Sebastopol Independent Charter School gets OK to build

Twenty-one years after its founding by a group of parents in search of a different education for their kids, the Waldorf-inspired Sebastopol Independent Charter School got the go-ahead to build a new, permanent campus on the north end of town.

Sonoma County supervisors unanimously approved the plan at their meeting Tuesday evening after a grueling, five-hour public hearing that had a standing-room-only crowd spilling into the lobby and overflowing into an extra room set up with a live feed of the meeting.

School Executive Officer Chris Topham said Wednesday he felt “about 20 pounds lighter” knowing the search for a permanent school site was over.

“I am very, very happy about having the future of the school secured,” he said. “There’s nothing scarier than having the Santa Rosa Charter School, which started the same year as we did, 1995, have to close because they didn’t have a campus. That is every charter school’s nightmare, and we have avoided that now.”

The Sebastopol school owns 20 acres for the new campus on Highway 116/Gravenstein Highway North at Mill Station Road, north of the O’Reilly Media campus.

The Sebastopol school, its 290 students divided between two locations, was informed last year it would have to vacate rented premises at Brook Haven Middle School, where about 100 children are in kindergarten through second grade. Brook Haven has since altered its plans for expansion, so the charter school students can remain on the grounds through the 2017-18 school year, Topham said.

The school never intended its current situation to be permanent, even though older students attend class in a downtown building owned by the school. Those students must walk several blocks to a public park for recess.

The land for the new campus is located just outside city limits in an area zoned for rural residential housing that allows for construction of a school.

But a contingent of neighbors and others in the community concerned about traffic, noise and the impact of student families crossing the West County Regional Trail to access the school created significant controversy around the plan, which was contingent on approvals by county supervisors.

Hurlbut Avenue resident Bruce Reading, who represented neighbors before the board, said via email after the board’s vote that opponents were “exploring our options,” including legal action.

“The neighbors are disappointed in the decision,” he said. “While we support the mission of the SCS (Sebastopol charter school), we continue to believe the project is an inappropriate land use for our rural neighborhood.”

The school community says the property instead could be used to build 10 homes, each with a legal second unit, in use 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while the school will be clustered on less than 10 acres and mainly will be in use during the day, Monday through Friday. Half the property will be left as undeveloped open space, gardens and orchards.

The supervisors’ approval also includes 16 pages of conditions that west county Supervisor Efren Carrillo, board chairman, said sufficiently mitigate concerns raised by neighbors.

“The project is a good project and deserves community support moving forward,” Carrillo said via a text message.

Topham said the school will have to wait until spring, when it’s dry, to begin grading the site and remodeling a 4,800-square-foot residence for offices and faculty work space. The classrooms will be in portable buildings for the foreseeable future, until permanent buildings are in place.

He said the earliest the school could move to the campus would be January 2018.

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.