We understand that sunnyvale school board is currently studying a proposal to redistrict the elementary school boundaries of the District.
We, residents of the Washington Park neighborhood, strongly oppose this proposal for the following reasons:
- Many of us have bought houses in this area for one main reason: to send our children to Cumberland. We have invested huge amounts of time, emotion and money in order to give our children the chance to learn at Cumberland. It is massively unfair to change the boundaries now. While some children will be "grandfathered" into Cumberland under the current proposals, many will not.
- While we understand that there is an overcrowding problem at Cherry Chase and Cumberland, we believe that the current redistricting proposal is an inappropriate response and doesn’t solve the core overcrowding problem in a fair manner.
- According to the School District's own predictions, the proposed redistricting will result in overcrowding at Vargas, almost as bad as that forecast for Cumberland under the status quo.
- Sign partition here: http://www.change.org/p/sunnyvale-school-board-vote-against-school-board-redistricting-plan#The redistricting is also predicted to result in Cherry Chase being greatly below its designed capacity.
- We do not understand why this particular redistricting was the one chosen for study, and why other options were not considered or dismissed so quickly, such as
- Keeping status quo of school boundaries and sending overflowing students to underused schools using a fair policy eg. (first come first serve, Lottery system)
- reopening the district-owned school building leased to private schools
- The redistricting is likely to result in lower property values in our neighborhood. When we bought houses here, the price we paid reflected the assumption that the houses would be included in Cumberland’s district. If this assumption no longer holds in future, we will likely lose a substantial amount of money if we sell our houses. This financial loss is another blow, on top of the possibility that our children may not be allowed to attend Cumberland. We accept that redistricting is sometimes unavoidable, but it should surely be a last resort.
