Phillips Brooks School

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The Phillips Brooks School is an independent, coeducational, preschool-grade 5 day school located in Menlo Park, California. The school is commonly known as PBS and was founded in 1978 by a group of teachers and administrators who split off from the nearby Trinity School. The enrollment of PBS is 270 students.

Admission to PBS is highly competitive due to the small class size and excellent reputation of the school. The school has the smallest class sizes of any school of its kind in the area.

Phillips Brook School has actively participated in efforts to make classrooms more attuned to the needs of students^[1]^[2], including a focus on identifying the unique ways in which each child learns.^[3]

1 Controversy
- 1.1 Woodside campus plan
- 1.2 Destruction of frog habitat
2 References
3 External links

[edit] Controversy

[edit] Woodside campus plan

The school had purchased a 92-acre lot in Woodside, California along Interstate 280 that it planned to redevelop into a second campus. Environmentalists expressed concern that the school's plans would result in the loss of 1,000 oak trees.^[4] Discord in the community regarding the school's development plans were in a major issue in the 2001 Woodside Town Council elections.^[5] The school's controversial plan was opposed and ultimately blocked by that city's government. As reported in the California newspaper The Almanac:

After hours of meetings, untold thousands of dollars and enough paperwork to fell a small forest, Phillips Brooks School's controversial plan to build a campus in Woodside came to an anticlimactic finale last week when school officials decided to pull the plug on the project at a board meeting....it was a dispute over the wording of open space agreements between the school and the town that reversed the divided Planning Commission's initial support of the Phillips Brooks project. School officials balked over the town's open space easement language, saying it was too restrictive and would make building and operating the campus unfeasible. Town staff countered that Phillips Brooks' easement language was too full of loopholes and would not protect areas of pristine open space. Ultimately, Commissioner K.C. Kelley, the swing vote, withdrew her support for the project, declaring that the easements the school were offering "ain't open space." The project was denied on a 4-3 vote. ^[6]

[edit] Destruction of frog habitat

According to a 2002 article in the environmental journal Green Footnotes:

The ink was hardly dry on the EIR (Environmental Impact Report) last June when the school, apparently at the specific request of the Woodside Fire Department, mowed a 100-foot wide swath through the grasslands along the edges of the property. In direct contravention of the EIR mitigation measures for the frog, the school invaded the buffer zone and mowed right up next to the edge of the wetlands around the ponds. It is unknown whether any frogs were killed by this irresponsible mowing. There wasn't any investigation of the mowing until Committee for Green Foothills filed a complaint with the fish and wildlife agencies in July, and by then it was too late to look for dead frogs. However, under the Endangered Species Act, destroying habitat is also a violation of the law. ^[7]