UPPER LAKE, Calif. – Upper Lake has, for some time, been a two-school-district town, but that could be about to change.
At separate meetings on Wednesday night, the boards of trustees for the Upper Lake Union Elementary School District and the Upper Lake High District voted unanimously to begin the process of studying the feasibility of unification.
Valerie Gardner, principal and superintendent of Upper Lake Elementary – which covers the elementary and middle schools – and Patrick Iaccino, principal and superintendent of Upper Lake High, took the matters to their boards for consideration.
At the Upper Lake High School Board meeting Wednesday night, the board quickly took the unanimous vote.
“That's the reason I ran for the school board,” said Trustee Richard Swaney before the vote was taken.
The high school board's student member, Christian McMilin, also gave her support to the item.
Iaccino said he and Gardner now will sit down and discuss next steps, decide if the required criteria for unifying are in place and begin to gather the information needed to decide whether the move makes sense.
That research is expected to cover potential costs for the process as well as possible savings.
Unifying some or all of the county's seven school districts has been considered at various times over the last several years.
In 2009, the Board of Supervisors created a committee that worked with the Lake County Office of Education to explore the issue. In October of that year, the committee released a 53-page report that considered the possible savings and costs.
The matter also was discussed during a December 2009 joint meeting of the Board of Supervisors and the Lake County Board of Education.
At that time, the agreement was to focus on cooperation and ways to share and extend resources, which included studying joint purchasing and sharing of transportation services.
In the fall of 2011, the Lake County Office of Education presented the districts with a report illustrating potential savings if shared transportation services were pursued, as Lake County News has reported.
Beyond those steps, however, no actions have been taken toward studying or pursuing a unification action until now.
If the Upper Lake unification effort moves forward, the Lake County Office of Education and the California Department of Education will need to review the process, Iaccino said.
The state's guidelines on district reorganization explain that such actions can be initiated by petitions from registered voters, local agencies or by the majority of the governing boards of the schools involved.
The process calls for a review by the county superintendent of schools, notice to the Local Agency Formation Commission, public hearings with 10 days' advance notice required and State Board of Education approval.
State guidelines say that an election isn't necessary if the governing boards of all affected districts consent to the reorganization.
With it being so early in the process, Iaccino didn't have a specific timeline for next steps.
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