sites in May, 2002, Superintendent John Bayless did not find size to be a problem with Cunha; in fact, Dr Bayless lists "size and shape" as one of the benefits of the Cunha site.
The issue of size vanishes, of course, once we build a second middle school in the midcoast and reduce Cunha's enrollment to a more manageable level.
In fact, a glance at the plans for the proposed Wavecrest middle school shows that its playing field inventory is limited to one baseball field, one softball field, and one football/soccer field enclosed by a track. Additionally, there's a paved "play area", striped for basketball, volleyball, tennis and roller hockey.
Under the current Wavecrest plan, the Boys and Girls Club is forced to share the middle school site, consuming even more of the available space. This would not be an issue if Wavecrest were an elementary site, requiring much less land than a middle school.
It wouldn't be surprising if you have this impression. The Facilities Master Plan informs us that our middle school enrollment would be 1,211 in 2004-2005. In fact, the actual enrollment was 800. That's 411 fewer students than projected, representing 15-20 fewer classrooms than planned.
The undisputed fact is that Cunha Middle School enrollment reached its peak in 1997, the year after the Master Plan was approved, and has been shrinking every since. State projections for San Mateo County suggest that our enrollment will be even smaller in 2013.
District policy, as adopted in the Facilities Master Plan, is to disperse elementary schools into neighborhoods, and to centrally locate the middle and high schools to make them, as much as possible, accessible to the entire district.
With much of the district's population living north of Half Moon Bay, it makes more sense to remodel Cunha as a smaller middle school, removing its worn-out modular classrooms, and to build a second middle school on the midcoast north of Half Moon Bay.
Hatch, the largest elementary school in the district, is just across the road from Cunha. A new elementary school should be sited to serve neighborhoods not served by an existing elementary school. One such location would be a southern site, serving Moonridge, Ocean Colony, and families south of Half Moon Bay.
If Hatch needs to be expanded, the Facilities Master Plan suggests one approach. Move the district offices to some other location (administrative offices are much easier to relocate than schools are), and use the freed space to build a new K-2 facility, using a refurbished Hatch for grades 3-5. This makes efficient use of the site, keeps the individual schools small, and expands their overall capacity.
And as a small but significant improvement: build a pedestrian and bicycle bridge across Hwy 1 between Cunha and Hatch.
Recently, the Podesta site, below and to the west of the high school, has been proposed as a possible middle school site.
There are several issues that make the Podesta site undesirable for the new middle school.
Rebuilding Cunha Middle School conserves our facilities and operating dollars, allowing us to continue to upgrade our elementary sites. And rebuilding Cunha can begin now, not years from now.
Renewed, Cunha can be a great school, every bit as modern as the proposed Wavecrest design, and considerably more beautiful and substantial. It makes good sense.
This page was last updated on 2 May 2005. Please send feedback to Jonathan Lundell: