After a very full day in the Tassajara Prep booth at Day on the Glen, we are delighted to report the overwhelming positive response from festival attendees today. We were quite often swamped with people crowding the booth clamoring for information about the new public high school coming to town. We have long known that there was a strong demand for a high school in east Dublin, but even we were surprised by the excitement and gratitude expressed by many, many parents.
The first thing we were asked today by most parents was “When will the school open and where will it be located?” The first question is easy to answer. As the Tassajara Prep banners over our booth proclaim, we expect the school to open in Fall 2012, most likely just for 9th grade the first year.
The question of where the school will be located is not an easy one to give a satisfying answer to at this stage of the process. We are still working on our petition. We want to obtain everyone’s input at our upcoming town hall meetings before we finalize the petition and submit it to the Dublin Unified School District, so that our petition reflects the needs of the community. After the petition has been submitted, it could take months before it is approved. Once the petition is approved, the school district will notify us on how they will provide a facility for Tassajara Prep. Until then, we probably will not know where our initial facility will be.
Once we have an approved charter petition in hand, we can start working with the city and land owners to identify a site for Tassajara Prep’s permanent location. After the site has been identified, we can start work on obtaining the land and financing the construction of the new school. The most we can legally say at this point is that our long-term plan is to build Tassajara Prep in east Dublin. Anything more specific than that is just conjecture right now.
We want to thank everyone for their opinions on and interest in Tassajara Prep – even those based on misinformation. We encourage everyone to attend our town hall meetings, where input from stakeholders will be gathered and a great deal of the speculation and misinformation relating to the plans for Tassajara Preparatory High School will be addressed and clarified.
Finally, we were very pleased to see that many visitors to our booth today had engaging conversations with Tara Aderman. For those who don’t yet know Tara, she is the Principal of Livermore Valley Charter School and brings a wealth of teaching and administration expertise to our team. Although Tara will not be available on Sunday, we will again be joined all day by Bill Batchelor, another key member of our team who is also Chief Operating Officer of Livermore Valley Charter School and an expert on school operations, funding & financial management.
We look forward to meeting many more of you tomorrow at another exciting (and hot) Day on the Glen.
