-PDBM/FXT LOOKING BACK Continued from page 12
station constructed in Mountain View. The decision set the stage for a competition with Palo Alto and Redwood City for a mid-peninsula stop on the line planned from San Diego to San Francisco. In several workshops and hearings, Mountain View residents grappled with the technical reality of adding two additional tracks up the Caltrain corridor for the high-speed trains, and the pos-
sible effects that grade-separated crossings would have on Castro Street and Rengstorff Boulevard. As a City Council subcommittee on high-speed rail was created in October, some council members lamented that Mountain View was not being as involved as other cities in discussions about the impact of high-speed rail.
SCHOOL BUDGETS SLASHED
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s the California state budget deficit reached some $21 billion, local schools felt the repercussions. Last February
cuts by the state Legislature translated into a $2 million slash to the Mountain View Los Altos School District’s budget. A hefty $1.2 million of that was taken from the Adult School, because most of its funding is provided by the state — the local high schools are funded primarily through property taxes. The Mountain View Whisman School District saw a cut of $250 per student in the 20092010 school year, totaling around $1.1 million. Though the district has healthy reserves, officials are expecting greater cuts next year. The slashes have been complicated
by a switch in the district’s funding structure from a “revenue limit� district, where funding is based on student enrollment, to “basic aid,� where regardless of the number of students, funding is based on property taxes and some (shrinking) supplemental funding from the state. The Foothill-De Anza Community College district also reported financial hardship in the face of growing demand. Foothill College has cut from its programming and expects to make deeper cuts in the coming year — including layoffs for tenured faculty.
DISTRICT CAUGHT IN ‘NO CHILD’ NET
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selves.� Burnett said she plans to work part time for the city for two to three months until a new director is found. She plans to spend more time gardening, mastering her drum set and being with her grand kids.
A LEADER OF UNSUNG HEROES Retiring public works director Cathy Lazarus has been running the most complex department in the city for 11 years, the one where employees endlessly repair roads, sewers and city buildings, and build all kinds of public infrastructure in the city. Lazarus, 58, has directed the development of numerous important capital projects, including several Stevens Creek trail exten-
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ising No Child Left Behind standards caught up with local schools this year. Despite standardized test score gains in most subgroups, the Mountain View Whisman District itself and two of its individual school sites — Monta Loma and Theuerkauf elemen-
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â– MOUNTAIN VIEW VOICE â– JANUARY 1, 2010
tary schools — entered their first year of Program Improvement (PI) under the federal plan. In a school or district’s first year under PI, parents must be notified and are given the option to transfer their student to another school in the district. The district saw no exodus from either elementary school site, and administrators said they would continue business as usual. The district saw its Academic Performance Index scores — those given by the state, based on a scale of 200-1,000 — rise in every school but Huff, which is the highest-scoring school in the district with an API of 918. Though English language learners and Hispanic students district-wide saw gains in the subgroups’ API scores, they still fell about 200 points below the API score for Caucasian students in the district, suggesting that a significant achievement gap persists. V
sions. But her proudest accomplishment was the construction of new personnel facilities at the municipal yard on Whisman Road, a project fairly invisible to the public, but that improved “terrible� working conditions for those employees, Lazarus said. Lazarus, who has a master’s degree in planning from Harvard, was initially hired away from the county, where she filled several roles, including county deputy parks director. At one point, she was executive officer of LAFCO, the agency responsible for the creation of new jurisdictions and property annexation in the county. Lazarus started in Mountain View as head of public services operations in 1995, a now-defunct department that was combined with public works. She took on the new department in 1998, and was able to develop high morale among employees despite her additional responsibilities, said city manager Kevin Duggan. Perhaps her trickiest ongoing responsibility is the continued maintenance and regulatory compliance of the city’s landfills in and around Shoreline Park, “which is very difficult to do these days,� Duggan said. Lazarus said that what she has liked most about Mountain View is how supportive the community is of public works projects, such as the water reservoir under the sports field at Graham middle school. Other cities are more “penny wise and pound foolish� about investing tax dollars in their infrastructure, she said. V
E-mail Daniel DeBolt at ddebolt@mv-voice.com