How Regnart Elementary School was Shut Down

In this mail, we go through two items: 

(a) The painful journey to the closure of Regnart Elementary School

(b) A note about who we are

The Regnart Story:

CUSD schools have one of the highest per-school enrollment in the region. A rational person would expect that the school board would prefer to distribute students evenly across different campuses. However, what happened at Regnart was exactly the reverse. 

Regnart was one of the less crowded schools in the district. Instead of enabling open enrollment students to join Regnart, or open new programs there, the policy of the board was to do the reverse; i.e. to find opportunities to reduce the enrollment even further.

1. The existing Transitional Kindergarten was shut down and relocated to another school.
2. Open enrollment students who had applied to Regnart as their preferred school,were waitlisted and not allowed to enroll there..

Regnart had a healthy enrollment of 426 in 2019. Meanwhile, neighboring Blue Hills had 361 students, and nearby Montclaire had about 445. However, those schools which also happened to be the home schools of two trustees (Lori-Montclaire & Phyllis-Blue Hills), received students during open enrollment who were channeled away from Regnart.

This drop in enrollment, which was manufactured by CUSD by closing down the transitional kindergarten and not allowing open enrollment to Regnart was then used to justify the closure of Regnart!

The Regnart community organized itself and offered CUSD many ideas. That included ideas for transforming Regnart into a magnet school, providing stop-gap funding to tide over the pandemic and even raising more than $100,000. However the Board Members refused to consider alternatives.

Deception from the Board

The primary reason given by CUSD to close school campuses was that they did not have enough funds. However, whenever parents dug into the data, they realized that the projections did not justify closing schools. There were two reasons:

1. The expected savings from closing a campus was minimal because most of the expense goes to staff pay; and class sizes in CUSD were already near state mandated maxima, so staff cuts were minimal.

2. CUSD itself was unlikely to face the funding shortage which would have justified cost cuts in the first place. CUSD had an ending fund balance of $45M at the time of closure. This has now risen to $53M and is projected to grow!

Lack of Transparency

A question to ask is why was CUSD in such a rush to close schools during a once in a 100 year pandemic?

While CUSD was shutting down Regnart they were simultaneously expanding the CLIP program to a new site. That goes against their claim of funding gap leading to program closures. 

PRA requests have also revealed that the CUSD board has been communicating withReal Estate Development consultants to evaluate the ‘attractiveness’ of various sites to investors. 

Regnart is nestled in a quiet neighborhood in Monta Vista with multi-million dollar homes, and is prime land for development of expensive homes. 

Choice For Voters?

Is this the way you want your school districts to be run? Why were the lives of children and families disrupted during the pandemic, when there was no compelling reason to close already crowded campuses?

Whose interests is CUSD serving: real estate investors or our children?

If, like us, you feel the need for change, please do NOT vote for candidates sponsored by the coterie of ex-mayors for the Cupertino City Council (JR Fruen, Sheila Mohan) or CUSD (Ava Chiao) who also been endorsed by the three CUSD trustees who spearheaded the effort..

Please vote for Govind Tatachari, Liang Chao, and Steven Scharf for Cupertino City Council, and Darcy Paul, Satheesh Madhathil & Jerry Liu for CUSD Board. They will  work to roll-back school closure, and ensure that the local agencies work for the betterment of the residents.

A note about who we are

Cupertino Facts is an effort is by a group of long-term residents of  Cupertino, who have come together to inform our neighbors about the misinformation which the special-interests spread in our city. Most of us hold mid to senior level professional roles in the Tech Industry, and are united by our desire to preserve the wonderful city we call home. 

We do not have any big donors, and would love to get your contribution to help fight the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) spread in our city by special interests. We would also like to hear from you about other topics you would like to learn more about.

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JR Fruen’s Campaign Finance Violations

In closing, we would like to inform our readers that one of the candidates sponsored by the coterie of ex-mayors, JR Fruen, was issued a warning letter by the FPCC due to campaign finance reporting errors in 2020. In the 2022 cycle, there are two other violations by JR Fruen which have been reported to the FPCC under COM-08232022-02558 including Laundering Campaign Contributions.