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Fremont High School
the
PHOENIX
Vol. 5 Issue No. 2 oct. 28, 2016
Border wars continue in FUHSD by Sam Tumkur, Caroline He, and Maggie Bernauer
Collaboration
For many students attending Fremont High School, commuting to school can be long and tedious. The reason they still take the long commute is because of district borders. District borders determine which school district a student will attend. If a student falls within the boundaries of the Fremont Union High School District (FUHSD), they will go there. Within the district, there are attendance boundaries and those determine the school within that district a student will attend. There is the fear that changing boundaries will decrease property value. Jason Crutchfield, FUHSD Director of Business Services, explains that for homeowners within the borders, changing attendance boundaries may increase or decrease the value of their home, depending on which attendance boundary they are in and how high-performing the school is. “When anyone is looking at district borders and attendance boundaries, the first thing they think of is ‘how does it affect me,’” Crutchfield said. “How does it affect my house?” Parents are not the only group concerned with this issue; realtors are concerned with it as well. “Realtors are heavily involved on all boundary issues,” Crutchfield said. “They have a vested interest in our boundaries, and they feel that it will affect what they can sell and how fast
they can sell a home. So there are realtors that back some of this, both financially and vocally with their time, every year.” A recent example regarding attendance boundaries would be with Lynbrook High School (LHS). Due to the decrease of Lynbrook students over the past few years, FUHSD suggested that a portion of Cupertino High School’s (CHS) attendance boundaries become a part of Lynbrook’s attendance boundaries. This has caused backlash from the Lynbrook community. “They’ve [Lynbrook parents] changed the history of their family tree by moving here,” Crutchfield said. “And every dime in their family is committed to this house so that their kids can go to the school for that boundary area. If there’s anything they think can change that, they think it’s scary. And when something scares you, you say ‘just don’t do it’.” The Citizen Advisory Committee (CAC) is coming to a decision about what will happen with the Lynbrook borders on Nov. 15. This town meeting brings up the unresolved 1981 closing of Sunnyvale High School (SHS) and the effect it has on borders and FHS students. Due to the closure of SHS, Fremont is now the furthest reaching school in the FUHSD borders. Because of that, there is no border solution for FHS students that will result in a shorter commute time, nor is it financially reasonable to
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open a new high school in the FUHSD border. “We can’t change our borders too much because we are the southernmost part of the district border,” CAC Board Member David Heinke, said. This is why it is easier to simply expand campuses to deal with population increase rather than changing the attendance boundaries. “We plan our buildings in advance, and have them running by the time the increase in enrollment hits [the schools],” Crutchfield said. “That’s what we’ve been focusing on for the past six years and we’ve been doing a really good job of that.” For example, the new B-building at Fremont High School, which finished construction in 2015, is part of the district strategy to accommodate the increasing population of students. Along with more construction, the increasing population of students may have other effects on school resources. “It’s more students to educate with the same amount of money because we don’t get dollars per student,” Crutchfield said. “So I think it can thin out our resources.” FUHSD gets its funding from property tax, while many other districts get funding from the government for every student enrolled in their school. However, according to Crutchfield, the negative effects overall are negligible. “You’re still going to have a school that feels very much like it does today, and still be able to handle 2700
Photo Courtesy of fuhsd.org
students if needed,” Crutchfield said. Based on current projections for student enrollment, the FUHSD feels prepared to handle the growing student populations. Dramatic changes would only be needed if a
by Emily Wright Managing Editor
Fremont High School News - According to the Fremont High School website, FHS has three National Merit Scholarship Semifinalists this year: Abhinav Kotra, Rahul Prabhakaran and Jae Weller.
California News - According to NPR, Calif. Lawmakers have unanimously passed a law that requires mandatory prison sentencing for anyone convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious person. This comes after Brock Turner, a former Stanford swimmer convicted of the same crime, was released after serving three months of his six-month jail sentence.
rapid increase in the students were to happen. “Our schools would have to start addressing possible changes if we saw multiple schools getting close to the 3,000 (students) range,” Crutchfield said. “At some point, we’re going to have to
face the fact that we’re not some bedroom community anymore, that we’re in the heart of the Silicon Valley and that we’re getting bigger and bigger.”
U.S. News - According to the Los Angeles Times, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver published potential electoral maps in hypothetical situations where only men or women voted, showing that if only men voted, Trump would win by a large margin. In response, several Trump supporters have started tweeting with #repealthe19th. This is in reference to the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that gave women the right to vote.
World News - According to CNN, Category 3 Hurricane Matthew has left more than one million people without power and has hit Florida and three Caribbean countries.