How to get your kids into Cupertino Unified School District (CUSD)
One of the reasons the Bay Area is so successful is that we are always pushing the envelope of innovation. Our amazing minds have this amazing ability to take common things and innovate the crap out of them, dramatically changing them. If you live anywhere else, you’ll just have the same ol’ same ol’ year after year, and be boring.
Let’s look at how Silicon Valley has pushed the envelope and truly innovated in the design of enrolling your kids into the local public school:
How to get your kids into a good school in California – camp for days, punch out others, voluntary mandatory donations [Burbed.com]
madhaus aka guitar hero Says:
June 4th, 2008 at 4:49 pmHow to get your kid into Cupertino Unified School District
If you live in CUSD borders:
1. Go to your neighborhood school during enrollment week, usually early February. District website has attendance area map and address finder.
2. Bring PG&E bill, birth certificate of kid, other ID
3. Child must be 5 by December 2nd of that year if enrolling in kindergarten.
4. To enroll in another neighborhood school or alternative program, tell enrollment person and get “lottery ticket” plus enrollment form.
5. Go to alternative school or other neighborhood school during alternative enrollment week, bring ticket and form to sign up. Some alternative schools have additional requirements to enroll. You should call the school well before enrollment to find out what they are so you can meet them.
6. Lottery is held at school district office. You can attend but what you see is meaningless. School by school, they call a bunch of names by picking them out of a hat and numbering them. But students with enrolled siblings are given preference, and you don’t know how many spots there are for each grade, so your number isn’t that useful. A kid with a sibling with #799 is ahead of another #1 and no sibling. Just wait for a letter from the school within 1-2 months.If you want your kid to go to the intense homework factory with perfect scores on the API, there will be 700 other families trying too. Very few will make it due to sibling preference.
If you missed enrollment week:
Follow same procedure, knowing you are behind everyone who enrolled when they were supposed to. Schools are closed for 6 weeks in summer, you may have to wait until August to enroll, or call school district office.
This means your child may have to attend overflow school instead of regular neighborhood school. And this is why everyone enrolls the first day of enrollment week, first thing in the morning.
There is no transit provided to any CUSD school unless your child goes to a special education program.
If you do not live in CUSD and wish to have child attend:
1. One alternative school takes out of district kids, but makes it very tough. They will not let you know if you’re in until first day of school, since district residents always leapfrog you. None of the regular schools will take out of district, though.
Wow. Seriously. Is there any wonder how Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs ended up creating the amazingly and devastatingly innovative Apple? (we’ll ignore most of the late 80′s to early 90′s)
Keep on taking ordinary things and innovating on them Silicon Valley. Let’s see some more innovation! How can we take school enrollment to the next level?
(For you folks not lucky enough to live in the Bay Area, how do you enroll your kids? Do you have to camp outside for a few days?)
June 8th, 2008 at 11:31 am
<i.How can we take school enrollment to the next level?
———-
I will start a camper agency which will reserve place in line thru night. I will get contract from parents for $1000. Then I will use some homeless or illegal immigrant to camp out in front of school. Next morning the parent will arrive and take the place in line. I will give the homeless guy $20. Rest is mine.
June 8th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Ah, but CUSD you don’t have to camp in line, unless you want to be one of the first few people to register and then not be late to work.
Given that Palo Alto was sending people outside the school district (and still asking for donations on top of it!), I wonder if your camper agency has already been implemented. Also I’d pay $20 plus 2 bottles of Thunderbird so they can keep warm all night.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
>>Given that Palo Alto was sending people outside the school district (and still asking for donations on top of it!)
Palo Alto actually offers their residents a choice of schools. A colleague of mine turned down their neighborhood school in PA to attend one of the “choice schools”, Hoover. If you look it up (http://www.greatschools.net/school/rating.page?id=5613&state=CA), you can see that it has an API score of 985, and a perfect “10″ rating throughout.
Speaking of camping, did you know that Palo Alto has a park that is open to residents of the city only?
http://www.city.palo-alto.ca.us/depts/csd/parks_and_open_space/preserves_and_open_spaces/foothills_park.asp
June 8th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
I wonder if your camper agency has already been implemented.
———-
In that case I need to patent my idea soon, so that I can get 25% royalty on their business.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:31 am
“Speaking of camping, did you know that Palo Alto has a park that is open to residents of the city only?”
How quaint. Oh, wait, quaint wasn’t the word I was looking for – it’s disgusting, that’s it, disgusting.
June 9th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I agree Lionel, it is completely disgusting.
Only PA residents, and their accompanied guests, can enter the park.
Completely ludicrous! As a PA resident, I cannot understand why guests should be allowed in just because they are “accompanied”. The mind boggles.
This area really is going to the dogs
-zanon
June 9th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Are they planning barbed fence around city of Palo Alto too? How about installing checkpost on every street and freeway exit entering Palo Alto? That would be sexy!
June 9th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Palo Alto: The Bay Area’s Green Zone.
June 9th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Hmmm. That means just barbed fence is not enough! They need blast wall and concrete road blockades. And they should replace PAPD with Blackwater.
June 9th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I think you are referring to Foothill Park – which I believe Palo Alto bought in the 50s or 60s. At the time Palo Alto asked other surrounding communities to pitch in to buy the land and keep it as a park, but they refused, so Palo Alto bought it and decided to only let Palo Altans in since they were the ones paying for the park.
If you read the Palo Alto police stats, a border fence keeping EPA residents out would be really useful. Lets just say that they typical PA crime suspect would feel right at home in EPA.
June 9th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Isn’t too ridiculous to hold the grudge of 1950s in 21st century? In any case, I don’t see any point of not allowing residents from other cities when the decisions for not buying it was taken by a few officials in neighbor cities.
June 9th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Fine, let Palo Alto keep Foothill Park. In Sunnyvale, we have… uh… er… well, we used to have a mall downtown, but they tore it up. We could have a park like Foothill except… well, you know, we don’t have any foothills in Sunnyvale so that makes it kind of challenging. Well, there’s the statue of the guy eating lunch at the library. And we have some nice parks but they let absolutely anybody, even real estate agents come and use them.
June 9th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Pralay,
As I explained to Bob previously, you don’t get something for nothing. This is not a socialist state. For example, they won’t let your kid play at YMCA unless you contributed membership dues. It’s not about a grudge at all.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
http://www.redwoodcitydailynews.com/article/2007-12-19-12-19-07-letters
“An editorial and a letter in last Sunday’s Daily News lament the lack of access to Palo Alto’s Foothills Park by nonresidents. That was true three years ago but no more. Now anybody is welcome to hike into and through the park. We can enter from both below, from Arastradero Preserve along Arastradero Creek Trail, and above, from Los Trancos Open Space Preserve, where a newly cut trail connects Page Mill Trail to Foothills Park.”
I have no idea whether this information is true though.
The park was bought in 1959 for about $1,300,000 by the way (http://www.westegg.com/inflation).
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/08.08.02/summer5-0232.html
June 10th, 2008 at 12:21 am
[...] the nation and world through innovation. We invented the PC. We invented Internet. We re-invented how to enroll your children to school. And now, we invent the $5 a gallon [...]
June 10th, 2008 at 9:46 am
“As I explained to Bob previously, you don’t get something for nothing. This is not a socialist state.”
Let me translate: “I’m a complete elitist jackass who thinks that parks should be available only to families who live in my hyper expensive area.” What unadulterated horsehit, RE. Parks are for citizens; they’re not country clubs. If a private entity wishes to buy a plot of land and exclude people beneath their breeding, than fine, I’d refer them to be out of my sight anyway. But this is public land. Why should children born outside of Palo Alto be excluded? According to your limited political ideology, why should there be public anything? All roads should be toll roads, all schools should be private, all parks should be private? I’m a big fan of the quote, “a society is judged by how it treats the least amongst them”. Apparently you’re not.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:00 am
The idea of a private public park in this area is kind of silly anyway, seeing as there are countless parks, hiking trails, and other natural attractions that can just as easily be accessed for free. What would people gain from being around only those that lived in their area? Frankly, I tend to go to parks to get away from th e daily drudgery anyhow- including the people I live around.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Frankly, I’m not sure how any of you have time to go to parks. Aren’t you spending all your time developing facebook/iphone apps, contributing to UGC sites, and doing everything Web 2.0, in addition to working 12 hour days?
You slackers.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Yes, you do have a point Burbed.In fact, you just gave me a fantastic new idea: Park 2.0, where only people that work for tech startups can visit. Take that, PA snobs! oh… wait- everyone in Palo Alto works in tech, so scrap that idea.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Lionel,
For the record, I’m more of a city type person, and I hardly make use of national parks, so I don’t have a personal interest one way or the other.
On this issue, the point here is that this is not “public” land. The land is is private to Palo Alto residents only, just like the Los Altos Country Club or YMCA is available only to its members.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
RE, imagine what a wonderful country this would be if everyone were as exclusionary as PA residents. What astounds me is that you can’t see anything wrong with it. I’m getting to thing you’re not real; you’re merely an annoying, elitist, uptight creation of burbed, designed specifically to create heated threads.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Lionel, this is exactly why I’ve asked you several times to stop feeding it.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
ha ha! That’s be funny if RE was actually Burbed! I recall this radio show on the AM dial. There was a guy named Phil Hendrie who could imitate hundreds of voices. The show was basically him pretending that someone was calling the show and talking about some crazy thing. One was about a preacher who was scared of vampires and planned on keeping a gun full of silver bullets on his nightstand. Of course it was him doing the voive of the caller, but people called in all the time to argue with him ( and his “caller”) The funny part was that he would then argue with whoever he was imitating! I just about peed my pants a few times listening. Too bad the show went off the air.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
I actually thought RE was burbed for a while, because RE generates so much debate, without him this blog would be a lot less interesting. But as far as RE being a troll…. really people, come on. I am an investor in real estate and as an investor I need to look at the cold hard return on some of the houses posted here, and really RE is actually closer to the FACTS than many of you. Case in point, the recent burbed post today of a PA shack on alma st for 895K- this sold in June 06 for 788K. If they get the asking price for the Alma st house (and it may go over) this represents a 107K gain – not bad- over a period 6/06-6/08 when most think real estate crashed. if the prior owners of Alma put 10% down (78K, then lets add 15K for closing costs etc)- that 93K investment yielded a 100% return over 2 years. Certainly not the best RE investment ever but not bad. Had the Alma st buyers waited until Dec 06 to buy, it was a bit of a trough in RE, they could have made even more money (depending on whether anything was available in PA, then).
I know RE is predictable with his constant RE hype, but the rest of you have the same problem in the opposite direction, and there are MORE of you.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Just to be clear, I’m not Real Estater.
Question to WillowGlenner: As an investor, how do you know when to enter and when to exit? How do you know that what you are doing is more investing, and less speculating?
June 10th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Burbed, I doubt many here really think you are RE. I actually never really thought it either.
As to investing, well to be honest most investment is speculation when you really get down to it. But I try to find houses to buy whose comps are significantly lower than the surrounding area, and buy those. These can either be bank REOs or sometimes, a house is mispriced coming on the market and sits on the market for months, when really there is nothing wrong with the house it was just mispositioned by the sellers. Or sometimes houses in good areas don’t sell because the neighbors are bad- meaning there is a vacant house next door or a rental. I like to buy those, to cut down on risk but of course, there is always risk in anything.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
I second WillowGlenner about RE, as annoyingly amoral as he sounds, and even though he regularly sidesteps specific questions, he has his facts right more often than not, posts to recognize when his facts are wrong, and makes for delightful contrarian views. Now if he could reign in that coffee diet..
As for that PA park, I guess some people are rattled that a whole city can own access to nature rather than a group or an individual – but it’s really no different. As much as I dislike paying entrance fees to natural reserves, I dislike even more the rationale that it’s OK to have Palo Alto residents pay for the complete upkeep of a park that would be trashed by the same people who are not able to keep San Jose’s Kelly park clean, despite its entrance fee. The ideal solution would probably be a yearly membership plan for non-residents.
Herve – the access from Arastradero from the top of the PG&E line was not open last I checked – 2 years ago.
June 15th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
So Palo Altan’s are unhappy we didn’t want to help pay for a park in the hills adjacent to their city. Hmmm, we have lot of parks in our city that are completely free and all the tennis courts are open to all. Private clubs are by definition private, but cities are public entities by definition. Perhaps we should put up a sign baring access to any non-residents from cities with park resident usage restrictions. All in favor, say bad PA, bad PA.