FUHSD Board passes enrollment plan
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BY URMILA VENKAT On Jan. 12, the FUHSD Board of Trustees unanimously passed a proposal to allow 8th grade students attending Miller Middle School but not living in the Lynbrook residence area the choice to attend Lynbrook for their four years of high school. This offer will extend to the siblings of the Miller students and are effective only for the 2016-17 school year. A newly created district-wide citizen’s advisory committee will study enrollment throughout the district and report on its �indings for the board to make a decision to implement for the 2017-18 school year. The passed proposal also included a provision that promised to maintain Lynbrook’s current programs. Lynbrook’s population is currently at 1767, according to projections done by Enrollment Projection Consultants, Lynbrook’s enrollment numbers will continue to decrease, with the enrollment projections for next year dropping to
1702 students. The decreasing enrollment numbers will affect which classes and how many sections of each class are offered in the coming years, though other factors such as graduation requirements, teacher availability, infrastructure limitations and student requests are also considered. Shrinking enrollment numbers could cause reduced class offerings, staff cuts and the possible elimination of programs such as world language, �ine arts and AP classes. To prevent this, the board held a meeting on Jan. 9 to discuss Lynbrook’s enrollment issue and to solicit public input on the matter. The FUHSD staff created a presentation covering the issue of declining enrollment and reviewed several tentative solutions. These options were to create an area of choice mear John Mise Park, open enrollment throughout FUHSD and, while not part of the FUHSD staff recommendation, a possible boundary change. The second portion of the meeting was for public input, and several staff, students and community members voiced
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MEDIA COVERAGE|The controversy of the decision attracted the attention of the press, with TV channels present at the meeting.
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PROTESTS| Young boy holds sign to show support for open enrollment as a solution to the problem of declining enrollment.
their opinions on the issue and what needed to be done. “I think the meeting was a fair effort to give multiple people with multiple views a forum to express concerns with all the options,” said School Financial Technician Judy Boehm. “The vast majority of people understand the need for more students, that that’s the big thrust; how it is accomplished seems to be the major disagreement.” Current students at Lynbrook also took their turn at the podium to express how the �ine arts and language programs had an impact on them. “There’s a lot of wealth in the languages and electives that Lynbrook offers, and these classes have offered balance,” said senior Samvardhini Sridharan. “If these electives were to get cut, or if there were fewer classes and they were harder to get into, other students wouldn’t get to have the same experiences I did.” see ENROLLMENT page 2
INDEPTH//
The effects of house price fluctuations BY WILLIAM GUO AND JESSICA LUO
T
he Silicon Valley has proven to be one of the most prosperous places in America, and the growing stream of new companies, workers and wealth makes it a real estate hotspot. During the last decade, demand for housing in California increased steadily, while construction rates remained constant. With the lack of new houses and the burgeoning �low of buyers, house rates steadily climbed, culminating in what is now the peak of Silicon Valley’s housing market. According to Zillow, the average house price in Cupertino has risen from $1.05 million to nearly $1.9 million in the past �ive years. For the less wealthy, the impact of high
prices has been devastating. An increasing number of families are leaning toward moving to areas where the cost of living is much lower than that of the Silicon Valley. “My family has decided to move to Texas because what we have to pay [here] is insane,” said sophomore Asad Memon. “However, if you look elsewhere, if we put money into housing over there, you can get houses twice the size of the ones here for less than what we pay here.” The vacant spaces caused by this emigration are �illed by wealthier people who can afford to buy property at a higher price, which in turn causes the average cost of housing to surge upward. The term for this process is gentri�ication, and it has affected several other major
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STUDENT SPEECH| Sophomore Sultan Ahmad speaks at the board meeting about his experiences in the drama department.
cities in California, including San Francisco and Los Angeles. Especially in the Bay Area, where more residents hold high-paying jobs, house prices are severely affected by the area’s wealth. “When somebody who earns a lot of money is looking at a house, they have the extra money to get what they want,” said real estate agent Stuart Campbell, who is based in the Bay Area. “They’re willing to pay a little bit more, to the detriment of ‘regular’ people that just have ‘regular’ jobs.” Given that the $90,000 median household income in the Silicon Valley is 40 percent higher than that of the U.S., the elevated cost of living in the area is no surprise. see HOUSE PRICES page 12
BASKETBALL// pg. 13
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