For more than four decades, Peninsula High School has served as the alternative school for the San Mateo Union High School District. In recent years, plans have been drafted to move the school from its current home in San Bruno to a new location in San Mateo.
The school provides an academically supportive environment for students behind in credits required to graduate. Currently, it offers a low student to teacher ratio of 15 to one and touts a 95 percent graduation rate. However, due to deteriorating facility conditions and an inconvenient location, the district is considering relocating the campus.
When Measure O was passed in 2010, one of the district’s projects was to “acquire new land and/or construct a replacement for our alternative school to better serve students.” Since then, the district has developed several options for the future of Peninsula.
These options include purchasing new land, relocating to an existing high school campus, and upgrading the current facility. The need for change became even more evident on Jan. 29 when the school, which houses the technology hub for the district, suffered a power outage that could largely be attributed to the school’s outdated equipment. This resulted in loss of Internet and phone usage for all schools in the district.
Many favor relocating Peninsula High School to the city of San Mateo, citing its central location and convenience to the 60 percent of the student body that lives in San Mateo.
Peninsula Principal Don Scatena says, “A student who lives in San Mateo or the Aragon area will have a roundtrip of 26 miles [to Peninsula High School]. We still struggle with things like attendance, [and] students found the school location as one of the chief reasons for issues around attendance.”
Purchasing new land for building a new campus faces no potential issues with neighboring school sites and gives the school greater flexibility. This option is favored by current Peninsula staff.
Scatena says, “[An] option that our staff and the community would endorse the most would be to build on a purchased property for an alternative education school… and do it the right way the first time and not force it onto another high school site and not to rebuild here.”
Another advantage is the availability of additional facilities for Aragon students to use. SMUHSD Superintendent Scott Laurence says, “We’re thinking about building an academic campus that would be used in the evening for a lot of different things that would enable other students to use some of the facilities. They would not just be for [Peninsula] students, but anyone in the district.”
However, this option comes with many difficulties, such as high costs and lengthy environmental impact reports, which add about a year to the entire process.
Another option is to relocate Peninsula to a current high school site, which would avoid the timely and costly process of acquiring new land and building a school from scratch. The San Mateo High School campus has the greatest accommodation capacity of all schools. Nonetheless, this option would still present many challenges, since the adult school, bus barn, and district currently housed at San Mateo High School would have to be moved.
However, this idea has been met with a large amount of community resistance, with parents fearing that the education and safety of their children would be compromised. To voice their opposition, parents launched a petition against this possibility that has acquired hundreds of signatures. The San Mateo Police Department released a report last spring that detailed its safety concerns with the relocation of Peninsula High School to San Mateo High School. However, Scatena pointed out that those opinions are unfounded.
“The SMPD data is flawed,” says Scatena. “I think they tried to prove a point that the students here create a safety issue, but I would listen more accurately to the San Bruno Police Chief rebuttal, which shows that there are very few incidents at Peninsula over the past five years that would be considered serious.”
While Aragon High School was considered to house Peninsula, its lack of available space quickly deemed it to be unviable. Hillsdale High School was seriously considered because of its numerous economic advantages. However, neighborhood protests and an inadequate property size make it a possible but difficult campus to house a new school.
Ultimately, the fate of Peninsula High School will be determined by the Board of Trustees in the next three to four months. The district hopes to have the issue fully resolved in the next two to three years.
