Locations would be next to parks
Schools in Coyote Valley should be centrally located and be built near parks to maximize use, consultants told the Coyote Valley Task Force.
Consultants also suggested multi-story schools, roof-top hard courts for recess in elementary and middle schools, and structured parking garages. They detailed “land-use” suggestions for a proposed Coyote Valley elementary, middle and high schools at the monthly Coyote Valley Task Force meeting Monday night.
San Jose has plans to develop the valley, building 50,000 homes to accommodate up to 80,000 residents with an 80-acre lake as the focal point. They also hope to lure jobs for some 25,000 residents.
Coyote Valley lies within the borders of the Morgan Hill School District (which extends to Bernal Road in south San Jose), and any development will significantly impact the South Valley region.
Consultant Ken Kay told Task Force members a narrow “central commons” of green parks spanning Fisher Creek and Coyote Creek will be a suitable location for Coyote Valley’s public schools.
“One of the goals is to create this viable corridor that will span the entire valley at 1.3 miles and be part of the public realm,” he said. “This becomes the seam of the community. It allows students and parents of the community, as well as people from the outside, to come together.”
The consultant proposed the various schools might have their own courtyards as well as sharing adjacent park fields for physical education activities.
Consultant Darin Smith of Economic & Planning Systems, Inc., told task force members top-quality schools will be an important inducement to drawing residents to Coyote Valley.
“We need to have first-class schools to make efficient use of Coyote Valley,” he said. He proposed planners design schools to keep the number of students in classes low.
Project consultants said they made a planning assumption that elementary and middle schools will have an average of 20 students per classroom and high school classrooms will have about 25 students. At least 200 acres of land should be set aside for the construction of all public schools, Smith suggested. He proposed several ways to maximize the use of the land, including multi-story school facilities, joint-use of school and park lands, roof-top hard-courts for recess in elementary and middle schools, and structured parking garages.
Task force member Eric Carruthers said he thinks the multi-story school suggestion is “a great idea.”
He emphasized he’d like to see more push on high school students taking mass transit rather than using their own cars to go to school. This will help minimize parking facilities.
“I know kids now feel deprived if they can’t drive – but tough,” he said.
Consultant Doug Dahlin of the Dahlin Group recounted a tour San Jose facilities he took with Morgan Hill School District administrators and showed a slide of Empire Elementary School which is adjacent to a large park. This might be a model for Coyote Valley public schools, he suggested.
“It’s an example where you can fence off the school and the hard-court area and still keep the adjacent park open on the weekends,” he said.
Horace Mann Elementary School in San Jose is a three-story facility that makes good use of limited land space, he told the task force.
San Jose’s Galarza Elementary School “is the closest fitting to what we have in mind,” he said. The two-story buildings have an architectural design that would fit in well with the vision of Coyote Valley.
“It’s has a good not-overtly urban feel to it,” Dahlin said. “I know that some of the people on tour, especially those from Morgan Hill, thought this was the closest thing envisioned for Coyote Valley.”
Morgan Hill businessman Russ Danielson, a former district trustee, agreed with the consultants that small class sizes are preferable.
“It promotes effective learning,” he said.
Task force member Helen Chapman cautioned against joint-use of high school fields with the public who might damage the grass and facilities.
“The schools are going to take ownership of those fields and they don’t want the public ruining their investment,” she said.
