School District considering using half of high school’s farm to
house buses
Morgan Hill – School board trustees debated adding a new barn to the farm at Live Oak High School this week, but it wouldn’t house animals for local Future Farmers of America students.
Instead, the project would hold the district’s fleet of more than 30 school buses on more than half of the farm’s acreage at the high school.
Though relocating the current bus barn at the city’s corporation yard on Eades Court to district-owned land would save several hundred thousand dollars per year, some trustees were uncomfortable with encroaching on the traditional farm of Live Oak students and intruding on neighbors as the buses rumbled out of the yard several time a day. The debate over the issue at this week’s school board meeting marked the first heated disagreement on the board since they discussed keeping Coyote Valley in the school district several months ago.
District staff recommended trustees look at moving the buses and related facilities to acreage at Live Oak High already owned by the district where the current ag program students operate a farm. If approved, buses would use a Half Road entrance and exit and would abut the farm, which would be reduced from approximately five acres to two acres.
“We looked at four district sites and 15 other sites in the city and county,” Deputy Superintendent Bonnie Tognazzini told trustees. “Other sites were deemed to be not workable…. Resources are important to us, and some of the city and county sites would be prohibitively expensive.”
Trustee Shelle Thomas said she was uncomfortable relocating the bus barn and adding considerable traffic to the new area throughout the day without first hearing from local residents.
“I want a community conversation on this,” Thomas said. “I want to hear about the impact it has on the Mariani’s (Orchard), the other rural residents in the area. I want to be sure the teachers aren’t going to be hearing those buses coming in and out and disrupting programs.”
But Trustee Peter Mandel said the board must consider what is best for the district financially and for the students, knowing that there will be no perfect solution.
“Nothing is binary, nothing is all good or all bad,” he said. “Andy (Mariani) or others might not be happy; the alternative is we might be spending $6 million to look for another site.”
Other board members were willing to accept the staff’s recommendation.
“This was all discussed when Sobrato was being built,” School Board President Mike Hickey said. “This is nothing new. This is what was requested.”
Several of the current trustees were not on the board when plans for Sobrato and the ag farm were being discussed; three of the seven trustees were elected in 2004, and Trustee Don Moody was appointed in 2004.
“Some of us weren’t here during those discussions,” Moody said. “Maybe we need to be reminded of that. What I’m basing my decision on is listening to the community who came here to our meeting and begged us to save the ag program.”
Ag Booster President Kris Friebel told trustees during the meeting that the program could survive on half its current space, but a slightly parcel would work better. At one point, Moody asked her if the two acres allotted would be enough for the ag program.
“Two and a half would be ideal,” she said. “In order to sustain the program with 300 students with their large animals, we’d love to have all the acreage, but we want to work with the district. If we could have two to two and a half acres, we could work with that. We never said we would move the entire program to Sobrato.”
When the district planned Sobrato, officials planned for a large farm on the property that would eventually develop into an area for all district students to use.
“Did we look at two and a half acres,” Trustee Peter Mandel asked. “I know that in the planning stages, we have met with the two principals, talked about what we will have programmatically at Sobrato and at Live Oak.”
Superintendent Alan Nishino said his understanding is that the two campuses would have delineated programs.
“I understood we would run two programs at two different schools,” he said. “I thought the idea was to have husbandry at Live Oak and growing things, other things, at Sobrato.”
Trustees agreed, by consensus, to direct the staff to go forward with a California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review of the Live Oak site. Tognazzini said trustees could have the results of the review by April 27.
