A proposal by Santa Clara County Supervisor Liz Kniss to use funds contributed to the county by Stanford University for a new bike bridge over Highway 101 in Palo Alto is facing resistance from the Stanford community, where residents and officials are urging the county to slow down and consider other alternatives for the funds.

The plan, which Kniss and Supervisor Dave Cortese unveiled Wednesday, May 16, calls for using $5 million in Stanford funds for the bike bridge at Adobe Creek and another $3 million to complete the Dumbarton link in the Bay Trail between Redwood City and Alviso. The money would come from a $10.34 fund that Stanford pledged to the county when it was applying for a General Use Permit (GUP) 11 years ago. The permit allowed Stanford to add up to 5 million square feet of construction to its campus. The $8 million recreation fund (which has since grown to $10.34 million because of interest) was intended to mitigate the loss of recreational opportunities that would result from the new construction.

But while Kniss maintained Wednesday that her proposals would boost recreational opportunities for Stanford students, residents and the wider community, members of the Stanford Campus Residential Leaseholders (SCRL) board of directors have other thoughts. The board, which is elected to represent the Stanford campus community, had its annual meeting last Wednesday night and Kniss' plan did not go down well with the board, said James Sweeney, the board's president.

Specifically, the board feels that the benefits of Kniss' proposed projects would provide little or no benefit to the campus residents, Sweeney said. Stanford had planned to use the funds to build a trail in San Mateo County but that plan fizzled in December, when the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to nix the idea.

The GUP specifies that if the trail proposal doesn't move forward, the funds would be used to reduce "the adverse effect on recreational opportunities for existing or new campus residents and facility users that will be caused by the housing and academic development approved by the GUP, which will reduce the availability of recreational facilities, while increasing the demand for such facilities."

Sweeney said he and the board believe that the projects proposed by Kniss fail to meet this criteria. Though they would provide benefits to the general population, they are too distant from Stanford's campus to get much use from the university community. Ideally, he said, the projects would benefit both Stanford and the public at large.

"We had a very strong negative reaction and we have not been able to identify anyone else who believes they'd have any benefit to them on the campus," Sweeney said, referring to the board's discussion of Kniss' proposals.

One proposal that the SCRL board supports is a plan to improve a trail along El Camino Real, between Stanford Shopping Center and Stanford Avenue and to enhance the existing trail along Stanford Avenue, which stops just short of the Stanford Dish. The proposal would stretch the trail to the Dish and to the newly completed S-1 trail on Page Mill Road.

University officials are also urging the Board of Supervisors to slow down. Though the board was scheduled to consider Kniss' proposals Tuesday morning, Stanford officials are calling for the board to continue the meeting to another date. Jean McCown, Stanford's vice president for communications, said Stanford has been waiting for the board to come up with a process for selecting a project that would be funded through Stanford's contributions.

Juana Briones Elementary School Principal Matthew Nagle announced Tuesday, May 15, he will leave the school at the end of the school year to work on projects in the Palo Alto school district central office.

Nagle, who is finishing his third year as principal of the 415-student K-5 campus, broke the news in an email to parents and staff Tuesday afternoon.

The announcement followed tensions at the school apparently precipitated by Nagle's controversial recommendation not to renew the contract of a popular school librarian. The dispute led other staff members, with support from a number of parents, to come forward with complaints, sources said.

In his e-mail, Nagle said he had "nothing but gratitude" for his three years as principal at the school.

"I know that the district will find another principal talented enough to lead this school into the next year and beyond."

Nagle was hired to lead Juana Briones in August 2009, replacing principal Michael O'Neill, who resigned in late July after two years at the school to take a job on the East Coast.

Nagle had been an elementary school principal for seven years, having previously served at Blackford Elementary School in San Jose and Marshall Lane Elementary School in Saratoga.

A revised plan to build a prominent "gateway" building at the downtown intersection of Alma Street and Lytton Avenue in Palo Alto will be the subject of a public hearing tonight.

The latest proposal is a scaled-down version of the original plan, which included a five-story building that exceeded the city's 50-foot height limit for new developments. If the City Council approves a "planned community" zone for the project at 355 Alma St. tonight, the new development would be four stories high and would consist mostly of office space, including an area for a nonprofit office that would be rented out at a subsidized rate.

The project, in its original five-story iteration, has already cleared the city's Architectural Review Board and its Planning and Transportation Commission. At its previous hearing on March 12, the City Council was generally sympathetic to the idea of allowing a large, dense office building to occupy a prominent spot near the downtown Caltrain station. But council members shared the concerns of residents from the adjacent Downtown North neighborhood who argued that the new development would exacerbate the area's parking problems.

In exchange for exceeding the city's zoning regulations, applicants Lund Smith, Boyd Smith, Scott Foster and Jim Baer are proposing an "in-lieu parking" fee of about $1.5 million and funding for a downtown parking study. The applicants' package of "public benefits" also includes $1.25 million for affordable housing; about 3,800 square feet of ground-floor retail; four electric-vehicle charging stations (two outside and two more in the underground garage); eight surface parking spaces available to the public and 16 more underground spaces that would be open to the public on nights and weekends; and various landscaping and road improvements.

The 90th annual May Fete Parade will be celebrated in Palo Alto Saturday, May 5, with the frivolous theme of "Palo Alto at Play." The parade -- featuring an array of group floats, musicians, martial-arts demonstrations and costumed characters -- will begin at 10 a.m. at the corner of University Avenue and Emerson Street.

Paraders will march down University and end at Heritage Park, culminating with a new May Fete Fair that will include children's activities, music and dance performances, food and more. The fair, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., is being sponsored by Peninsula Pediatric Dentistry, Mid Peninsula Orthodontics and Jefunira Camp, and hosted by the Palo Alto Recreation Foundation and the Kiwanis Club of Palo Alto.

"For 90 years Palo Altans have been celebrating the children and youth of our community and the flower-scented season of spring at the annual May Fete Parade; we know how to play and have fun," city officials stated in a press release.

Parade participants include the Palo Alto High School Viking Pep Band, Sparkles the Clown, All Star Kung Fu, Palo Alto Children's Theatre and Grand Marshal Bob Klein, among many others.

Automobile enthusiasts can stop by the Museum of American Heritage (across the street from Heritage Park) from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. for the museum's "Vintage Vehicle and Family Fun Day," which will include children's activities and a showcase of vintage vehicles.

More information about the May Fete Parade is available at www.cityofpaloalto.org/recreation.

In Palo Alto's high-flying high schools, it's crowded at the top.

So many students earn stellar grade-point averages that the school district years ago quit reporting a student's class rank to colleges.

Beginning next year, for similar reasons, the district will stop reporting a student's decile ranking -- that is, the student's standing on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the highest, when compared with classmates.

With the top decile bottoming out at 3.947 GPA, school officials decided that decile sorting harms more students than it helps.

A very respectable 3.55 GPA, for example, puts a Palo Alto student squarely in the middle -- the fifth decile. A 3.0 relegates the student to decile eight.

"Our 'twos' would be 'ones' in most other places," said Director of Secondary Education Michael Milliken.

Getting ranked below the second decile is "not helpful to students" -- particularly when that same student would rise to the top in most other school populations.

And students in Palo Alto's top decile "have such strong academic profiles that they speak for themselves," Milliken said.

College admissions officers are under pressure to select applicants from top deciles because of college-ranking systems like that of U.S. News & World Report, , Milliken said.

"A lot of these colleges want kids stacked up one to 10 so they can scoop off the top two. Have we helped our kids by putting them into these bins?

"I don't want to invoke Lake Wobegon analogies, but we have an incredibly strong population of students," he said.

More than 24 percent of current high school seniors, for example, were recognized as National Merit Semifinalists or Commended Scholars -- placing them in the top 3 percent of students nationally based on their scores on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test.

And SAT data shows that students ranking in Palo Alto's 25th percentile -- with a combined score of 1,740 -- would rise to the 75th percentile if compared against seniors across California or across the nation.

The Palo Alto City Council kicked off a community discussion on the fate of Cubberley Community Center Monday when members backed a set of principles to guide the discussion.

The principles will also be considered by the Board of Education as the two bodies contemplate the possible joint use of the 35-acre site in the future.

In the decades since Cubberley High School closed in 1979 due to falling enrollment, the school district has rented the campus to the City of Palo Alto for use as a community center, garnering about $7 million a year in lease revenue for schools.

That lease is up for renewal in 2014 but, this time, school officials have indicated they may need to take back at least part of the campus because of rising school enrollment, particularly in the southern part of town.

A San Francisco architect has drawn several "conceptual plans" for a future Cubberley, several of them showing shared use between schools and community groups.

Officials stressed those sketches are nothing more than informal concepts to see whether multiple interests could be accommodated in the 35-acre space, eight acres of which is owned by the city.

The guiding principles and concept plans will be discussed Friday in a meeting of a Cubberley "policy advisory committee" on Cubberley, consisting of three City Council members and two school board members. The Cubberley discussion also will be augmented by a "community advisory committee" consisting of representatives of more than 20 community groups.

Children and parents at Fairmeadow School are wondering why a beloved tree, which had been fenced for protection during a school construction project, was cut down over spring break.

School officials, who ordered the tree removed despite construction plans directing that it be saved, say they also are "very sad the tree came down" but insist there was no other choice once an arborist reported it was unsafe.

The half-century-old double-trunk redwood tree sat at the edge of Fairmeadow's grassy play yard, next to the elementary school's border with Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School.

Its shade and crooked, gnarly base made it a popular spot for "fairy play," said parent Ruth Gordon, whose two children went through the school.

"They created their own little world in there," she said.

Gordon, a landscape architect, sat on Fairmeadow's parent-staff committee that spent more than a year refining modernization and construction plans for the school.

Those plans include a new, eight-classroom, two-story building now being laid out in the vicinity of the tree. The new building, designed by San Francisco architect Lisa Gelfand, is slated to be occupied by fourth- and fifth-graders in spring 2013.

Committee members discussed the tree and -- both sides agree -- plans called for it to be preserved, and protected during construction.

"The two-story building was going to have that tree as a backdrop, and the second story would've looked into the tree," Gordon said.

"I talked to the architect about it and said it's a really nice nestling of the new building. Another benefit of the tree was it was going to screen the looming, two-story building from JLS," she said.

Gordon said kids and parents were astounded to return from spring break and find the tree gone and its stump already ground.

"I still can't believe it," she said.

Palo Alto would build three new schools at Cubberley Community Center as part of a new concept that top city and school officials unveiled late Thursday, April 5.

The proposal, which the City Council is set to discuss Monday night, April 9, includes four concepts that a committee of top city and school officials have been considering since late last year. All four concepts include a new elementary school at 525 San Antonio Road, site of a recently closed day care center (the school district purchased the site last year).

The new plans also call for a middle school and a small high school, which would accommodate 600 and 500 students, respectively. While in the first option, the middle and high schools would stand alone, the other three options call for land swaps and shared uses between the city and the schools of gym, theater and classroom spaces.

A new report from Deputy City Manager Steve Emslie aims to establish the parameters for one of the most complex ongoing discussions between the Palo Alto Unified School District, which owns 27 acres of Cubberley, and the city, which owns 8 acres. The school district leases its space to the city under an agreement that is set to expire in December 2014.

Both sides have stressed the critical importance of Cubberley, a bustling but run-down center at 4000 Middlefield Road that currently includes a Foothill College campus and an eclectic mix of gyms, athletic fields, day care facilities and artist studios. Emslie's report calls it "a significant element of the City's complete infrastructure needs," while school officials see it as crucial to accommodating the district's surge in student population, particularly in south Palo Alto.

At the same time, both sides acknowledge that the center's dilapidated condition will require expensive upgrades. The new report pegs the cost of ongoing maintenance and anticipated capital improvements at $10 million over the next four years. The high costs of upgrading Cubberley were a major factor behind a recent recommendation to the city from the specially appointed Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Commission to terminate the lease.

The city and the school district are trying to reach a consensus by the end of this year about whether to renew the Cubberley lease. They plan to spend much of 2013 discussing the details of the potential lease renewal. In addition to discussing the new concept plans, the council will consider Monday approving a new advisory committee composed of stakeholders to work with the two sides on a solution.

This "Community Advisory Committee" was appointed by City Manager James Keene and includes former mayors Lanie Wheeler and Mike Cobb, various Cubberley tenants, PTA representatives, neighborhood leaders and local commissioners. The group will advise another new committee -- the "Policy Advisory Committee" -- which will include members from the council and the school board. Both groups are scheduled to kick off discussions this summer.

So far, most of the discussions have occurred at the top levels of the city and school district. In the past three months, Keene, Superintendent Kevin Skelly and architects from the group Gelfand Architects have been considering the district's needs and possible ways to accommodate them. The new concept plans, which the council will look at Monday, are the first publicly released byproduct of these discussions.

"The preliminary options developed jointly with PAUSD and their architect should be considered conceptual drafts intended to present alternatives for subsequent discussions," the report states. "The options only provide some high level detail as to a foundation and starting point for the Cubberley vision process."

The council will also consider Monday a set of "guiding principles" relating to the Cubberley discussion. These include a commitment to transparency; an agreement for the city and the school district to equally share the planning and architectural costs; and consideration of neighborhood concerns and transportation issues in discussions.

The proposed principles also acknowledge the importance of keeping recreational facilities and community uses at Cubberley. Many of the center's users, including day care providers, artists and dancers, attended council meetings last year and urged city leaders to retain space to meet their needs.

"The city types of programs offered by the City and its contractors and subtenants at Cubberley enrich the community and should be preserved and enhanced wherever possible," the proposed principles state.