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BEST LOCAL NEWS COVERAGE California Newspaper Publishers Association
Local news, information and analysis
Palo Alto examines finals before winter break Neighboring high schools shifted their calendars years ago by Chris Kenrick change in Menlo-Atherton High School’s academic calendar, shifting first-semester final exams from January to December, has been “very successful,” according to Steve Lippi, instructional vice-principal at the school. Now in its sixth year, the pre-winter-break exam schedule is popular with students, teachers and families
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alike, Lippi said. “It’s been a win-win situation for everybody,” he said. As Palo Alto schools consider the contentious issue of shifting their own calendars to pre-break finals, officials from neighboring high schools said they do not recall the decision being terribly controversial in their own communities.
“Parents liked the idea of having finals finished before Christmas, and I don’t think the teachers minded it either,” Mountain View High School spokesperson Ginny Donaldson said. Both Mountain View and Los Altos high schools shifted their calendars about three years ago, she said. In Palo Alto, Superintendent Kevin Skelly has recommended a similar switch beginning in 2011. The Board of Education is set to take a final vote on Skelly’s proposal Nov. 9.
In the meantime, board members have urged citizens to weigh in by e-mailing their thoughts to calendar@pausd.org. District officials will track the comments and summarize them prior to the board’s Oct. 26 meeting. At Menlo-Atherton, the biggest drawback to the new calendar is that the first semester is “much shorter than the second semester, typically 82 days compared to 98,” Lippi said. “However, this is only a problem for semester-long classes, such as
Government and Econ. The great majority of our classes are yearlong, and therefore the fact that one semester is shorter than the other works its way out by the end of the school year,” he said. Other commonly cited difficulties — an earlier school-start date in August and stress-filled conflicts between finals and holiday music performances and other activities — have sorted themselves out, Lippi said. (continued on page 9)
LAND USE
Palo Alto to ask for $1.5 million for California Avenue Valley Transportation Authority grant could revitalize shopping district but would reduce street lanes to two by Sue Dremann
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Vivian Wong
Playing around for kids’ health Actor Matthew McConaughey and San Francisco 49er Patrick Willis shake hands before taking the field with students from San Francisco 49ers Academy in East Palo Alto Tuesday. They emphasized to the kids the importance of daily exercise, nutrition and healthy activity. Watch the video at www.PaloAltoOnline.com.
LEGAL
Documents detail CalPERS’ $100 million Page Mill loss Pension fund had invested in Page Mill Properties of Palo Alto by Gennady Sheyner
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n December 2008, about nine months before Page Mill Properties lost control of its 1,800 housing units in East Palo Alto, Warren Otto of Stockbridge Capital Group wrote an e-mail to Page
Mill Properties CEO David Taran asking him about a $50 million debt in Page Mill’s books. Otto had recently been hired by CalPERS, the nation’s largest retirement fund, to analyze Page Mill’s
East Palo Alto portfolio, which the Palo Alto-based company began accumulating in 2007. By late 2008, the company had steeply raised rents, displacing many of the residents in the Woodland Park neighborhood and enraging tenant activists. The Palo Alto-based company had also launched a flurry of lawsuits against East Palo Alto, challenging the city’s rent-control ordinance. CalPERS, which stands for California Public Employees’ Retirement System and provides retirement and health-benefit services to more than 1.6 million members, had invested $100 million in the Page
$1.5 million grant could transform California Avenue in Palo Alto into a Europeanstyle boulevard with two lanes, a park/plaza at the east end near the Caltrain station, additional landscaping, kiosks and a 20-seat miniplaza near Ash Street. The city plans to submit an application next Tuesday to the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) for a Community Design for Transportation Grant, which is designed to help cities improve transit connections, calm traffic, promote bicycle and pedestrian uses and increase economic development. The city would add $500,000 in matching funds. The city previously applied for VTA funding in June and was turned down. The latest California Avenue streetscape plan — its eighth iteration— is based on feedback officials received during a Sept. 23 community meeting. The Palo Alto City
Council will hear an informational presentation on the plan and grant application on Monday night. The streetscape proposal adds “bulb outs” to extend the sidewalk in some places but does not uniformly widen the sidewalks. Shade trees could be added in places. An outdoor plaza with seating for up to 20 tables could be added west of Ash Street, Chief Transportation Official Jaime Rodriguez said Thursday. The plan would redesign diagonal parking at a 60-degree angle; cars currently park at 45 degrees. A 3-foot buffer zone between the cars and traffic lane would be added. Parking spaces would increase to 135 (from 111) with two loading zones. Each 16-foot traffic lane would be marked as a shared bike lane, he said. Colored crosswalks and parking areas would alter the “sea of asphalt” look of the current
Mill Properties II portfolio in 2006. As time wore on, however, it became concerned about Page Mill’s strategy and the fallout its investment has caused in the media and among tenants. As Otto began to comb through Page Mill’s numbers in 2008, the due date for a $50 million loan to Wachovia (which later was acquired by Wells Fargo) caught his attention. “David, I’d like to talk with you about the status of the debt on the portfolio whenever you have a minute,” Otto wrote. “If you have an abstract which summarizes the terms of the debt that would be helpful. If
not, I will need a copy of the debt documents. We are concerned about the $50 million of debt which apparently comes due before the term of the loan is over. Thanks.” The e-mail was one of hundreds of documents CalPERS was forced to release this week because of a legal challenge from the nonprofit group First Amendment Coalition. The 1,175 pages include business reports, Page Mill memorandums, complaints from Page Mill tenants and e-mail exchanges between CalPERS officials and Page Mill executives in the frantic months be-
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