K ehillah Jewish High School has finally landed a campus after an 18-month search in the South Bay. Its home will be the 51-classroom former Blackford High School in San Jose, which was designed to accommodate 1,800 students.
Administrators expect several dozen freshmen to populate Kehillah’s initial class in September. At first glance, it’s a little like storing a harmonica in a guitar case.
“There are a lot of colleges that are smaller than this,” said Len Lehmann, board vice president, of the 40-acre campus in northwest San Jose. The site features 117,000 square feet of indoor space. About 200 parents and prospective students toured the site on Sunday.
“What I like about it is it’s a high school. It feels like a high school and looks like a high school,” said Lehmann. “It’s got a track, a football field, a baseball diamond, tennis courts, two gyms, wood shops, metal shop, auto shop, a photo studio and darkroom. It’s an incredible facility for a private high school.”
Kehillah settled upon a three-year lease earlier this month with the Campbell Unified School District for roughly $1 million yearly.
The school — which hopes to eventually find a permanent home in the proposed Palo Alto Jewish campus within a few years — will occupy around 20 percent of the grounds in its first year, subleasing the remaining land.
“We’re charging all of our subtenants exactly what we have to pay, so we’re going to break even,” said the school’s president, Jacqueline Bocian. The site, she added, was roughly the 100th school looked at in a geographical swath ranging from Burlingame to San Jose.
“The only thing we’re paying for out of pocket is our own area of the campus and our portion of the common area. The cost is relatively small for a fabulously rich site full of science labs and fields. We’re only paying a tiny portion of the million; the rest is coming from the subtenants. Luck was on our side.”
Kehillah has tentatively filled the remainder of the campus with subtenants for the first two years of its three-year lease, Bocian said. Two of the larger tenants may be Los Gatos’ Yavneh Day School and the preschool of Addison-Penzak JCC of Silicon Valley, which are likely to be temporarily relocated to the Blackford campus for a year while the Jewish Federation of Greater San Jose campus undergoes construction starting in September.
“I think it’d be a great thing to have all of the schools together,” said Jon Friedenberg, the San Jose federation’s executive director. “I’m hopeful things will work out, and I think they will.”
The proposed yearlong relocation would bring approximately 300 elementary and preschool students onto the Blackford campus, and take up an additional 30 to 35 percent of the grounds.
The Mid-Peninsula Jewish Day School in Palo Alto is also considering a move to the new campus, according to Lehmann. Canyon Heights Academy, a small, startup elementary school, has already signed on.
Bocian describes the campus as situated “15 minutes from the center of our search range,” in the Palo Alto-Los Altos region. However, officials were unable to find an affordable, available campus in that region. They decided potential construction costs and unwilling landlords would make an office building or office park location unfeasible.
Kehillah had originally hoped to draw students from Burlingame to San Jose, but with the new location has received applications from as far afield as Santa Cruz. The school plans to offer free busing service from various points around the South Bay.
The massive Blackford campus last housed a full-time high school just over a decade ago, when a dearth of high school-age students in the area resulted in the school’s closure. Officials say the campus’ ready-to-use condition is ideal for Kehillah’s purposes.
“We were looking at buying land and developing our own campus from the get-go, but that’s very expensive,” said Lehmann. “We’d prefer to devote our early resources into academia and establish a reputation. We’d like to prove ourselves to the community before we begin to spend.”
With its top priority of obtaining a campus out of the way, school officials say they can turn their attention back to academia. Kehillah is involved in hiring its third teacher, and has received more than 20 applications from interested students.
“Applications are rolling in,” said principal and acting head of school Marion Peterson. She took over the latter title from Ron Reynolds after his departure last month in what was described as a “mutual decision.”
“We can accept as many [students] as meet our admissions criteria,” Peterson said.