A battle between two North County school districts for where their boundary should be goes to the state.

In the fall of 2019, eight residents of Hidden Canyon Ranch, just off of Crazy Horse Canyon Road, petitioned the Monterey County Office of Education to transfer 13 parcels of land from North Monterey County Unified School District to Lagunita Elementary School District. On face value, the petitioners were just cementing what they already knew about their neighborhood: kids from Hidden Canyon attend Lagunita Elementary School.

The change would end the practice of inter-district transfers by parents in Hidden Canyon Ranch, who moved their children out of Prunedale Elementary School, around 7.5 miles away, and instead enrolled them into Lagunita Elementary School, less than two miles away, the reasoning went.

“[The petitioners] are part of the community and were divided by this arbitrary line,” Lagunita Superintendent Daniel Stonebloom says. “Ideally, this process shouldn’t have happened and the boundaries would have redrawn around when the development was made.”

The months-long process seemed to culminate on Jan. 13, when the MCOE board of education voted 7-0 to approve the petition.

But a resolution is likely 18 months out. On Feb. 12, NMCUSD appealed the county board’s decision to the California Department of Education, and a determination is estimated to take at least that long, and possibly up to three years.

NMCUSD Superintendent Kari Yeater understands the petitioners’ motives. “These things get political,” she says. “Parents want influence over their local schools.” But NMCUSD board members noted these 13 parcels could, in the future, affect everything from district revenue to the diversity of their campuses. Shifting district lines has affected NMCUSD before, such as when Monterey Peninsula Unified School District claimed Armstrong Ranch within its boundaries, before Yeater’s tenure. “At what point do we say this is enough?” she says.

County board members say they heard those concerns, voting based on a list of nine criteria addressing everything from taxes to enrollment and community identity. Many of those votes on each criterion weren’t unanimous. However, the deciding final vote – which asks if the petition meets all criteria – is effectively a yes or no question.

“Think of [MCOE] as the gatekeepers,” board member John McPherson says, noting some of the criteria did create “gray areas.” “The short answer is, all the criteria were met.”

Board member Mary Claypool notes the gray areas, such as one criterion on community identity. “It wasn’t clear to me the boundaries did much to affect the [Lagunita] community and what the significant impacts were in the last 25 years,” she says.

Stonebloom says the dispute is wearing on both school districts’ resources. “It’s really too bad that two districts are spending a great deal of time and money on eight signatures and to further the impact to the school budget in a costly appeal,” he says.

NMCUSD had stated all along that if approved, they would dispute the change of district boundaries, and their final step was to file the appeal. Now, it’s in the state’s hands. “At this point, we’re just waiting,” Yeater says.