As residents of the Almaden Valley neighborhood, we are strongly opposed to San Jose Unified School District’s consideration of relocating Leland High School and Bret Harte Middle School in order to build low cost employee housing units.  The Leland/Bret Harte site is a very bad option for the following reasons:

• Leland and Bret Harte are neighborhood schools, conveniently located central to Almaden Valley.  The proposed new school locations would be at the very southern edge of Almaden and a much less convenient location.
• The proposed new school location would cause a safety issue for students attempting to walk to school.
• The only path into and out of the proposed location is Almaden Expressway, which is a one lane road leading into the proposed location.  This will cause huge amounts of traffic congestion.
• Tearing down these existing top-notch schools just to rebuild them in another location is a huge unnecessary cost and a waste of taxpayer money.
• The number of houses that could be built consistent with this low-density neighborhood would be very small, and cost would be extremely high.

We request that you immediately remove Leland/Bret Harte from the list of potential sites for this project.