The overwhelming positive response from festival attendees continued into our second day at Day on the Glen. We were so surprised by the number of parents that said they came to the festival just to hear more about the new high school. By the time Dublin Learning Corporation packed up our booth, we had collected a total of 30 completed “Intent to Enroll” forms and signed up 159 interested parents and residents for our mailing list. The delight and excitement expressed by everyone about Tassajara Prep was much more than we could have ever predicted. The whole town seems to be buzzing over what we are doing.

Dublin Learning Corporation noticed a significant difference between the parents who stopped by our booth on Saturday and those who stopped by on Sunday. While both groups of parents opened with the standard questions regarding the opening date of our new public high school and its location, parents who visited us on Sunday expressed more concern about their kids’ chances for getting into Tassajara Prep than Saturday’s parents. Parents have clearly noticed the resounding enthusiasm that the announcement of Tassajara Prep has been generating, and now some are becoming worried that the school may not have sufficient capacity for all of the students who will want to enroll.

Tassajara Prep will be a public high school fully committed to serving the racially and economically diverse student population throughout Dublin. Our goal is to offer every student the advantages of a comprehensive high school experience within a small neighborhood school environment. Given the tremendous buzz they have heard and the dense forest of pins on our map of residents who came by our booth to learn about Tassajara Prep, we at Dublin Learning Corporation completely understand the concerns of Sunday’s parents and will do our best to accommodate every student who wishes to attend Tassajara Prep. Over the next few weeks, Dublin Learning Corporation will be working very hard in preparation for our three public town hall meetings where we will solicit community input and feedback as we draft Tassajara Prep’s charter petition. Below are the dates and locations of these town hall meetings:

• 10/20/2009 – Dublin Library Community Room, 7PM
• 10/27/2009 – Civic Center Regional Meeting Room (located next to City Council Chambers at 100 Civic Plaza), 7PM
• 11/03/2009 – Dublin Library Community Room, 7PM

These town hall meetings will be the perfect opportunity for parents and community members to play key roles in planning the high school that everyone in Dublin would like Tassajara Prep to be. We look forward to seeing you there.

In addition to the many volunteers who helped make our appearance at this year’s Day on the Glen a success, Dublin Learning Corporation would like to thank Blush Organic Frozen Yogurt and Extreme Pizza Dublin for their generous gift card donations to our contest. We challenged everyone to guess the total number of traffic signals encountered on a ROUND-TRIP drive from Lorenzo Court in east Dublin to the Dublin High School parking lot on Brighton Drive via the route marked in RED on the map. This is the most direct route suggested by MapQuest. We received a total of 96 entries, and we will be announcing the winning entries on Tuesday, September 21 on the Tassajara Prep website and the Around Dublin Blog.

Finally, we at Dublin Learning Corporation would like to thank everyone who stopped by our booth and took the time to learn more about Dublin’s new public high school. Tassajara Prep’s debut could not have been the smashing success that it was without the outpouring of support from the community. We are especially grateful for the many passionate parents who pledged to volunteer and do whatever it takes to help bring school choice to everyone in Dublin, CA. The dawn of a brand new era for Dublin’s public schools has arrived.

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.

Please plan on visiting the Tassajara Prep booth at Dublin’s annual Day on the Glen festival September 19-20 at Emerald Glen Park. We will have games and prizes for young kids, information about our plans to open a brand new public high school in Dublin in Fall 2012, and resources available to answer any questions that you may have.