“The Rise,” a development project near the former Vallco shopping center that has been at the center of community debate for eight years, is being reconstructed into housing, office space and recreational areas. “The Rise California” will deliver 2,669 housing units, including 356 units designated as affordable for lower-income households. However, “The Rise,” which is in Cupertino High School’s geographical boundary, is unlikely to lead to increased enrollment for FUHSD.
Director of Administrative Services Jason Crutchfield says that FUHSD has seen a loss in enrollment of around 2,000 students throughout all district schools since 2017 when enrollment peaked at 11,000 students. Crutchfield also explains that there are a number of issues that come with declining enrollment, such as course conflicts that occur when the school attempts to allow students to take all the classes they request. He says that as declining enrollment continues, students sometimes have to choose between two singleton courses that will run the same period.
“MVHS has certainly seen a decline in the number of courses, but so far, it hasn’t gone as far as eliminating a course,” Crutchfield said. “It’s going from having five sections of a class to three sections. So now, when we’re making the master schedule, we’re trying to get every kid to take all the classes they want, but we start to have more course conflicts.”
According to Assistant Principal in charge of scheduling Brian Dong, another contributing factor to course conflicts is staffing the teachers on campus. Dong states that teachers are owed a certain number of classes, five for a teacher who is employed full time, which cannot be completed with classes they aren’t qualified to teach.
“We can’t force a Spanish teacher to teach Java when they don’t have a Java teaching credential,” Dong said. “So it’s not necessarily just based on what the kids want to do, it’s also based on how we can provide the right number of courses to our teachers.”
This declining enrollment led the district to move to not offer four languages at all five sites, and Japanese is in the process of being phased out at MVHS starting two years ago with Japanese 1, Japanese 2 this year and Japanese 3 next year. When courses are facing cuts like this, it leads some community members to feel hopeful about new housing developments, but according to Chief Demographer for Enrollment Projection Consultants Tom Williams, “The Rise” will not boost overall enrollment.
“It won’t turn things around — the numbers are just too steep,” Williams said. “Again, we have thousands and thousands of housing units, and we have thousands and thousands of families, but relatively speaking, we have far fewer families now than we did 10 years ago, let alone 15 or 20 years ago.”
Crutchfield says that older families with grown kids are not moving out of housing that could be used for younger families, and that, paired with rising housing costs over $2 million for a single family home, leads to fewer families being able to afford to move to the area. While “The Rise” might yield a small increase, Crutchfield says it’s more so lessening the decline.
“Do we get a couple hundred students out of it?” Crutchfield said. “That could happen, but we don’t think it’s going to happen quickly, and we think that because in comparable projects, student generation rates have been very low. We get a lot of people moving into these types of places, but not a lot of families with high school kids.”
Williams also mentions that apartment complexes near tech companies, like “The Rise,” aren’t attracting the demographic that they want for increasing enrollment in the school district because they aren’t suitable for multi-kid family homes, which are the prime contributors for the student population.
“Unfortunately, apartments being built nowadays are being targeted more towards high-tech singles and childless couples and good tech friends,” Williams said. ‘They’re generally not being designed for families anymore. The apartments they were going to build as of three months ago, some of them were only 600 square feet, and you’re not going to fit too many families into 600 square foot apartments.”
