Palo March 5, 2021 Alto Council set to debate Castilleja ...€¦ · 05/03/2021 · Page 6 •...

Palo Alto

Vol. XLII, Number 22 March 5, 2021

Council set to debate Castilleja expansion

Page 5

w w w.Pa l oA l t oOn l i n e .c om

Inside this issue: Palo Alto Adult School spring catalog

Upfront At Palo Alto stop, Newsom touts schools plan Page 5

Arts New public exhibits tackle pandemic blues Page 25

Living Well Podcast plumbs Alzheimer’s journey Page 28

• March 5, 2021 • Palo Alto Weekly • www.PaloAltoOnline.com

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UpfrontLocal news, information and analysis

Council set for Castilleja

debateHearings on school’s

expansion plan to start Monday

by Gennady Sheyner

When the Palo Alto City Council launches its review Monday of Cas-

tilleja School’s contentious plan to reconstruct its campus, it will kick off a process that will influence not just the Bryant Street institution but also the city’s process for evaluat-ing future major developments.

The school, which was founded in 1907, has been in the spotlight since 2016, when it submitted plans to modernize the campus. While the proposal has gone through nu-merous revisions since then, the passionate feelings on both sides of the debate remain the same. The school’s supporters say that Cas-tilleja’s redevelopment will enhance the institution and the broader com-munity. Opponents say the plans would burden the single-family residential neighborhood with more cars and noise.

In the months leading to the council’s March 8 hearing on Cas-tilleja, hundreds have submitted let-ters urging the city to support the school and advance the project.

“We must do all we can to pro-tect, preserve and further the mis-sion of this valuable community resource for our next generation of female leaders,” High Street resi-dents Dick and Anne Gould wrote in one such letter last week. “Cas-tilleja has shown how this can be done, while protecting our neigh-borhood and environment — the school’s leadership is to be com-mended for their ‘listening’ and for their efforts.”

(continued on page 8)

DEVELOPMENT

M ovie theaters, gyms and restaurants were allowed to reopen in Santa Clara

County as of Wednesday, after county officials announced that the region is returning to California’s less-restrictive red tier.

The announcement comes amid declining COVID-19 cases in the

county and a significant drop in hospitalizations, turning a corner on an explosive increase in cases over the winter. Santa Clara was one of seven counties in the state to join the red tier on March 3.

The change means that indoor dining can finally resume for the first time since November, and

gyms and fitness centers will be allowed to operate indoors at 10% capacity. Movie theaters, museums, zoos and aquariums are all allowed to open at 25% capacity.

Santa Clara County Health Of-ficer Dr. Sara Cody said it’s been just a few days shy of one year since she issued her first public health orders in March 2020 and that the county has since endured a “devastating” winter surge that claimed the lives of too many county residents. But with case

counts down and vaccinations providing a clear path to recovery, she said the county is prepared to ease public health restrictions.

“It’s been an extraordinarily long year for everyone,” she said. “We have and we will continue to do ev-erything that we can to safeguard the health of everyone living and working in our county.”

The last time Santa Clara County entered the red tier, many of the activities that were allowed under the state’s framework remained

banned in the county. Indoor din-ing, for example, was not allowed to resume until October.

That will not be the case this time. Cody said the relaxed public health rules largely align with the state, though she cautioned resi-dents against participating in risky activities.

“Please remember, just because the state’s framework may allow an activity, that doesn’t mean it’s

Movie theaters, gyms, restaurants among businesses that can reopen

by Kevin Forestieri, Ana B. Ibarra and Barbara Feder Ostrov

Santa Clara County re-enters public-health red tier


T he day after announcing legislation that would provide $6.6 billion to

incentivize school districts to resume in-person instruction, Gov. Gavin Newsom visited Barron Park Elementary School in Palo Alto, praising the dis-trict as a model that proves schools throughout the state can reopen safely.

Newsom said the new reopen-ing package, which legislators

approved on Thursday, coupled with declining hospitalizations, the state’s 2.3% positivity rate and increasing vaccine availability, particularly for teachers, should help more schools reopen safely.

Palo Alto Unified’s 12 elemen-tary schools, including Barron Park, have been open for hybrid learning since October, and sixth graders returned to school for the first time on Tuesday morning. With Santa Clara County moving

into the red tier on Wednesday, middle and high schoolers will be back in classrooms, starting next week, for the first time in nearly a year (though they’ll still be learn-ing on Zoom, but in a room with peers and a teacher).

The district anticipates that more than 5,000 of its 12,000 students, from kindergarteners to high school seniors, will be back on campuses next week, a major milestone for the district.

“Today we are really celebrat-ing success,” Newsom said of the district’s reopening. “We can do this. We can keep our kids safe.”

The new state legislation, SB 86 and AB 86, provides $2 bil-lion to school districts to support — though not mandate — the reopening of schools as part of a larger, $6.6-billion education funding package. The extra mon-ey is meant to encourage districts to bring teachers, students and staff back to campuses, and can be used for anything from per-sonal protective equipment and improving classroom ventilation to COVID-19 testing. School dis-tricts have until March 31 to re-open to tap into the full funding.

Newsom said the funding should help assuage teachers’ anxieties about returning to work

Governor visits Palo Alto school to champion new school reopening deal

Elected officials, district representatives call for in-person instructionby Elena Kadvany

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Gov. Gavin Newsom addresses reporters on new state legislation for the reopening of schools at Barron Park Elementary in Palo Alto on March 2.


EDUCATION


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Upfront

in person and also bolster school districts with fewer resources and in communities that have been hard hit by the coronavirus.

“Not every part of the state has the same resources as this district,” he said of Palo Alto Unified. “No one is naive about that.”

He said the state’s economic revival is dependent on reopen-ing schools, which allows parents to go back to work. He acknowl-edged that school closures have disproportionately affected work-ing parents and single mothers in particular. The bills include $4.6 billion for extended class time and summer school.

California is expected to receive 1.64 million COVID-19 vaccine doses in the coming weeks, New-som said. The state has set aside 75,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccines, or 10% of the total sup-ply, for teachers and is designating teacher vaccine days. Santa Clara County opened a new site Monday aimed at vaccinating education workers. Palo Alto Unified was se-lected this week for a priority vac-cination program for employees in partnership with the Santa Clara County Office of Education — not a requirement to return to work in person but “another level of support and safety for everyone involved,” Superintendent Don Austin said.

Austin thanked Newsom for his “clear direction to the state

of California that kids belong in schools” and for providing funding to make in-person learning happen safely.

Palo Alto Unified Board of Edu-cation President Shounak Dharap encouraged other school boards that are tackling the “gargantuan” task of reopening schools to priori-tize flexibility.

“You have to bend like a reed without breaking like a twig,” he said. “Districts have to be flexible ... because things are going to change.”

State Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, and Assemblyman Marc Ber-man, D-Menlo Park, also attended Tuesday’s press conference. They emphasized the importance of re-opening schools for students’ aca-demic and emotional wellbeing.

Becker, who recently called for the immediate vaccination of edu-cators in Santa Clara and San Ma-teo counties, said the state’s new reopening package “gives us hope” and “provides a pathway to get our kids back and restore some of their childhood.”

“Our kids can’t afford to lose more classroom time,” said Becker, who is himself a parent of two high school students. “We’re at risk of losing a generation of students to distance learning.”

Under the proposed legislation, April 1 starts a clock for districts to reopen and if they don’t, they lose 1% of their share of the money. If they fail to reopen by May 15, they forfeit all of the money.

“I’d like to think $2 billion in incentive grants to address their anxieties, the prioritization of vac-cinations and what’s at stake would drive a more aggressive narrative to give it a try and do it right,” New-som said. “With respect, I know it may be difficult to change the para-digm of thinking, but we have that capacity. Our experience and sci-ence dictate we can do this safely.”

Newsom said he won’t be order-ing schools to reopen in the fall and is hopeful that working to-gether will be more productive. He agreed with the Biden administra-tion’s prediction that eventually “an abundance of vaccines” will pave a path to five days a week of in-person school by the fall. (President Joe Biden announced this week that there would be enough doses of the vaccine for the entire adult population by the end of May.)

When asked about the fits and starts of reopening and the possi-bility of another lockdown, New-som said that with declining hos-pitalization rates and vaccinations ramping up, California is better prepared now to absorb a “modest surge.” He encouraged the public to “maintain the vigilance” and con-tinue to follow health precautions even as schools, restaurants and other businesses reopen.

Before speaking to the media, a masked Newsom visited a first-grade classroom, where he read “I Believe I Can” by Grace Byers to students, and a fifth-grade class-room, where one student explained, from behind a plexiglass divider at his desk, a math problem to the governor.

Staff Writer Elena Kadvany can be emailed at [email protected].

Reopening(continued from page 5)

Here for you. Or over there for you.In-person or virtual visits at

Peninsula Pediatric Medical Groupgenpeds.stanfordchildrens.org

CITY COUNCIL ... The council plans to consider revisions to the city’s “conditional use permit” thresholds and to hold the first of its two public hearings on Castilleja School’s proposal to reconstruct its campus, with the purpose of getting public comments before the council takes action on March 15. The virtual meeting will begin at 5 p.m. on Monday, March 8. Those wishing to participate by Zoom can do so by dialing 669-900-6833 and using Meeting ID: 362 027 238.

BOARD OF EDUCATION ... The school board will discuss school reopening, a new equity committee and student wellbeing, among other items. The virtual meeting will begin at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 9. The meeting will be broadcast on Cable TV Channel 28 and midpenmedia.org. Those wishing to participate by Zoom can do so by going to pausd.zoom.us/j/97888498129 or dialing 669-900-6833 and using Meeting ID: 949 9734 6242.

COUNCIL POLICY AND SERVICES COMMITTEE ... The committee plans to receive updates about the county’s behavior health program relating to emergency response; consider updates to the council’s procedures and protocols handbook; and get an update about the city’s recent work on race and equity, including police data collection. The virtual meeting will begin at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 9. Those wishing to participate by Zoom can do so by dialing 669-900-6833 and using Meeting ID: 946 1874 4621.

PLANNING AND TRANSPORTATION COMMISSION ... The commission plans to discuss the city’s objective standards for new developments and the latest alternatives for the North Ventura Coordinated Area Plan. The meeting will begin at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, March 10. Those wishing to participate by Zoom can do so by dialing 669-900-6833 and using Meeting ID: 981 2987 7431.

HUMAN RELATIONS COMMISSION ... The commission plans to make recommendations for the Community Development Block Grant allocations and for the Human Services Resource Allocation Process; and hear a presentation about upcoming Palo Alto Art Center exhibits. The meeting will begin at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 11. Those wishing to participate by Zoom can do so by dialing 669-900-6833 and using Meeting ID: 919 9454 8701.

Public AgendaA preview of Palo Alto government meetings next week


Upfront

Learn more at CastillejaReimagined.org

Aileen Lee • Nancy Tuck • Barbara Hazlett • Leannah Hunt • Linda Lovely • Bob Kocher • Susann Mirabella • Dana Fenwick • Catharine Garber • Megan Miller • Carrie Anderson • Mora Oommen • Greg Sands • David Chang • Bill Burch • Bonnie Rosenberg • Jeannine Marston • Cindy Traum • Tony Carrasco • Kathy Burch • Anne Taylor • Kate Li • Suman Gupta • Kathleen Foley-Hughes • Yair Blumenfeld • Jianming Yu • Anne Gould • Jane Gee • Harry Plant • Peggy McKee • Maya Blumenfeld • Nellis Freeman, Jr. • Gerry Marshall • Lisa Van Dusen • Mike Graglia • Michelle de Blank • Cathy Williams • Roger McCarthy • Kathryn Verwillow • Carin Rollins • Cindy Chen • Tom Kemp • Glowe Chang • Amy Rao • Leif King • Craig Ritchey • Wileta Burch • Bruce Gee • Anne Ritchie • John Rollins • Eduardo Llach • Theresia Gouw • Emil Lovely • Tom Cole • Lesley King • Patricia McGuigan • Barry Johnson • Karen Harwell • Parag Patel • Roy Wang • Anne Avis • Heidi Hopper • Dick Gould • Sarah Sands • Jennifer Lee • Anu Priyadarshi • Milind Gadekar • David Fisch • Rebecca Sales • Ray Dempsey • Mathews Cherian • Jennifer Ko • Azieb Nicodimos • Tenzin Dingpontsawa • Sajjad Jaffer • Beerud Sheth • Dr. Eva Xu • Pauline Bromberg • Stephanie Wansek • Nandini Cherian • Joel Brown • Mike Chen • Amanda Ross • Jenifer Turnbull • Victoria Dean • Yunfang Zheng • Mace McGinn • Diane Allen • Kalpesh Kapadia • Charles Stevens • Emily Wang • Chandra Gnanasambandam Family • Andy Lichtblau • Christine Tachner • Kathryn Hallsten, MD • Deborah Goldeen • Craig Allen • Gloria Hom • Sujata Kadambi • Yvette Maydan • Linda Williams • Steve Turnbull • Kyle Bordeau • GD Ramkumar • Natalie Tuck • Olivier Redon • Scott Kauffman • Yuko Watanabe • Laura Lauman • Jim Fitzgerald • Bilal Zuberi • Tina Tang • Cosmos Nicolaou • Guillermo Viveros • Dan Stober • Nipa Sheth • Lila Fitzgerald • Vivek Raghunathan • Mimi Lyons • Amanda Zeitlin • Bosung Kim • Carolyn Steele • Wyatt Ritchie • Kate Feinstein • Eugenie Van Wynen • Lian Bi • Nanci Kauffman • Donna Sheridan • Celine Teoh • Bharat Bhushan • Catherine Debs • Caixia Zhang • Tina Boussard • Diane Corrie-McIntyre • Stacy Mason • Yvette Bovee • Mahooya Dinda • Bill King • Blake Kavanaugh • Stephanie Norton • Dave Lyons • Irv Henderson • Olivia Viveros • Marie Oh Huber • Lydia Jett • Lilyana Prasetya • Gary Hammer • Rachel Cleary • Jarlon Tsang • Zac Zeitlin • Eugenie Paick • Stewart Raphael • Perry Meigs • Mary Liz McCurdy • Liza Hausman • Patty Boas • Joseph Haletky • Navin Budhiraja • Steven Nightingale • Leonard Ely III • Sonal Budhiraja • Larry Sullivan

• Monica Stone • Cindy Clarfield Hess • James Sheridan • Chuck Sieloff • Megan Hutchin • Tim Cain • Jonathan Manson • Nancy Ginsburg Ph.D. • Elaine Wood • Dr. Joel P. Friedman • John Hanna • Nancy Bischoff • Evelyne Nicolaou • Gloria Rothbaum • David Meng • Mary Rose • Min Wei • John Debs • Priyanki Gupta • David Hanabusa • James Bean • Sudhanshu Priyadarshi • Frank Yuan • April House • Ruth Oku-Ampofo • Irene Au • Michelle Cale • Trisha Suvari • Carol C. Friedman • Todd Kaye • Arunashree Bhamidipati • Marcela Millan • Heather Kenealy • Josh Thurston-Milgrom • Ann DeHovitz • Emily Sawtell • Jeff Chang • Helen MacKenzie • Jeff Hausman • Teresa Kelleher • Erik Carlson • Asma Rabbani • John Danner • David Ko • Don Stark • Ambika Pajjuri • Stacie Cheng • Patrick Heron • Annie Turner • David MacKenzie • Asim Hussain • Craig Taylor • Amy Asin • Steven Flanders • Rebecca Fox • John Bard • Yefei Peng • Roger Smith • Kristin Meier

• Michal Goldstein • Desola Amos • Greg Avis • Jochen Profit • William Barnett • Hwai Lin • Adam Tachner • Victoria Sullivan • Hila Goldstein • Gina Bianchini • Ashmeet Sidana • Rob Goldman • Lorraine Brown • Vijay Vusirikala • Namchul Kim • Michael Kieschnick • Mayma Raphael • Elana Manson • Carol Kenyon • Bryan Furlong • Frances Hall Kieschnick • Michele Grundmann • Carole Borie • Barry Asin • Jonathan Hoy • Patama Gur • Julie Huang • John Huber • James Witt • Gang Liu • Libby Heimark • Craig Heimark • Lucy Blake • Consuelo Beck-Sague • Mike Anderson • Jennifer Carolan • Lexin Li • Vania Fang • Carol Lamont • Meredith Pfeffer • Vidhya Thyagarajan • Eli Pasternak • Kurt Taylor • Norman Klivans • Anna Verwillow • Eric Dunn • Martin O’Malley • Cameron Turner • Shawn Carolan • Harvey Alcabes • Roy Maydan • Peter Levin • John Giannandrea • Kristin Goldman • Douglas Kerr • Barbara Stevens • Gloria Carlson • Saar Gur • Christine O’Sullivan • Jody Lieb • Xenia Hammer • Josée Band • Susan A. Dunn • Maureen Bard • Christina Gwin • Laura Stark • Jane Weng • Elizabeth O’Malley • Peter Deutsch • Karen Schilling-Gould • Esther Kim • Adrienne Lee • Bradley Horowitz • Lydia Callaghan • Patrick Burrows • Jane McConnell • Jayant Kadambi • Laura Hansen • Chungwha Park • Alice Mansell • Carolina Abbassi • Lama Rimawi • Steve Gouw • Kate Loomis Healy • Stacy Brown-Philpot • Guangwei Yuan • Sulev Suvari • Cathy Martin • Vanessa Anderson • Sophie Bromberg • Hayes Raffle • David Pfeffer

safe,” she said.What remains in place is the

county’s guidance that all activities should be moved outdoors when-ever possible and that residents should keep wearing masks regard-less of whether it’s required. Resi-dents also are asked to keep a safe

social distance from people they do not live with and to get vaccinated as soon as possible.

County Counsel James Wil-liams said residents are also ad-vised, though no longer required, to quarantine after traveling and that people are still being asked to avoid travel whenever possible.

County Supervisor Susan El-lenberg cautioned that the county is not “home free” just yet and that COVID-19 and its more virulent variants are still infect-ing people every day. But the re-duced deaths, lower test-positivi-ty rates and vaccine availability show that there is progress worth celebrating.

“We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she said.

State’s new COVID-19 vaccine system launches

State health leaders announced on Feb. 26 that Blue Shield would be taking over distribution of vac-cines in California as of this past Monday.

Blue Shield, one of the state’s largest health insurers, has been hired to streamline and manage the logistics of allocating vaccines to local health departments and other vaccine providers. In its role, Blue Shield will make recommen-dations to state health officials on how many doses should go to each county and which providers should get them.

All 58 counties are expected to become part of the distribution sys-tem by the end of March, starting with eight in the Central Valley plus Imperial and Riverside. Most Bay Area counties will be in the third and final wave.

Blue Shield CEO Paul Markov-ich said that its recommendations for how much to distribute doses to each county will be based on prior-ity groups in the state’s vaccination tiers as well as the state’s goals to provide equity for disadvantaged communities.

Earlier in February, Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged that the fragmented, county-by-county ap-proach was slow in getting vac-cines to the public. The state’s goal is to scale up to 4 million immuni-zations per week, up from the cur-rent 1.4 million per week.

“It’s a high stakes issue, and if something goes wrong, the blow-back to the Newsom administration would be severe,” said Democratic political consultant Steve Mavi-glio, who served as press secretary to former Gov. Gray Davis. “The governor has staked his fortunes on making this vaccination system work. He’s trying to find the best way to make this a success.”

What will the new system mean to Californians waiting for a vac-cination and sorting through con-fusing options? State officials have promised consistency, where eligi-bility looks the same in all counties and distribution moves at a similar pace throughout the state.

As counties move to the Blue

Shield system, myturn.ca.gov and 1-833-422-4255 will become the main routes for scheduling appointments.

California currently prioritizes health care workers, long-term care residents and staff, people 65 and older, educators, child care workers, food industry employees, farmworkers and first responders to receive inoculations. People with high-risk medical conditions such as cancer and heart disease will become eligible for vaccina-tion starting on March 15, bring-ing the total number of eligible Californians to between 17 mil-lion and 19 million.

About 8.2 million doses have been administered since COVID-19 vaccinations began in December. About 15% of all Californians have received at least one dose.

At a press conference on Feb. 26, Newsom said California would re-ceive 1.58 million doses this week.

That allocation is expected to grow when the single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine comes on line.

So far, Blue Shield has contract-ed with at least 30 providers who will be getting shots into arms. These include pharmacies, health systems and clinics, including Kai-ser Permanente, OptumServe and Adventist Health.

California’s deal with Blue Shield raised some eyebrows, but the state cited the company’s expe-rience in operations and logistics.

“Clearly Blue Shield (is) not starting from ground zero. They have the networks and the doctors,” Maviglio said.

Mountain View Voice Staff Writer Kevin Forestieri can be emailed at [email protected]. CalMatters reporters Ana B. Ibarra and Barbara Feder Ostrov can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

Red tier(continued from page 5)

What’s allowed nowSanta Clara County busi-

nesses returned to the less-restrictive red tier on Wednes-day, prompted by a decline in COVID-19 cases, hospitaliza-tions and deaths. That means indoor services can restart, with restrictions on how many customers can be inside at one time and following the standard social distancing precautions. Here’s what’s allowed now: • Restaurants at a maximum

of 25% capacity or 100 peo-ple, whichever is lower

• Retail and grocery stores at 50% capacity

• Gyms and fitness centers at 10% capacity

• Movie theaters at 25% capacity

• Indoor shopping malls at 50% capacity

• Museums, zoos and aquari-ums at 25% capacity

Source: Santa Clara County

City Council (March 1)Tenant relief: The council approved three months of rent relief for nonprofit tenants on city’s properties and to refer discussion of further tenant relief to its Policy and Services Committee. Yes: Burt, Cormack, DuBois, Filseth, Kou, Stone No: TanakaBudget: The council approved various budget adjustments, including the uses of $3.8 million from a reserve account to help close the gap in the fiscal year 2021 budget. Yes: UnanimousAudits: The council approved the city auditor’s risk assessment and annual audit plan. Yes: Unanimous

CityViewA round-up of Palo Alto government action this week


The project’s many opponents counter that the plan is both il-legal and insensitive to neighbor-hood concerns. They point to the school’s history of exceeding its enrollment cap — a transgression that prompted the city to issue a $265,000 fine in 2013 — and argue that its plan to bump up the number of students from 426 to 540 and to build a garage is incompatible with the character of the neighborhood. The plans, they contend, should be significantly scaled down and the new garage eliminated altogether.

“To allow this increase right now makes a mockery of city laws and regulations,” Mary Sylvester, who lives near Castilleja and who is a member of the group Preserve Neighborhood Quality of Life Now, told the council this week.

Both views will get plenty of airing in the next two weeks when the City Council is scheduled to hold hearings on what is easily this year’s most complex and divisive development project. But even as Castilleja continues to be lionized and demonized by its supporters and opponents, the council’s verdict may come down less to the passion-ate feelings on both sides and more to technical interpretations of am-biguous zoning laws.

Is the garage a garage?Among the most critical ques-

tions that the council will weigh is: Should the new underground structure be considered a garage? To a layman, the answer is clearly yes. Castilleja has referred to the subterranean facility as a garage in its plans, and the city’s documents, including the environmental analy-ses and the statement of findings, similarly use the term.

Yet when it comes to code, city staff determined that the subterra-nean facility with 78 parking spaces is in fact not a garage but rather a “basement.” That’s because the city’s zoning code defines a “ga-rage” as a “portion of a principal residential building or an accessory building to a residential use de-signed to be utilized for the park-ing or storage of one or more motor vehicles.” Because Castilleja is not a residence, the city’s planning and legal staff concluded that its garage is not, technically, a garage.

“Since these definitions relate to residential buildings and uses — they do not apply to the pro-posed parking facility for a non-residential use,” a new report from the Department of Planning and Environment states.

In explaining staff’s conclu-sion that the facility is a basement, Deputy City Attorney Albert Yang told the Planning and Transporta-tion Commission in September that basements are defined by code as structures that are at least 50% below ground. Thus, “this under-ground parking facility could qual-ify with that definition.”

“We believe it’s a reasonable interpretation of our code,” Yang said at the Sept. 9 meeting. “These

are areas where there is some gray area.”

The distinction between a “ga-rage” and a “basement” is a critical one for Castilleja. Under the city’s zoning code, underground garages are illegal in R-1 neighborhoods; basements are not. Garages also are counted in a project’s gross square footage; basements are not.

Thus, if the council rejects staff’s logic and concludes that Castilleja’s underground parking facility is in fact a garage, the school may be forced to either remove the struc-ture from its plans or scale down its expansion proposal.

Not everyone agrees with this in-terpretation. Critics of the Castilleja proposal and even some planning commissioners have characterized the staff interpretation as a major giveaway by the city to the school.

“How can a parking garage not be a parking garage?” Becky Sand-ers, co-chair of the umbrella group Palo Alto Neighborhoods, asked at a Nov. 4 hearing of the planning commission. “How can it not be included in the floor area when the zoning code clearly states that it’s included?”

The thorny question has already stymied the commission, which split 3-3 over the issue when it was reviewing the project in Oc-tober and November. While three commissioners — Bart Hecht-man, Michael Alcheck and Giselle Roohparvar — deferred to the city’s planning and legal staff, three of their colleagues — Ed Lauing, Doria Summa and Cari Templeton — couldn’t make the finding that supported staff’s interpretation.

Templeton, who otherwise sup-ported the Castilleja project, ob-served during the commission’s Nov. 18 discussion that the under-ground garage is “a big departure from what other properties in the area are allowed to do.” She also suggested that if the project goes through, the city will see more re-quests for underground facilities.

“We don’t want to see an inad-vertent side effect of abuse of this particular kind of structure,” Tem-pleton said.

Summa agreed.“I just can’t find anything in the

code that allows for the floor area of the parking garage not to be count-ed,” Summa said.

How many car trips?For critics of Castilleja’s redevel-

opment, it’s not just the new garage that’s the problem. It’s also the cars. Over the course of the proposal’s

long planning period, neighbors have complained that allowing the expansion would endanger bicy-clists on Bryant Street and create parking problems for neighbors whenever the school hosts major events.

Castilleja has maintained in its plans and its comment letters that it would adopt a more robust “trans-portation demand management” plan that would minimize the num-ber of vehicle trips to campus. As an assurance to neighbors, the city and the school agreed to stringent traffic-monitoring requirements. Under the proposed system, if the school were to exceed allowed traf-fic limits, it would have to freeze enrollment increases.

To Castilleja’s chagrin, the plan-ning commission decided on Nov. 18 that this would not be enough. Rather than adopt the school’s pro-posed measures, which the envi-ronmental analysis showed would result in “less than significant” traf-fic impacts, the commission voted to institute a more severe standard of “no net new trips.” While two commissioners, Alcheck and Hech-tman, argued that this standard is too rigid, five others supported the proposal from former Commission-er William Riggs, who proposed a “no net new trips” policy akin to what is currently in effect at Stan-ford University.

“We should hold them to the same standard that we hold Stan-ford to,” Riggs said at the Nov. 4 meeting.

The new standard would limit the school to no more than 1,198 aver-age daily vehicle trips to and from Castilleja, the number of trips that the environmental impact report estimated for the school’s current population of 426 students. Cas-tilleja would need to adopt more aggressive transportation measures if it wants to enroll 540 students.

Castilleja has argued that the commission’s recommendation — which would also commit the school to not exceeding 383 trips during the morning peak com-mute time — goes too far. School staff have pointed to their history of reducing traffic and to a recent analysis showing that the school’s expansion would not worsen area traffic. Its proposed transportation measures include providing transit passes, creating a “guaranteed ride home” program for those who don’t drive to school, off-site pick-up ar-eas and a bike-share program on campus.

During recent hearings, Cas-tilleja staff have also pointed to the

measures the school already has in place, including vans that shuttle to Caltrain stations and a policy that prohibits employees from driv-ing solo to work more than twice a week. Nanci Kauffman, head of Castilleja, told the planning com-mission on Oct. 28 that the policies have helped the school reduce its vehicle trips by 31%.

“I don’t know another employer in Palo Alto who has the same strin-gent requirement for employees,” Kauffman said.

Mindie Romanowsky, an attor-ney representing Castilleja, urged the commission in a Nov. 17 letter to reconsider and reject the “no net new trips” standard. Upholding it, she argued, “will equate to the city holding the school to an unreason-able and higher standard than the city would require of any other proj-ect and could serve to paralyze the school’s ability to use their property and to grow in a meaningful way.”

Two planning commissioners shared this view. Hechtman and Al-check both suggested that the city’s initial proposal — tying sufficient traffic management to allowed en-rollment expansion — would en-sure that traffic conditions will not deteriorate.

“The conditions create a frame-work with which the school would have to meet certain hurdles before they could continue to grow,” Al-check said.

The student dilemmaWhile most development deci-

sions are binary in nature, subject to either approval or denial, the Castilleja expansion presents the council with an unusually broad discretion with which to tinker. In considering a new conditional use permit for the school, for example, the council will have to weigh a number of questions that have al-ready generated significant debate: How many special events should the school be allowed to host? (The planning commission settled on 74 per year.) When should these events be allowed to take place? (No more than five on Saturday evening and none on Sunday, ac-cording to the proposal.) Should Castilleja be forced to modify its tree plan, which calls for removing 18 trees and planting 99? (City staff had concluded that the school’s tree-removal plan is legal, a finding that PNQLNow members dispute.)

But the central question loom-ing over the council as it prepares for the Castilleja hearings is: How many students should the school be allowed to have?

The school has been gradually decreasing its annual enrollment since 2013, when it was found to have exceeded the cap of 415 stu-dents by 8%, or 33 students. In 2020, the school was still overen-rolled, with 426 students. If its proj-ect is approved as proposed and the traffic conditions are met, it would be able to gradually ramp up enroll-ment to 540 students.

Castilleja staff have cited recent traffic studies that accommodating 540 students would not worsen traf-fic around the school.

“That was a number that we

derived primarily on the basis of both what serves the school pro-gram but also to be sure that we could maintain the promise of not having a traffic impact,” Kauffman said on Oct. 28.

But many neighbors, and some planning commissioners, believe 540 is too many. Lauing and Sum-ma both suggested that 450 may be a more reasonable number. Once Castilleja proves that it can manage that many students with no neigh-borhood disruptions, they argued, it can seek further increases.

Lauing suggested that limit-ing the enrollment number to 450 would minimize the risk that the project would worsen area traffic. If Castilleja’s traffic-mitigation strategies succeed, Castilleja should have no problem getting the city’s permission for additional increases, he said.

“I think given the risks now, the city needs a safety net,” Lauing said. “We know it’s easier to man-age TDM with a lower number of students because Castilleja is suc-cessfully doing that right now and I salute them for that. But it gets harder as enrollment increases.”

That view, however, has been rejected by both the city’s plan-ning staff and the majority of the planning commission, which sup-ported Castilleja’s ultimate enroll-ment of 540 students. Planning commission Vice Chair Giselle Roohparvar spoke for the majori-ty when she argued that the school should be allowed to go as high as it wants to on enrollment, pro-vided it can contain the impacts of its growth.

“I don’t think there is a problem with having 540 — or however many — students, as long as there’s no impact on traffic,” Roohparvar said at the Nov. 18 meeting. “And that can be managed.”

The council is expected to tackle the question of whether or not to approve an expansion to 540 stu-dents or to mandate a more gradu-ate growth plan on March 15, its second scheduled hearing on the Castilleja project. The first meeting, on March 8, is reserved largely for public comments.

Staff Writer Gennady Sheyner can be emailed at [email protected].

Castilleja(continued from page 5)

Upfront

Tune in to Palo Alto Weekly Online Town

Hall on Castilleja Thursday, March 11

7 - 8:30 p.m.Learn about the key issues that still separate supporters from opponents and the conditions of approval that the City Council will be considering as it decides on the Castilleja School redevelopment plan. The town hall will feature Nanci Kauffman, Castilleja Head of School; Andie Reed, a neighbor and leader of PNQLNow (Preserve Neighborhood Quality of Life Now); and Weekly journalists Gennady Sheyner and Jocelyn Dong. Register at PaloAltoOnline.com/castilleja

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The Palo Alto City Council will launch a review of Castilleja School’s expansion plans on Monday.


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995 Fictitious Name StatementTPT TEACHING AND COACHING FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT File No.: FBN672135 The following person (persons) is (are) doing business as: TPT Teaching and Coaching, located at 239 Montclair Ave. #6, San Jose, CA 95116, Santa Clara County. This business is owned by: An Individual. The name and residence address of the registrant(s) is(are): THUY TRUONG 239 Montclair Ave. #6 San Jose, CA 95116 Registrant began transacting business under the fictitious business name(s) listed above on 8/30/2020. This statement was filed with the County Clerk-Recorder of Santa Clara County on February 16, 2021. (PAW Feb. 26, Mar. 5, 12, 19, 2021)

997 All Other LegalsNOTICE TO CREDITORS OF BULK SALE (U.C.C. §6104, 6105) ESCROW # 0126015553 Exempt from fee per GC 27388.1 (a) (1). Recording is not related to real property NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN to creditors of the within named seller that a bulk sale is about to be made of the assets described below. The names and business address of the Seller(s) is/are: S. Mitchelle Barbecue Company, Inc. 4546 El Camino Real B12, Los Altos, California 94022 The location in California of the Chief Executive Office of the seller is: same as above As listed by the seller, all other business names and addresses used by the seller within three years before the date such list was sent or delivered to the buyer are: none The names and business address of the Buyer(s) is/are: Unfurl, Inc. 4546 El Camino Real B12, Los Altos, California 94022 The assets to be sold are described in general as All stock in trade, furniture, fixtures, equipment and other property And are located at: 4546 El Camino Real B12, Los Altos, California 94022 The business name used by the Seller(s) at those locations is: "Commercial Kitchen" The anticipated date of the bulk sale is March 23, 2021 At the office of Old Republic Title Company @ 1000 Burnett Avenue, Suite 400, Concord, CA 94520. The bulk sale IS subject to California Uniform Commercial Code Section 6106.2. If so subject, the name and address of the person with whom claims may be filed is as follows: Old Republic Title Company @ 1000 Burnett Avenue, Suite 400, Concord, CA 94520, Escrow Holder. The last day for filing claims shall be March 22, 2021 which is the business day before the sale date specified herein. Dated: 2/23/21 Buyer(s): Unfurl, Inc. /S/ By: Chris Tara-Browne, President /S/ By: Liudmila Kokorich, CEO /S/ By: Alexey Kharis, COO 3/5/21 CNS-3444957# PALO ALTO WEEKLY

NOTICE TO CREDITORS OF BULK SALE AND OF INTENTION TO TRANSFER ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE LICENSE (U.C.C. 6101 et seq. and B & P 24074 et seq.) Escrow No. 010684-GG Notice is hereby given that a bulk sale of assets and a transfer of alcoholic beverage license is about to be made. The names and address of the Seller/Licensee are: ULLATTIL LLC, 3870 EL CAMINO REAL, PALO ALTO, CA 94306 The location in California of the chief executive office of the Seller is: SAME AS ABOVE The business is known as: ERNIES LIQUORS The names, and address of the Buyer/Transferee are: EZHARAT LLC, 6272 HONEYSUCKLE DR, NEWMARK, CA 94560 As listed by the Seller/Licensee, all other business names and addresses used by the Sellers/Licensee within three years before the date such list was sent or delivered to the Buyer/Transferee are: NONE The assets to be sold are described in general as: FURNITURE, FIXTURES, EQUIPMENT, TRADE NAME, LEASEHOLD IMPROVEMENTS, COVENANT NOT TO COMPETE, INVENTORY OF MERCHANDISE AND OFF-SALE GENERAL LICENSE #21-

570723 and are located at: 3870 EL CAMINO REAL, PALO ALTO, CA 94306 The kind of license to be transferred is: OFF-SALE GENERAL LICENSE #21-570723, now issued for the premises located at: 870 EL CAMINO REAL, PALO ALTO, CA 94306 The anticipated date of the sale/transfer is APRIL 6, 2021 at the office of: CAPITAL TRUST ESCROW, 280 S. BEVERLY DR #300, BEVERLY HILLS, CA 90212 The amount of the purchase price or consideration in connection with the transfer of the license and business, including estimated inventory, is the sum of $600,000.00, which consists of the following: DESCRIPTION, AMOUNT: CASH $50,000.00; NOTE $550,000.00 It has been agreed between the Seller/Licensee and the intended Buyer/Transferee, as required by Sec. 24073 of the Business and Professions Code, that the consideration for the transfer of the business and license is to be paid only after the transfer has been approved by the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. DATED: FEBRUARY 12, 2021 ULLATTIL LLC, A CALIFORNIA LIMITED LIABILTY COMPANY EZHARAT LLC, A CALIFORNIA LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY 207922 PALO ALTO WEEKLY 3/5/21

APN: 153-28-017 TS No: CA08000412-20-1 TO No: 1711247CAD NOTICE OF TRUSTEE'S SALE (The above statement is made pursuant to CA Civil Code Section 2923.3(d)(1). The Summary will be provided to Trustor(s) and/or vested owner(s) only, pursuant to CA Civil Code Section 2923.3(d)(2).) YOU ARE IN DEFAULT UNDER A DEED OF TRUST DATED June 7, 2019. UNLESS YOU TAKE ACTION TO PROTECT YOUR PROPERTY, IT MAY BE SOLD AT A PUBLIC SALE. IF YOU NEED AN EXPLANATION OF THE NATURE OF THE PROCEEDINGS AGAINST YOU, YOU SHOULD CONTACT A LAWYER. On March 29, 2021 at 10:00 AM, at the Gated North Market Street entrance to the Superior County Courthouse, 191 North First Street, San Jose, CA 95113, MTC Financial Inc. dba Trustee Corps, as the duly Appointed Trustee, under and pursuant to the power of sale contained in that certain Deed of Trust recorded on June 11, 2019 as Instrument No. 24201006, of official records in the Office of the Recorder of Santa Clara County, California, executed by 774 BURGOYNE ST LLC, A CALIFORNIA LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY, as Trustor(s), in favor of CENTER STREET LENDING V SPE, LLC, A DELAWARE LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY as Beneficiary, WILL SELL AT PUBLIC AUCTION TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER, in lawful money of the United States, all payable at the time of sale, that certain property situated in said County, California describing the land therein as: AS MORE FULLY DESCRIBED IN SAID DEED OF TRUST The property heretofore described is being sold "as is". The street address and other common designation, if any, of the real property described above is purported to be: 260 ELMWOOD ST., MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA 94043 The undersigned Trustee disclaims any liability for any incorrectness of the street address and other common designation, if any, shown herein. Said sale will be made without covenant or warranty, express or implied, regarding title, possession, or encumbrances, to pay the remaining principal sum of the Note(s) secured by said Deed of Trust, with interest thereon, as provided in said Note(s), advances if any, under the terms of the Deed of Trust, estimated fees, charges and expenses of the Trustee and of the trusts created by said Deed of Trust. The total amount of the unpaid balance of the obligations secured by the property to be sold and reasonable estimated costs, expenses and advances at the time of the initial publication of this Notice of Trustee’s Sale is estimated to be $1,104,820.73 (Estimated). However, prepayment premiums, accrued interest and advances will increase this figure prior to sale. Beneficiary’s bid at said sale may include all or part of said amount. In addition to cash, the Trustee will accept a cashier’s check drawn on a state or national bank, a check drawn by a state or federal credit union or a check drawn by a state or federal savings and loan association, savings association or savings bank specified in Section 5102 of the California Financial Code and authorized to do business in California, or other such funds as may be acceptable to the Trustee. In the event tender other than cash is accepted, the Trustee may withhold the issuance of the Trustee’s Deed Upon Sale until funds become available to the

payee or endorsee as a matter of right. The property offered for sale excludes all funds held on account by the property receiver, if applicable. If the Trustee is unable to convey title for any reason, the successful bidder’s sole and exclusive remedy shall be the return of monies paid to the Trustee and the successful bidder shall have no further recourse. Notice to Potential Bidders If you are considering bidding on this property lien, you should understand that there are risks involved in bidding at a Trustee auction. You will be bidding on a lien, not on the property itself. Placing the highest bid at a Trustee auction does not automatically entitle you to free and clear ownership of the property. You should also be aware that the lien being auctioned off may be a junior lien. If you are the highest bidder at the auction, you are or may be responsible for paying off all liens senior to the lien being auctioned off, before you can receive clear title to the property. You are encouraged to investigate the existence, priority, and size of outstanding liens that may exist on this property by contacting the county recorder's office or a title insurance company, either of which may charge you a fee for this information. If you consult either of these resources, you should be aware that the same Lender may hold more than one mortgage or Deed of Trust on the property. Notice to Property Owner The sale date shown on this Notice of Sale may be postponed one or more times by the Mortgagee, Beneficiary, Trustee, or a court, pursuant to Section 2924g of the California Civil Code. The law requires that information about Trustee Sale postponements be made available to you and to the public, as a courtesy to those not present at the sale. If you wish to learn whether your sale date has been postponed, and, if applicable, the rescheduled time and date for the sale of this property, you may call In Source Logic at 702-659-7766 for information regarding the Trustee's Sale or visit the Internet Website www.insourcelogic.com for information regarding the sale of this property, using the file number assigned to this case, CA08000412-20-1. Information about postponements that are very short in duration or that occur close in time to the scheduled sale may not immediately be reflected in the telephone information or on the Internet Website. The best way to verify postponement information is to attend the scheduled sale. Notice to Tenant NOTICE TO TENANT FOR FORECLOSURES AFTER JANUARY 1, 2021 You may have a right to purchase this property after the trustee auction pursuant to Section 2924m of the California Civil Code. If you are an “eligible tenant buyer,” you can purchase the property if you match the last and highest bid placed at the trustee auction. If you are an “eligible bidder,” you may be able to purchase the property if you exceed the last and highest bid placed at the trustee auction. There are three steps to exercising this right of purchase. First, 48 hours after the date of the trustee sale, you can call 702-659-7766, or visit this internet website www.insourcelogic.com, using the file number assigned to this case CA08000412-20-1 to find the date on which the trustee’s sale was held, the amount of the last and highest bid, and the address of the trustee. Second, you must send a written notice of intent to place a bid so that the trustee receives it no more than 15 days after the trustee’s sale. Third, you must submit a bid so that the trustee receives it no more than 45 days after the trustee’s sale. If you think you may qualify as an “eligible tenant buyer” or “eligible bidder,” you should consider contacting an attorney or appropriate real estate professional immediately for advice regarding this potential right to purchase. Date: February 26, 2021 MTC Financial Inc. dba Trustee Corps TS No. CA08000412-20-1 17100 Gillette Ave Irvine, CA 92614 Phone: 949-252-8300 TDD: 866-660-4288 Dalaysia Ramirez, Authorized Signatory SALE INFORMATION CAN BE OBTAINED ON LINE AT www.insourcelogic.com FOR AUTOMATED SALES INFORMATION PLEASE CALL: In Source Logic AT 702-659-7766 Trustee Corps may be acting as a debt collector attempting to collect a debt. Any information obtained may be used for that purpose.Order Number 74081, Pub Dates: 03/05/2021, 03/12/2021, 03/19/2021, PALO ALTO WEEKLY

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Upfront

Council rebuffs request for office zoneDeveloper Jay Paul, who owns numerous properties along a

stretch of Park Boulevard just south of Oregon Expressway, has requested that the city create a new office overlay district in the area.

The zone change would allow properties zoned for research and development to accommodate a wider range of office-based businesses, including financial services, architecture practices and law firms, and would extend beyond the two properties that Jay Paul owns along Park Boulevard: the building at 2747 Park Blvd., which is occupied by Tencent, and 3045 Park Blvd. It would also apply to five other commercial properties: the law office of Hopkins & Carley at 200 Page Mill Road; Park Plaza, the mixed-use development at 195 Page Mill Road that includes 84 apartments; the WeWork office at 3101 Park Blvd.; the office of Vance Brown Builder at 3197 Park Blvd.; and a vacant building at 3241 Park Blvd.

Maia Harris, project manager with Jay Paul, said most of the companies that have expressed interest in leasing the company’s new building at 3045 Park Blvd. were general office uses.

That proposal, however, failed to gain traction during Mon-day’s “prescreening” session. While the council didn’t take any formal action, members showed little appetite for making any zone changes at this time, particularly ones that would allow more offices.

Several pointed at the fact that the city is now in the final stages of completing the North Ventura Area Coordinated Area Plan, a vision document for a broader 60-acre portion of Ventura that includes a segment of Park Boulevard.

—Gennady Sheyner

County unveils plans for a psychiatric hospitalIn a bid to create desperately needed psychiatric hospital beds

for children and teens in crisis, Santa Clara County officials last month unveiled plans to build a new state-of-the-art facility right in the heart of Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.

The 77-bed hospital building, which is expected to cost $233 million and finish construction by the end of 2023, would consoli-date emergency psychiatric services and inpatient care for those suffering from mental illness across all ages. The design carves out one unit specifically for adolescent youth ages 13 to 17, and another for children age 12 and younger.

If built, the 190,000-square-foot facility would fill a significant gap in mental health care that has plagued Santa Clara County for years. With a dearth of psychiatric beds in the region, teens and young children who are faced with a mental health crisis are frequently forced to travel long distances in order to receive care.

— Kevin Forestieri

News Digest


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POLICE CALLSPalo AltoFeb. 25-March 3Violence related University Avenue, 2/23, 7:48 p.m.; strong arm robbery.El Camino Real, 2/24, 9:01 p.m.; domestic violence/battery.El Camino Real, 2/28, 3:54 a.m.; domestic violence.El Camino Real, 3/2, 3:30 a.m.; domestic violence/battery.Theft relatedChecks forgery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Commercial burglaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Grand theft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Identity theft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Petty theft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Residential burglaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Shoplifting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Vehicle relatedAuto recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Bicycle theft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Hit and run . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Lost/stolen plates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Misc. traffic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Stolen catalytic converter . . . . . . . . . . 3Theft from auto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Vehicle accident/minor injury . . . . . . . . 5Vehicle accident/prop damage . . . . . . 4Vehicle embezzled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Vehicle tow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Alcohol or drug relatedDrunk in public . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Possession of drugs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1MiscellaneousCasualty fall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Found property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5Located missing person . . . . . . . . . . . 1Lost property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Misc. penal code violation . . . . . . . . . . 2Missing person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Other/misc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Outside investigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Psychiatric subject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13Suspicious circumstances . . . . . . . . . . 4Vandalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Warrant/other agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Menlo ParkFeb. 24-March 2Violence related1100 block Willow Road, 3/1, 7:10 p.m.; battery.Theft relatedGrand theft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Identity theft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Petty theft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5Vehicle relatedAuto theft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Bicycle theft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Hit and run . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Misc. traffic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Stolen catalytic converter . . . . . . . . . . 1Theft from auto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Alcohol or drug relatedPossession of drugs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2MiscellaneousCourt order violation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Found property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Lost property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Mental evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Missing person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Other/misc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Property for destruction . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Vandalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Warrant arrest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

PulseA weekly compendium of vital statistics

A list of local residents who died recently:

Joseph David Mandell, 91, an educator and longtime Palo Alto resident, died on Feb. 19. Bruce E. Crocker, 78, a ven-ture capitalist and Palo Alto resident, died on Feb. 22.

To read full obituaries, leave remembrances and post photos, go to Lasting Memo-ries at PaloAltoOnline.com/ obituaries.

OBITUARIES

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It is with great sadness and love that we mourn the loss of Kevin George Gillett who passed away from complications fol-lowing a cardiac event on February 15, 2021. A devoted son, husband, father, brother, uncle, and friend, Kevin left us too soon. His life and legacy stretched from coast to coast.

Born in Rockledge, Florida, the only son of Karin and Ron Gillett, he grew up fishing, shooting hoops, playing golf and being a devoted big brother to his three younger sisters. He attended high school at The Bolles School and went on to study computer science and ap-plied mathematics at Princeton University. At Princeton, he was a member of Quadrangle and experienced the joy of playing basket-ball for Coach Pete Carril, beating UCLA in the NCAA tournament his freshman year.

Upon graduation from Princeton Kevin moved west to California to begin his career at Oracle. After Oracle, he worked at Amazon and Google where he made significant contributions. He was Engineering Director at Facebook at the time of his passing. Technical, eloquent, driven, passionate and curious, Kevin was a valued team member throughout his career. Kevin thought of himself as a mentor to all members of his various teams, never the boss in the traditional sense.

Kevin met the love of his life, Erin, on a date arranged by one of her friends. What started with a walk on the beach evolved into a shared journey of 21 years. They enjoyed summers boating at Lake Tahoe and golfing at Pebble Beach, where they married in 2002. They were both passionate about basketball, the ocean and, of course, their

amazing children. There was nothing Kevin en-joyed more than (loudly) cheering on his daughter at her water polo matches or (not so loudly) cheering for his son at competitive chess tournaments.

At 6’10” Kevin was a big guy with an even big-ger heart, and he will be

deeply missed by all those who had the pleasure to know him. Kevin is survived by parents, Karin and Ron Gillett; wife,

Erin; children, Paedrin and Kingsley Gillett; sisters, Keira (Neil Dergenski), Caidi Gillett Phillips (Eric) and Caia Gillett; in-laws, Bob and Claudette Rosenberg; brother-in-law, Shanan Rosenberg (Sarah); nephews, Clyde, Walt and Gus Rosenberg and numerous aunts, uncles and cousins.

A Memorial Service will be held at a later date when COVID re-strictions lift.

Memorial Contributions may be made to Princeton Men’s Basketball Program: makeagift.Princeton.edu

Sacred Heart Schools Atherton: [email protected] or Oceana.org.

Kevin G. GillettAugust 14, 1976 – February 15, 2021

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Remembering Joe MandellJoe Mandell was born across the

street from his future wife, Marion Bruskin, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. They attended the same junior high, high school, and uni-versity. He and Marion became a couple at Rutgers and married in 1951 after Joe completed his Masters. They moved to Pasadena where Joe studied viruses with Linus Pauling and earned his doc-torate in microbiology at Cal Tech.

After Joe finished his PhD, the couple moved to Long Island, NY where he had a post-doc fellow-ship and his first two children, Linnea and Douglas were born. In 1958, they moved to Palo Alto for Joe to take a research position at Stanford Research Institute. Dana, their third child, was born in 1960, the year they bought a house on Parkside Drive, which is still the family home.

After years of research, Joe switched to teaching. He became chair of the Biology Department at University of Santa Clara where he taught microbiology, biology, and genetics and was re-quired to dress conservatively. Then Joe moved to West Valley College and taught biology, microbiology, and chemistry. In the informal environment of the 60s and 70s, Joe grew long hair and wore a leather headband. He was beloved by his students who thought he was a “really cool” professor.

Joe was known for making his classes especially fun. He liked to include science jokes at the ends of his exams, and the sound of giggles would let him know when a student had reached the end of a test. His microbiology labs included food applications like making sourdough starter, yogurt, and beer.

Joe was an avid folk dancer and teacher, and, along with Marion, ran a children’s folk dance club at Ohlone school. Joe volunteered in the schools, teaching science and assisting music teachers. He was an active volunteer with the Friends of the Palo Alto Library and served on the board of the Mendocino Wooodlands Camp Association. After retiring, Joe fulfilled a lifetime dream of learning to play violin, playing for 15 years with the South Bay Community Orchestra and attending music camp every summer.

Joe enjoyed woodworking, and made furniture that is still in the family home. Years ago, when Joe admired a carved wooden frog, his friends assumed he especially liked frogs, and started a tradition of gifts of frog-related items. A dedicated mycologist, Joe was president of the San Francisco Mycological Society for two years, and served as a mushroom expert for the poison con-trol center.

He also loved going to yard sales and eating Sunday breakfasts at Hobees where, like on Cheers, everyone knew his name. Joe was always known for his kindness, cheer, and warmheartedness. He was quick with a joke and everyone enjoyed his intelligent and interesting conversations. He will be fondly remembered by all who knew him.

The Mandells would like to encourage everyone to contrib-ute stories, photos and memories to an online memorial at joseph-mandell.forevermissed.com

P A I D O B I T U A R Y

Joseph David MandellJuly 9, 1929 – February 19, 2021


Pay the teachersEditor,

Teacher housing is helpful in the short term; however, teachers should be paid a salary that offers them an opportunity to purchase property of their own choice in the community in which they teach.

We owe it to teachers to pay them what they are worth — that’s more than they are receiving now.

Gerry JurgensenChanning Avenue, Palo Alto

Bad precedentEditor,

When a long-entrenched Palo Alto institution like Castilleja School embarks on a vast multi-million dollar building project, nothing can stop it.

With wealthy, politically well-connected parents, supporters and a well-paid lobbyist at City Hall, expansion plans for the 100-plus-year-old private girls school will easily pass hurdles — including increasing student enrollment from 415 to 540 — while dodging various city code variances such as campus gross floor area.

This approval will come even though the school is situated in an R-1 residential zone, 75% of its students live outside of Palo Alto and in spite of the Environmental Impact Report declaring the proj-ect will bring “significant and un-avoidable increase in traffic and threaten the residential character of the neighborhood.”

The project, which will go in front of City Council during a public hearing on March 8, also will mean three or more years of noisy demolition and construc-tion chaos, plus traffic danger on the Bryant Street Bike Boulevard. These concerns likely will be dis-missed by the council (with no-table exceptions), which will roll over like a docile spaniel while the juggernaut passes. The blind and feckless Planning and Trans-portation Commission (with no-table exceptions) have swept aside legal violations and objections as though they were grass clippings.

The council will offer token appeasement to neighbor objec-tions by slightly lowering enroll-ments and imposing vague “self regulation” to ensure compliance to enrollment limits, parking and event regulations. The school’s attempt at self-regulation failed badly when it illegally exceeded enrollment limits that went undis-covered for 13 years! Neverthe-less, Castilleja will enjoy 90% of its demands.

Who’s not to say that the oppor-tunistic leaders of the school will someday swallow up neighbor-hood homes and form their own community — Castilleja Terrace — and expand its enrollment to 1,000. Who’s to stop it?

Vic BeferaHigh Street, Palo Alto

Follow-up to 911 nightmareEditor,

There was excellent cover-age over a year ago by Palo Alto Weekly about the absolute fail-ures of the Palo Alto Police, Of-ficer Yolanda Franco-Clausen and dispatcher Brina Elmore to aid a 54-year-old female resident having a seizure. The City Council was going to provide answers. There was discussion in changes of protocol, as well as failure of the city to comply with the California Public Records Act. Why have we heard nothing more of this?

As a 53-year-old resident, I want to know what the city has done to change the failed policies and procedures of the Palo Alto Police Department.

As a resident, I am looking for answers and accountability. It is not the job of the police to diag-nose medical conditions. They are absolutely unqualified as proven by this interaction. It is almost two years after the initial incident, please don’t say discussions are still ongoing. There are so many remaining unanswered questions. This is also a failure of City Man-ager Ed Shikada and City Attor-ney Molly Stump to comply with investigations and answer the questions of Palo Alto Weekly.

The city manager and city at-torney are not elected by the resi-dents, yet somehow make deci-sions on their behalf without city council really questioning them. We elected the city council to represent us. The council is the employer; the city manager and staff are the employees. Shikada should not run the city without the council’s firm control. We should demand accountability.

Dena SekiHigh Street, Palo Alto

No more hangtags?Editor,

City Council on Feb. 22 dis-cussed changing the existing resi-dential parking permit program to a system that can be managed with license plate readers.

Under the existing system, in addition to the stickers that are at-tached to cars, residents can buy hangtags for temporary guests. The hangtags are not linked to a specific car and can be used as

and when needed. The cost of the hang-tag is the same as for a stick-er and valid for the same period.

Although the elimination of hangtags was never mentioned in reports I’ve read, I’m assum-ing that if the city will be relying solely on license plate readers, hangtags will no longer be issued.

This means that each temporary guest permit will be linked to a specific car, so if a resident had two different guests at different times during the same day, one would have to buy two permits.

This would create an unac-ceptable cost, especially for low-income or elderly residents who may have more than one caregiver coming to the house in one day.

Some seniors are not comfort-able doing things online and may not even have good (or any) inter-net connection. This would be an unnecessary anxiety-causing bur-den on them.

If you have an unexpected guest, you would first have to as-certain their license plate number, then go online to acquire a tem-porary permit (whereas now, you can simply hand them a hangtag).

If you have out-of-town guests visiting for a few days, would you have to remember to go on-line daily to renew the temporary permit?

While this new proposal is possibly more cost-efficient for the city, it would pose a financial and bureaucratic burden on resi-dents for whose benefit the RPP program was created in the first place.

Shaila SadrozinskiChurchill Avenue, Palo Alto

Distortions in Castilleja expansionEditor,

Castilleja School’s expansion project, garage construction and enrollment increase will be dis-cussed at City Council meetings on March 8 and 15.

As a Palo Alto resident, I am shocked the Planning and Trans-portation Commission majority agreed with Castilleja’s expansion plans and the Planning Depart-ment’s labeling of the requested underground garage (illegal in R-1 neighborhoods) as a basement (legal in R-1 neighborhoods).

The “basement” (wink, wink) will, of course, be for cars only and not be under any building and net Castilleja only 22 additional parking spaces.

Please go to pnqlnow.org to read all about Castilleja’s expan-sion plans and request for 114 ad-ditional students.

Why should every Palo Alto resident be concerned? Because

zoning regulations are being twisted, bent and distorted to ap-prove Castilleja’s expansion plans. These “distortions” then become precedent and can be used in oth-er questionable situations to harm neighbors and neighborhoods.

All of us who live near a church, school or other institution in an R-1 neighborhood count on Con-ditional Use Permits (CUP) to state enrollment limits, allowed uses, times of assembly, etc. CUP’s protect us all.

If Castilleja can have its garage labeled as a basement and proceed with all its expansion plans, other neighborhoods are, in my opinion,

also at risk.As a Castilleja parent, I ap-

preciate the school’s educational process but not their request for a garage and enrollment increase. Shuttle buses can be used to re-duce traffic impacts on Embar-cadero Road and Alma Street. The 75% of students coming from outside Palo Alto do not need to drive to and from school.

Let’s reduce traffic, eliminate the parking garage, and main-tain neighborhood quality while allowing for reasonable school expansion.

Rita VrhelChanning Avenue, Palo Alto

SpectrumEditorials, letters and opinions

Letters

The Palo Alto Weekly encourages comments on our coverage or on issues of local interest.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Submit letters to the editor of up to 300 words to [email protected]. Submit guest opinions of 750 to 950 words to [email protected]. Include your name, address and daytime phone number so we can reach you. We reserve the right to edit contributions for length, objectionable content, libel and factual errors known to us. Anonymous letters will generally not be accepted. Submitting a letter to the editor or guest opinion constitutes a granting of permission to the Palo Alto Weekly and Embarcadero Media to also publish it online, including in our online archives and as a post on Town Square. For more information, contact Editorial Assistant Lloyd Lee at [email protected] or 650-223-6526 or Editor Jocelyn Dong at [email protected].

Do you plan on resuming indoor activities under the new COVID-19 guidelines?

LET’S DISCUSS: Read the latest local news headlines and talk about the issues at Town Square at PaloAltoOnline.com/square


A t the start of the pandem-ic, the normal cadence of working in health care was

thrown into complete disarray.Patients stopped showing up for

appointments, and many impor-tant visits were relegated to video calls. Protective equipment was in short supply, and health care workers — anxious and unfamil-iar with COVID-19 and all of its peculiar traits — were frightened to show up to work. Tens of thou-sands were infected last year in California alone, and many died.

One year into the pandemic, the frustrations of public health re-strictions and the fear of contract-ing the potentially deadly illness are still very real. Yet some health care workers are finding reasons to be hopeful and believe the worst of the virus is behind them.

Kerry Boynton, who has worked as a medical assistant at a Mountain View clinic since the start of the pandemic, doesn’t su-garcoat her experience: It’s been a year filled with sadness, depres-sion, grief, stress and anger. But with declining case numbers and more and more residents receiv-ing the vaccine, misery has given way to optimism.

“We’re at the stage of the pan-demic where we can have hope that it can be alleviated, or at least contained,” she said.

One of those bright spots is that people are starting to go to the doctor again. When the virus started to spread in March 2020, Boynton remembers her office turning into a complete ghost town. Company policy and pub-lic health orders contributed to

the situation, she said, but many patients were simply unwilling to come in and risk exposure to the coronavirus.

Many appointments had to in-stead be conducted over video calls, which she said is anything but ideal. Technical problems,

long setup times and remote diag-noses are common, and everyone involved — from the doctors and nurses to the patients themselves — agree that nothing can replace face-to-face appointments.

But now, patients are coming in for non-urgent appointments, Boynton said.

“They say ‘We are so happy to see you’ and ‘I’m so happy to be out of the house,’” she said. “They say they’re lonely, sad and depressed and felt like they didn’t have hope. Now they do.”

Keeping up with the safety protocols and wearing extra pro-tective equipment at all times remains a slog, however, and it can be brutal over a long shift, she said. The double masks, the sweaty plastic gowns, the face shields that constantly fog up and obscure vision — all of it adds up and makes work a chore. Some of the more industrial-strength face shields look and feel like welding masks and are heavy enough to induce pounding headaches.

“For nine hours a day it is abso-lutely exhausting,” Boynton said.

“Our skin is breaking out; our bod-ies are feeling heavy. It’s been re-ally rough with all the precautions to keep ourselves, our families, our coworkers and our patients safe.”

One major change since the start of the pandemic has been a decreasing fear level among health care workers. Boynton, like most health care workers in the county, has received two shots of the COVID-19 vaccine, giving her an extra level of safety in work-ing with patients. She said it has helped her dial back the constant fear, which was taking a toll on

Oak Knoll Elementary School first grader Hannah jumps rope while wearing a mask during recess at the Menlo Park school on Sept. 29. This pandemic year has been one of major upheaval for local students and their families. Photo by Magali Gauthier.

W e all remember a mo-ment last year when unease about the coro-

navirus started to creep into our consciousness.

Maybe it was when we heard about the long lines outside of Costco and the shelves inside stripped bare of toilet paper and bottles of water. Or the first time someone elbow-bumped us in-

stead of shaking hands (jokingly, but not really). Or when we start-ed seeing people walking around wearing blue surgical masks, and we didn’t even own one, let alone know where to get one.

And then came March 17, the day that the Bay Area’s stay-at-home order took effect. It was the first in the nation, initiated by our alarmed public health leaders.

In the seemingly endless year since, our unease has turned into a multitude of emotions and unusual, only-in-a-pandemic experiences.

To give us the chance collec-tively to pause and reflect on the impact these past 12 months have had on our lives, the Palo Alto Weekly is publishing this two-part series of profiles and recollections

of local residents. This week, we feature the stories of those who’ve been on the front lines, including medical staff, gig workers and an educator. And we also catch up with one person who got CO-VID-19 even before the public health mandate kicked in.

In two weeks, we turn these pages over to our readers, who are stepping forward with their in-

sights about how they’ve changed as a result of the pandemic.

It’s not too late to share your story, whether brief or lengthy. Send it to us by emailing [email protected] or by leaving us a three-minute voicemail message at 650-223-6514 by Friday, March 12. Include your full name and a way for us to contact you, and we’ll be in touch.

by the Palo Alto Weekly, Almanac and Mountain View Voice staffs

Back on the mendHealth care worker says constant fear

is giving way to hopefulnessby Kevin Forestieri ‘ We’re at the stage

of the pandemic where we can have hope that it can be alleviated, or at least contained.’

— Kerry Boynton


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Kerry Boynton, a medical assistant, says the grief and stress of the pandemic is finally starting to give way to optimism as more people get vaccinated against COVID-19.

One year inHow the pandemic has changed us


Cover Story

A s a paramedic in the Palo Alto Fire Department, Sunny Johnson-Gutter is no

stranger to helping residents deal with trauma, devastation and — at times — even celebration.

In his 10 years in Palo Alto, he has responded to emergencies both within the city limits — as when he helped deliver a baby on University Avenue in 2011 — and beyond, as when he took part in a 2019 strike force that battled wild-fires in Napa County.

But last month, Johnson-Gutter and Palo Alto firefighter/paramed-ics Gregory Coffelt, Jordan Braa and Matt Ferguson found them-selves in a new setting: a hospital in Bakersfield that was overflow-ing with COVID-19 patients after a surge of cases in the weeks that followed the holiday season.

When the firefighters arrived at Kern Adventist Hospital on Jan. 3, the intensive care unit was over-flowing, Johnson-Gutter said in a recent interview. The hospital had established care treatment areas by putting up tents in the parking lot, and nurses and doctors were hus-tling to take care of “waves upon waves” of patients.

The Palo Alto paramedics im-mediately joined the fray by help-ing to administer medication, take vital signs and move patients, some of whom were intubated and had to be flipped over several times per day. In many cases, the assistance came down to helping a patient get to the bathroom or providing them with a cup of water, he said. With nurses focused on providing vital care to dozens of patients at a time, the “human aspects” of patient care sometimes got relegated to a second tier of importance, he said.

“It’s just a constant barrage of needs, needs, needs and needs — people who are sick, and they need care and compassion,” Johnson-Gutter, 43, said. “Everyone is doing a great job, but I just don’t know how they can continue to do that without having some sort of relief.”

The human aspect has always been a critical component of the job for Palo Alto firefighters, and it’s one that has been put to the test in this year of social distancing. Firefighters and paramedics are,

after all, the ultimate team players. They respond in units, and when they’re not on calls, they train, de-compress and — to a great extent — reside in neighborhood stations, where they work 48-hour shifts.

So when the COVID-19 pan-demic began to accelerate in February and March of 2020, they weren’t just dealing with the threat of a mysterious and deadly virus; they were also confronting new rules that, in many ways, ran counter to the firefighter ethos of togetherness.

In the early weeks of the pan-demic, Palo Alto firefighters were told that they can no longer eat meals together. Dining in sepa-rate rooms, Johnson-Gutter said, took away from the normal bond-ing experience, which he said is a critical way that department staff recuperate, share experiences and re-energize after calls.

So employees responded by in-stalling heat lamps and creating outdoor areas that allowed them to share their meals while main-taining a safe distance. They also agreed that they would do every-thing they could to protect one another from the spreading virus.

“We all made an agreement that we would wear masks even before a lot of other departments were making a push,” he said. “We en-couraged each other, ‘I’m wearing my mask to show support for the fact that I don’t want you and your family to get sick.’”

Even with these precautions, the first responders felt heightened anxiety, thanks in no small part to a shortage of personal protec-tive equipment. Much like hospital workers and emergency responders elsewhere, Palo Alto firefighters

were asked to reuse gowns and N95 masks. There was also a lack of knowledge back then about the incubation period of the virus and the best ways to stem its spread.

Despite these uncertainties, Johnson-Gutter said he and his colleagues at the Fire Department were confident that they’d be able to cope with the looming threat. They were resigned to the fact that some would probably catch the vi-rus, but they also felt that, if that were to happen, they’d have the means to take care of themselves and the city’s support.

While maintaining social dis-tance between themselves, John-son-Gutter’s team at the Rinco-nada Park fire station, known as Station 3, was also confronting isolation from the wider commu-nity. When the newly rebuilt sta-tion opened in March 2020 and the Station 3 crew was able to return to its assigned neighborhood after a two-year exile in a makeshift sta-tion near the Baylands, the long-awaited milestone passed without any public ceremony or a commu-nity celebration.

Firefighter crews also had to

halt their tradition of shopping at local supermarkets. Not wishing to go into the crowds and compete for space with other shoppers, including local seniors, Station 3 staff began to buy supplies in bulk from food distributors, Johnson-Gutter said.

That was just one of many adjustments that emergency re-sponders have had to make over the past year, as they were basi-cally charged with crafting a new playbook to deal with a once-a-century threat. Among other pro-tocols paramedics established: They limited the number of staff members who got close to patients with COVID-19 symptoms. They also began to rely more on decon-tamination misters after calls that involve potential COVID-19 cases.

Despite these changes, and the ongoing concerns about recent (and pending) budget cuts in the Fire Department, Johnson-Gutter said he and his colleagues feel for-tunate to have the ability to do a job they love and to see their close friends and colleagues on a daily basis — a luxury that many people don’t have these days.

He was also happy to volunteer for the assignment in Bakersfield, where the response unit stayed for two weeks. Even though the four paramedics had different shifts, they made a point to still meet daily for outdoor meals.

“It is so integral in just how we’ve been trained and how we’ve learned to deal with stress,” John-son-Gutter said. “Being away from our families for two weeks straight, it was very refreshing to be able to meet with our co-workers on a dai-ly basis and kind of recount what we learned and pass on information and kind of share experiences.”

When they returned, each mem-ber of the team went through five days of quarantine and a debrief-ing session with a department therapist. They took some time to reflect on the stress of the prior two weeks. The trip, he said, left them feeling “on edge.”

“It took us a while to kind of process, ‘Why am I having this argument with my wife right now? What is this about?’ It’s this realization that you’ve just been through a very stressful experi-ence, and it’s going to take a while to readjust to normal life. It’s nor-mal. It’s OK to be aware of it.”

The trip also brought into stark relief the ways in which different regions have responded to the pan-demic. Here, tech workers imme-diately shifted to remote working, which helped halt the spread of COVID-19, and public health of-ficials quickly imposed shelter-in-place rules. In Bakersfield, many employees don’t have the luxury of working remotely, and the health restrictions had been less stringent — as evidenced by restaurants that were completely packed with in-door customers, he said.

While the city’s budget challeng-es continue to cast a shadow over the Fire Department, the past few months have brought some hope. Every member of the department has been vaccinated against CO-VID-19, and the city was largely spared during the post-holiday surge, when other parts of the county saw increases in cases.

“You walk around Palo Alto and you see people running with masks on,” Johnson-Gutter said. “People in this community and surround-ing communities are very much onboard with following the guide-lines, which has made our jobs much more bearable for sure.”

Email Staff Writer Gennady Sheyner at [email protected].

The stress testPalo Alto paramedic reflects on the Fire

Department’s evolving response to COVID-19 by Gennady Sheyner

‘It’s just a constant barrage of needs, needs, needs and needs — people who are sick, and they need care and compassion.’

— Sunny Johnson-Gutter

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Sunny Johnson-Gutter, a Palo Alto Fire Department paramedic, spent two weeks working at a hospital in Bakersfield that was overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.

her health for months.It was all anxiety all the time

before the vaccine. Boynton said she and her colleagues felt like they were at constant risk of con-tracting the virus within the next five minutes. Some patients would show up without knowing the re-sults of their COVID-19 test, and a quick phone call would reveal they had tested positive — putting

everyone in the building at height-ened risk.

Others simply lied.“We would have people who

would flat out lie and say they were coming for an annual physi-cal, and once they got in the room they revealed to us that they had COVID symptoms,” she said.

The holiday season was the worst, Boynton said, because of the huge spike in patients who had COVID-19 or had family members who had contracted or even died from the virus. Yet for

whatever reason, people remained cavalier about the problem and re-fused to cancel their plans to travel for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Meanwhile, she was receiving messages almost every day from her union that another employee had died from COVID-19 while just doing their job.

“It’s just been heartbreaking,” she said. “That goes anywhere from housekeeping and registra-tion duties to nurses and doctors. It’s every level of health care that has been affected by this.”

Though the pandemic has tak-en its mental and emotional toll, Boynton said she’s been able to keep a level head. At work, she and her colleagues have bonded more than ever before, sharing stories and keeping one another in high spirits. At home, she’s learned to hit the brakes and take life slower, appreciating fam-ily life while taking care of her elderly mother. The hubbub of social outings has been replaced with quiet contemplation, and that could very well continue once the

pandemic subsides.“Even if I just sit in my back-

yard and appreciate the squirrels running around the tree, just slow-ing things down in life rather than being social and having to go out to eat at restaurants or meet up with people,” she said, “I’ve been appreciating a slower pace in life, and it’s been okay.”

Email Mountain View Voice Staff Writer Kevin Forestieri at [email protected].

Kerry Boynton(continued from page 18)

(Continued on page 20)


Cover Story

B efore last March, the Clark family was constantly in motion.

Jessica Clark to the kindergar-ten classroom at Duveneck Ele-mentary School where she works as a teacher’s aide. Her husband, Jeremy, to O’Connor Hospital in San Jose, where he supervises the respiratory department. Their three children to school, to soccer practice, to endless extracurricu-lars. Days filled by hurrying up to be somewhere and do something.

“Before the pandemic we were moving in so many different directions in my house. It was just go, go, go all the time,” Jes-sica Clark said. “When all of that stopped, it made you say: Was all that really important? Do we want to go back to that life?”

Thinking about it brings Clark to tears. They now spend more time as a tight-knit family unit whose members lift each other up when one of them is down. It’s a silver lining of the pandemic, which for the Clarks and so many

brought isolation, fear and anxi-ety — but also a forced slowing down that people may have never otherwise relented to.

The week before schools closed last spring, Clark’s husband was seeing the early impact of the nov-el coronavirus at the O’Connor respiratory department. They had started keeping a clothes hamper outside the house where he would change before coming inside. He warned her not to go into work. She emailed her prin-cipal and teacher and told them she was taking Friday, March 13, off. She didn’t feel safe coming in. That Friday, Santa Clara County ordered all public schools in the county to close for what everyone expected would be an extended spring break.

“I didn’t know that was going to be my last time seeing that class-room for seven months,” Clark said.

Clark’s and her children’s lives moved online. Instead of read-ing books to kindergarteners and

holding their hands while they learn to use scissors for the first time, she became the “mute mas-ter” on Zoom — muting a chaotic screen of 5- and 6-year-olds try-ing to learn online.

For her older children, now a Gunn High School freshman and senior, distance learning wasn’t the same as in-person school and they missed their friends, but they

mostly managed.But online education was near

impossible for Clark’s youngest daughter, now a fifth grader at Juana Briones Elementary School, who struggles with anxiety. She stopped logging on to her classes and couldn’t access therapy on-line. (She has an individualized education plan, or IEP, for anxiety and receives specialized services.)

So when the school district started talking, controversially for some, about elementary schools reopening the fall, Clark reacted both as an employee and a mother watching her child fall through the cracks at home. She felt terrified about the health risks of working in person but knew firsthand there

O ne year ago in February, Monica Yeung Arima and her husband, Adrian

Arima, were celebrating his 70th birthday with their tour mates during a trip to Egypt. One week later, on March 3, they became ill with COVID-19 and landed in Stanford Hospital.

The Arimas were among the first Palo Altans to be diagnosed with the deadly coronavirus, which has now killed more than 500,000 Americans. Monica Arima became seriously ill and spent two weeks in the hospital. One of the first patients to re-ceive the drug remdesivir in an

early clinical trial, she began to recover within days of treatment, she recalled.

Arima recuperated at home for a while longer, and she still ex-periences some health problems a year later: shortness of breath and congestion. She isn’t sure if COVID-19 is to blame or if it’s caused by her self-imposed lifestyle changes during the pan-demic, she said. She hasn’t been to the gym in a year.

An eternal optimist, she took her recovery from COVID-19 in relative stride.

“I believe in fate. I was scared when I got this disease, but I just dealt with it,” she said. “I just try to solve it. I think it’s the engineer in me.”

Surviving COVID-19 hasn’t blunted her caution toward the disease, however. She follows the research and is aware that her immunity might not protect her against the virus’ variants. She also doesn’t know how long her immunity will last.

“I’m not too, too worried — as long as I’m in protective gear,”

she said. “I feel I have some im-munity, but I still wear my mask and socially distance and do all of the things other people do.”

Some people also seem appre-hensive around her, knowing she had the disease — another reason why she still takes many visible precautions, she said.

“Since I was sick, some people are very paranoid about it, and I feel it,” she said.

Over the past year, Arima says she’s also grown concerned about another type of pandemic:

xenophobia. Some people have used the virus’ origins in China as an excuse for violence — the latest chapter in the long history of racism against Asian Ameri-cans in the United States. She says she saw hatred rising a few years ago as political rhetoric turned more anti-immigrant.

It feels more daunting than the virus itself, she said.

“The (coronavirus) doesn’t kill me. It’s the hate crime that kills me,” she said.

Arima herself hasn’t been

attacked, but fears of victimiza-tion are limiting people’s sense of freedom, she said. Now people look out for each other in ways that never happened before, she said.

“People say, ‘I’ll walk you to the car.’ It’s a gesture to be safe. The security of our Asian Americans is being violated,” she said.

Overall, Arima feels fortunate to have survived COVID-19. After

Finding a silver lining in the pandemic

As an educator and a parent, Jessica Clark has experienced the reopening debate from both sides

by Elena Kadvany

Fearing racism more than the virus

A COVID-19 survivor, Monica Yeung Arima says it’s hate crimes against Asian Americans

that worry her the mostby Sue Dremann

At home with her family, Jessica Clark, center back, a teacher’s aide at Duveneck Elementary in Palo Alto, knows firsthand of the challenges facing both educators and parents of students who struggle with distance learning.

Monica Yeung Arima was one of the first known local COVID-19 cases. She contracted the virus during a trip to Egypt.

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‘I have some immunity, but I still wear my mask and socially distance and do all of the things other people do.’

—Monica Yeung Arima


Cover Story

T he beginning of the pan-demic felt like a sprint to Francisca Vazquez. That’s

when she and her household of five at Buena Vista Mobile Home Park in Palo Alto found them-selves scrambling to come up with a month’s rent in April.

Now a year into the public health crisis, Vazquez — like so many others still struggling with the consequences of the pandem-ic — tells of a seemingly endless marathon for survival, and a life that has largely been put on hold.

“We are barely recovering,” Vazquez, 25, said in a recent interview.

Vazquez has spent the past year mostly tending to her family, which includes her now 1-year-old little brother, Jorge Amir De la Luz. She’s also picked up gig work, as so many have during the pandemic, making deliveries through apps such as DoorDash, UberEats and Instacart.

Her mom, Ryena, was a floral designer who lost her job after her employer, a flower shop, shut down. She recently started sell-ing “a bit of everything” at a flea market, including clothes and children’s toys, which required her to invest her own money just to get started.

These choices weren’t driven out of some entrepreneurial spirit with the hopes of growing a flour-ishing business or making a lucra-tive living through delivery apps — they were one of many tactical decisions Vazquez said her family made to just get by.

“That’s what we use to make ends meet when we have tough times,” she said.

Vazquez’s household at the Buena Mobile Vista Home Park, where she has lived for over a de-cade, includes her mom, her step-dad, two younger siblings, one of whom is in college, and her boyfriend who recently became her fiance and is also helping the household through delivery-app work.

Her stepdad was a chef con-tracted by Google prior to the pan-demic. Since the offices closed, Vazquez said, the company has sent checks that have somewhat helped to sustain the family. But around last week, according to Vazquez, all the contracted chefs at Google were given a 60-day no-tice that their contract would not be renewed and that they would be let go.

So far, her family has received zero help from federal govern-ment aid. Vazquez and a few oth-ers in her family are some of the 11 million undocumented immi-grants in the U.S. who were left out of the two stimulus packages passed in 2020.

While millions of Americans have received COVID-19 relief, Vazquez and her family have been left behind to fend for themselves.

“At the moment, when this hit and they talked about all this gov-ernment help, we knew we were not gonna qualify at all,” Vazquez said. “We just had to see how we could make it through without the help that everybody else was getting.”

The closest her family has got-ten to a stimulus check so far was $500 from Sacred Heart Com-munity Service — a resource Vazquez said her family only heard about through a Latin radio station.

To add to the financial instabil-ity, there’s now disruption as well: Vazquez and her family are plan-ning to move out of Palo Alto, a city she has lived in for most of her life.

Owing to a complicated own-ership situation at the Buena Vis-ta Mobile Home Park, Vazquez said her mobile home unit is one of around 11 on the prop-erty the owners of the park are trying to get rid of. Her options were either to live in a smaller unit within the park or be paid to relocate entirely. Vazquez went with the latter.

With such short notice of the move, Vazquez said her family will not be able to purchase a new mobile home elsewhere. Instead, for the next few years, Vazquez and her family will rent another mobile home in Sunnyvale.

For Vazquez, what’s helped the most throughout the past year hasn’t been the small checks or

the news of a vaccine — though it certainly helps her feel that there will be an end to the pandemic — but rather familial support.

“We’re actually really family-oriented,” she said. “Throughout this whole time, we actually had each other so that’s what really helped all of us.”

Vazquez is happy to report that no one in her family was infected with the coronavirus.

With her fiance, she hopes that she will start talking about a new family when things become more stable.

“It’s a little weird how every-thing happened,” she said, “But it’s become a new normal.”

Email Editorial Assistant Lloyd Lee at [email protected].

A life put on holdGrit, family and a Latin radio station are

the few things helping one family to hang onby Lloyd Lee

‘We are barely recovering.’

— Francisca Vazquez

Francisca Vazquez and her siblings, Jorge Amir and Camantha De la Luz, stand in the doorway of their home in Buena Vista Mobile Home Park in Palo Alto on March 3. Vazquez has picked up gig work during the last year to make ends meet.

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were children who desperately needed in-person support.

“If I was going to be a par-ent wanting her to go back then I needed to do that at my job as well,” she said.

Clark was part of the first group of teachers and students to return to elementary campuses in Oc-tober. She couldn’t help but feel like a guinea pig, but she said her husband’s experience of working at a hospital helped ground her. Throughout the fall, she watched heated debates over reopening in-tensify in Zoomed school board meetings and on social media, pit-ting teachers against parents.

She said she felt confident in the district’s safety protocols, but it was troubling not being able to control students’ and families’ behaviors outside the classroom. Her students, too young to know any better, would blurt out that their family was planning to travel to Hawaii over the holidays or that they were allowed to have

playdates without masks on.“It was a little hard to stomach

when my husband is working 15-hour days,” Clark said. “It almost felt like there were two worlds go-ing on — some were sacrificing a lot, and some weren’t sacrificing anything.”

Her fears eased over time as she adjusted to a new way of interact-ing with students — and especial-ly when she saw them benefiting from being back in school.

“It was such a joy to see them on the first day of school. It was like they came to life,” she said.

Unlike in the spring, when they moved to distance learning with

students they already knew, this year’s class only knew each other and their teacher as squares on a computer screen.

“Some kids you would think were alright on Zoom and then they get into the classroom and you see a different side to them or a different personality. Was all this going outside the camera view?” she said.

Clark didn’t hesitate to send her youngest daughter back to school for hybrid learning when the option became available, and it’s been a “game changer,” Clark said. In the fall, she initially let her older children decide if they would want to return, back when the district thought high schools would be able to reopen in Janu-ary — but has since changed her mind. Now, a year into the pan-demic and with options for high schoolers to come to campus to Zoom from classrooms on the horizon, “there’s no question,” she said. “I know they need to go back. I see that they need that social interaction with their peers.”

A year into their new life, the

family has settled into a routine. Her husband, who’s now vacci-nated, leaves for work at 5 a.m. Clark leaves at 7:30 a.m. to be at Duveneck three days a week, where she wears a N95 mask and has learned to talk loudly over the industrial air purifier whir-ring in the back of the classroom. The oldest Clark daughter drives her sister to school in the morn-ings and makes sure her younger brother (who no longer plays club soccer, his busy pre-pandemic ac-tivity) is up for his online classes.

Clark sees herself in educa-tors who are nervous about com-ing back to work this spring and is now in the position of sharing several months of reopening ex-perience, both the good and the challenging. The vaccine will make a huge difference in teach-ers’ comfort levels, she said. She was excited and relieved to get her first vaccine shot on Monday.

The biggest challenge of the last 12 months, Clark said, re-mains living with the stress of the unknown. What if she or her husband is exposed to the corona-virus and brings it home? When

will she be able to hug her parents or get together with her siblings, freely, for a family barbecue?

“I’m not usually a person who’s anxious. I seriously have had some anxiety just trying to keep every-thing together and afloat,” Clark said. “We’re all just trying to keep our head above water and get to that finish line, wherever it is. Just like everyone else, right?”

But she comes back to that silver lining: family. She got to spend more time than she would have otherwise with her oldest daughter before she leaves for college. They talk about mental health and tell each other that everyone’s allowed to have bad days.

“It’s been a really hard year. When one person is up, some-one might be down but you help each other meet in the middle and bring that person back up where maybe we didn’t do that before as a family so much,” Clark said. “We know now that we’re a really tight-knit family.”

Email Staff Writer Elena Kadvany at [email protected].

‘Before the pandemic ... it was just go, go, go all the time. When all of that stopped, it made you say: Was all that really important?’

— Jessica Clark

Jessica Clark(continued from page 20)


Cover Story

V anessa Bain, an organizer and nonprofit leader who lives in Menlo Park, knows

she probably isn’t alone in calling the pandemic “the hardest period of protracted, long precarity and uncertainty in my life.”

As an advocate for essential workers, a mom and one of eight family members stuck mainly at home together over the past year, figuring out how to juggle the demands of advocating for gig workers, protecting her fam-ily and taking care of herself has been a struggle, she explained in a recent interview.

“It just feels like a constant struggle to really achieve any kind of balance. And at times, I feel like I just have to throw my hands up and be like, ‘OK, there’s no such thing as balance,’” she said.

The past year has been a chal-lenging one for gig workers in particular, a fact Bain, as an ad-vocate for their interests, has felt acutely.

Bain has worked for the gig grocery shopping and delivery company Instacart and has been a longtime organizer on behalf of its workers. Because she shares a home with seniors who are vulner-able to developing complications from COVID-19, though, she has abstained from making food de-liveries for most of the past year.

Instead, she transitioned to working full-time as the execu-tive director of the gig worker organizing nonprofit Gig Work-ers Collective. Because funding for the nonprofit is so limited, she isn’t taking a paycheck there yet, she said.

The hardest moment of the past year came at the onset of the pan-demic, she said. When the shel-ter-in-place orders came out in California, Instacart announced it planned to hire 300,000 new workers. At first, being declared an essential worker felt like a privilege — it meant being able to work while many, many others weren’t.

But “what became very clear very quickly is that essential is just a useful euphemism for dis-posable,” she said.

“None of us had access to (per-sonal protective equipment); none of us had access to, like, disinfec-tants or sanitizers or anything like that,” Bain explained.

So she and her colleagues helped to organize a nationwide walkout for Instacart shoppers.

Even as the workforce of gig-work grocery shoppers doubled or even tripled over the past year, she said, Instacart and other compa-nies providing essential services failed to support their workers.

“There’s a lot of folks that have showed up day in, day out throughout the pandemic to do work in an essential capacity. And I think all of our companies have really failed to properly pro-tect us and make us feel safe and comfortable in our workplaces, let alone adequately compensate us for the risks that we’re taking.”

Another blow to gig worker protections that Bain found per-sonally devastating was when California voters passed Propo-sition 22 in November.

The proposition, heavily fund-ed by gig companies, exempts app-based transportation and delivery companies from having to comply with state legislation Assembly Bill 5 and lets them continue to classify their work-ers as independent contractors rather than employees. The ex-emption means those companies do not have to provide traditional employee benefits like overtime, paid sick time or health care to their gig workers.

Its passage, she said, was dis-heartening because the legislation has clearly been profitable for

those companies and its impacts won’t affect just the gig econo-my but also properly classified employees.

Still, she’s not giving up. “There are a lot of us that are

committed to seeing this through and ensuring that this isn’t a model that spreads to other places, and doesn’t get enshrined or codified into law at the national level as well,” she said.

The onus of responsibility

Bain has been doing all of her organizing work while sharing a home with her husband, their 12-year-old daughter, her sister, her sister’s partner, and a grandmother, grandfather and great-grandmoth-er — all of whom have had to learn to share a single bathroom and kitchen over the past year.

While it’s been difficult at times, being able to live with family has also provided a sense of financial security, since they are able to share bills, she said.

“I feel really grateful for having this multi-generational household where people have pooled re-sources and energy and time to-gether to take care of one another in a way that a lot of people don’t have,” she said.

But that proximity to loved ones has also come with worry

about protecting them. For instance, she worries about

how sheltering in place is affect-ing her child.

“I will say I really miss my daughter’s childhood. ... I feel in a lot of ways she’s been really stripped of it through this pan-demic,” she said. “She’s an only kid and she’s living with seven adults. I can’t imagine what that’s like on just a social and emotional level for her.”

So far, she said, they’ve all stayed safe and healthy, but for her it meant giving up app-based grocery shopping work outside the home — even while she’s had to take on some of those risks anyway as her family’s primary grocery shopper.

“I feel the onus of responsibil-ity to keep my family safe and protected, which has definitely changed the way that I would normally live my life,” she said.

On a personal level, she added, as someone who worked outside of the home pre-pandemic, she said, it has taken some adjustment for grandparents and her child to understand that just because she’s home doesn’t mean she’s available to play or help out.

Having blurrier boundaries be-tween her work and home lives has also made it harder to feel that she’s fully succeeding in one realm or the other, she said.

“I still continue to feel like I’m constantly failing everybody around me, everything I do, be it work or my personal life, because I feel like there aren’t the same kind of parameters around how you allocate time,” she said.

“I’ve actually felt a pretty tre-mendous amount of guilt around the idea that I can’t dedicate my-self fully to work or home right now. I’m constantly split between the two,” she said. “And it ... has definitely led to some very real changes in my mental health and well-being.”

Looking back, she said, one les-son she’s learned from her pan-demic experience is the impor-tance of self-care. It didn’t come easily, and it took seeing other people she loves struggle with similar challenges for her to take the matter seriously, she said.

“You’re not really any good to anybody else if you’re not feel-ing OK or feeling capable of do-ing things,” she said. “I’ve had to hold myself accountable more to my well-being.”

“I feel like I’m advocating for myself more at this point than I have in a long time,” she added. “And I think that’s actually some-thing that, while it’s challenging, is long overdue.”

Email Almanac Staff Writer Kate Bradshaw at [email protected].

Finding her footingNonprofit leader, mom and advocate for gig

workers shares challenges of her pandemic year by Kate Bradshaw

Vanessa Bain gave up gig work with Instacart during the pandemic in order to protect the health of older family members in her multigenerational household in Menlo Park.

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‘I feel the onus of responsibility to keep my family safe and protected, which has definitely changed the way that I would normally live my life.’

—Vanessa Bain

a month of isolation and recovery, the first thing she did when she tested negative for the virus was to enjoy her garden. It’s the place where she finds solace and con-nection to nature, she said.

As it is for other people, the pandemic shutdown has taken away many things she used to en-joy to the fullest: gatherings with friends, travel and seeing family.

“I miss the social life I had. I

miss the freedom of being able to travel around. Life under COVID has been more sedentary.

“We watch more TV than nor-mal. I don’t cook as much. We buy more food (from restaurants). On average, four to five days a week, we order from outside,” she said.

“Before COVID, I had lost weight. After COVID, I gained every single drop back.”

Arima does go out with one or two friends to walk or to social-ize, but the luncheons with a large group are on hold for now. Zoom

meetings fill some of the void.Arima has used her experi-

ence with COVID-19 to further scientific research. She has vol-unteered in two studies at Stan-ford University School of Medi-cine, including one investigating the mental health impacts of the coronavirus, she said.

On Feb. 20, she and her hus-band discussed their experiences with the virus in a Zoom webi-nar with doctors from Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Kaiser Permanente. The event attracted 500 people, she said.

She also has found a philo-sophical silver lining in the pandemic.

“The society is moving so fast — too fast for anybody to catch up,” she said of the Bay Area’s frenetic pace.

But things happen in life to make people change their pace.

“Sometimes it slows down so we can stop and smell the roses,” she said.

Arima has taken that adage to heart. Her family has bonded more since her son is working from home now, and the Arimas

also have rediscovered long-for-gotten, simple joys.

“We went to a drive-in movie. We haven’t gone to a drive-in for years,” she said.

Email Staff Writer Sue Dremann at [email protected].

Monica Arima(continued from page 20)

About the cover: Residents share how the pandemic has changed their lives one year in. Photos by Magali Gauthier and Frederica Armstrong. Illustration by Douglas Young.


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W hat do a whimsical marching band, a playful sculpture, data about mu-nicipal trees and a scavenger hunt

have in common? As the COVID-19 pan-demic lumbers on — keeping performing arts venues shuttered, museums and galler-ies limited, and Zoom fatigue very, very real — the Palo Alto Public Art Department is ready to spruce things up with some color-ful, uplifting new projects that can be safely encountered.

“Temporary public art has become a re-ally big field,” the city’s Public Art Program Director Elise DeMarzo said in a recent in-terview. “There’s a really big focus right now for everyone because, while we like our big splashy permanent artworks and our big ar-chitectural artworks, those take a lot of time to engage. People really need some joy and relief now.”

In addition to offering something to the public, it’s also a way of supporting numer-ous artists during a tough time, she added.

First up in the new batch of works are the eight site-specific murals bringing good vibrations to the downtown and California Avenue business districts. The project was commissioned in conjunction with the city’s Uplift Local initiative and more funding is available to continue the program if the mu-rals prove popular and more potential host sites come forward, DeMarzo said. The im-ages are printed on aluminum, applied like wallpaper, recyclable and expected to remain in place for up to a year.

The work of Downtown North artist Lau-ren Berger has what she calls a “bohemian California feminist idealism,” reflected in her mix of 1970s inspiration and fresh, con-temporary aesthetic. Her new mural, “See You Soon” is located close to home, at 542 High St.

“My digital illustrations typically live out their existences on screen, so the opportunity

to have my digital artwork printed 8 feet wide for a public audience of passersby was really exciting to me,” Berger said.

“See You Soon” depicts an engaging scene of current life in the slice of downtown Palo Alto in which it’s displayed, complete with Stanford Theatre marquee, outdoor dining and safely masked socializing.

“I was inspired by the supportive and in-terconnected nature of our community dur-ing this difficult and historic time,” she said. “Our dependence on one another has really come into focus for me this past year, wheth-er it’s risking one’s health to provide impor-tant services, supporting local businesses, or simply wearing a mask.”

Another Palo Alto artist, Robin Apple, uses iPhone photography to create color-ful, abstracted and collaged images, often inspired by local nature. Her “Sunrise at the Baylands, 2020” is installed at 668 Ramona St.

Apple, who’s also a clinical psychologist, said her work is informed by emotion within a cultural context.

“In today’s divisive world, I’m eager to create art that expresses themes of diversity. Because my phone serves as my art studio, I’m able to encounter all kinds of interest-ing and stimulating environments and situ-ations,” she wrote in her application, which she shared with this news organization.

Over at 265 California Ave., Damon Be-langer’s “California Avenue Marching Band” offers the neighborhood some welcome cheer, with a host of intriguing characters parading by. “They may look a bit odd, and they might play off key, but everyone’s wel-come to join in and sing along,” according to the mural’s description from the Palo Alto Public Art Program.

All eight murals can be found with the help of an interactive map (at tinyurl.com/Palo-Altoartmap) which provides information on

each artwork, in addition to its location.Meanwhile, the city and Uplift Local have

continued to offer funding and receive appli-cations on a rolling basis for its $1,000 Artlift microgrants, aimed at sparking nontradition-al artwork, interactions and performances.

“It’s a good mix of projects, some from high-traffic communities and other ones that are very neighborhood-specific, which is re-ally the intent,” DeMarzo said of the propos-als received so far. “Everyone’s been isolated for a long time. This could be a good way for people to find connection, even if we have to isolate a little longer.”

Seventeen microgrant projects have been selected already and the first are starting to appear around town, including Connie Ch-uang, Debra Cen and David Peng’s “Trees of Gratitude in Old Palo Alto: Lunar New Year Celebration, 2021,” which is located at Bryant Street and Lowell Avenue (a new version of an installation that first appeared in December). A scavenger hunt by Palo Al-tan Susan Meade is likely the next to launch. Meade will be creating artworks from her daily walks around Palo Alto and leaving small reproductions for finders to keep and post online, DeMarzo said.

Atherton artist Priyanka Rana’s upcoming installation involves help from the youngest members of the community. Her project will be a sculpture made up of small toys donated by kids — an ode to how children have strug-gled and persevered over the past year and a way for them to participate in art.

“I want to tell them, ‘We are proud of the resilience that you’ve shown,’” Rana said. “My proposal was that public art often ne-glects children as viewers, which is a shame because they are the most curious of us all.”

She wanted her microgrant work to be in-stalled somewhere accessible to children, so locals will soon be able to find it at Edith Johnson Park. She’s enthusiastic about public art in general, especially with museums and other venues still pretty restricted. “Let the museums come to us,” she mused. “Let the art come to people.”

Rana said she was touched and inspired by how many busy families have gone out of their way to contribute toys to the project so far.

“I hope they bring the kids to the park and see this art piece,” she said. “They can see how their individual toys come together and create one form. The toys tell their own stories.”

She also hopes kids will be inspired to take things that may be destined for the landfill

and recycle them into something new.“It’s fascinating because my kids have

contributed toys (to previous projects) and said, ‘What a waste, mom! Why are you wasting toys in a sculpture?’” she said with a laugh, “but they also love to see how it comes together.”

Other potential microgrant ideas DeMarzo mentioned include a plan by a high school student to restore, paint and make available a piano to the public; a songwriter who wants to compose something for getting kids ex-cited to return to school; and a proposal to use a meditation exercise to create a mural at Gunn High School.

While the intent of the microgrants pro-gram is indeed to fund an eclectic mix of projects outside of what may more typically constitute public art, DeMarzo acknowl-edged that, as the COVID-19 pandemic con-tinues, projects that involve in-person inter-action or live performances are less feasible at the moment. Still, with funding secured for up to 40 projects through September, she encourages performing artists to apply.

“We’re not seeing as many of those types of applications at the moment but we would love to,” she said.

King Plaza, in front of City Hall, has been home to temporary artwork for long before the COVID-19 crisis hit. Starting this week, the plaza will be host to a very Palo Alto-sounding project — Adam Marcus’ “Arbor.” Marcus took data about Palo Alto’s more than 45,000 public trees from the city’s Open Data Portal and turned it into a sculptural, three-dimensional map of sorts, representing all the trees in every direction, radiating out from King Plaza.

“This is like a data geek’s perfect artwork,” DeMarzo laughed. This data spatialization of Palo Alto’s urban forest, inspired by zoe-tropes and cycloramas, is anticipated to be in place for about 10 months.

While all of these recent and upcoming projects vary wildly in style, media and scope, what they have in common is the goal of enhancing the city’s vibrance and lifting public spirit. DeMarzo also hopes the initia-tives will continue giving opportunities to emerging and local artists in particular.

“Everyone’s looking for some creativity and some joy,” she said. “Hopefully we can continue to deliver that.”

For more information, go to tinyurl.com/PaloAltotemporaryart.

Arts & Entertainment Editor Karla Kane can be emailed at [email protected].

CreativityCreativityand and joyjoy


“Sunrise at the Baylands,” a mural by Robin Apple, can be found at 668 Ramona St. in Palo Alto.

Connie Chuang, Debra Cen and David Peng’s “Trees of Gratitude in Old Palo Alto: Lunar New Year Celebration” consists of wishes written on cards that are strung on the branches of two trees located at the corner of Bryant Street and Lowell Avenue.

A weekly guide to music, theater, art, culture, books and more, edited by Karla KaneArts & Entertainment

Where to find temporary murals, interactive installations and more this March

by Karla Kane | photos by Magali Gauthier


W hen her husband, Bob, was diagnosed with mixed dementia, in-

cluding Alzheimer’s disease, in 2012, Lena Chow Kuhar drew on her scientific background and medical connections to determine the best way to care for him.

After he died in 2018, the Palo Alto resident gathered some of the lessons she learned to create the podcast “Bob’s Last Marathon,” which focuses on the seven years she spent caring for the man she had first come to know through their mutual interest in long-dis-tance running.

“I thought the knowledge might be something I could share,” she said in a recent interview. “At the beginning of Bob’s illness, I didn’t know what to do and it took me quite a while to put all this togeth-er. I thought, ‘What if somebody doesn’t have access to this informa-tion? How long would it take them to find it?’”

Kuhar, who for decades ran her own advertising agency rep-resenting biotech and health care

companies, said because her com-munications business leaned to-ward science and biotechnology, she was trained to look for infor-mation and that helped her when they got the diagnosis.

“I wanted to put something out there that’s easy to access and sim-ple,” she explained.

Kuhar posted the first of her on-going weekly podcast episodes at bobsmarathon.org on Jan. 13.

In the podcast, Kuhar talks about how she decided soon after her hus-band’s diagnosis that her key focus needed to be on supporting his quality of life rather than seeking a cure.

“We learned — and it’s still true today — that there’s no cure for Alzheimer’s,” she said. “Drugs can slow the disease in some cases, but it doesn’t last, so drugs are a very small piece of it.

“Most of my energy, and the message I want to bring to the au-dience, is to focus on the quality of life, because we’re not going to get a cure in our lifetime. So, take the medication, but also focus on diet,

exercise, social interaction and cog-nitive therapeutics.”

The Kuhars already were eat-ing a lot of fish and vegetables so it wasn’t a big leap for them to cook with fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean protein — the sta-ples of the Mediterranean diet his doctors recommended.

As time went on, Lena Chow Kuhar took charge of her husband’s multiple medications, including two for Alzheimer’s, to ensure that he took them as instructed and that refills were ordered in time.

She hired a helper to come to the house and work with him on cogni-tive exercises and games.

The Kuhars long had been pas-sionate exercisers — they first got to know each other in a lunchtime running group at the pharmaceu-tical company where they both worked — and Kuhar was still run-ning at the time of his diagnosis at age 76.

“As he became less mobile, I re-alized we needed to make an extra

Living WellA monthly special section of news & information for seniors

Bob’s Last Marathon’Widow shares insights gained in husband’s Alzheimer’s journey

Palo Alto resident Lena Chow Kuhar has launched the weekly podcast called “Bob’s Last Marathon” based on lessons she learned during the seven years she cared for her husband after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

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Lena Chow Kuhar displays a stuffed bear with a handwritten note that her husband, Bob, gave to her.

Photos of Lena Chow Kuhar and her husband, Bob, adorn a table at her Palo Alto home. Photo by Magali Gauthier.

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Calendar of EventsLiving Well MARCH 2021

For complete schedule or info about Avenidas events, call 650-289-5400

I belong to Avenidas Village ...

... for the social connections!• Sheltering in place made it a lot

harder for me to connect with

friends the way I used to.

• Avenidas Village helped me

learn Zoom to join social

activities like happy hours

and conversation groups. We

even have some in-person,

safely distanced gatherings

such as lunch in the park and

walking group!

• The Village community helps

me feel like I am not alone.

Attend a Free Coffee Chat to learn more!

Visit www.avenidasvillage.org to learn more and sign up!

(650) 289-5405

Mar 1Mandarin webinar: Conversation Guide for Advance Care Planning with Shirley Pan1:30-2:30pm via Zoom. Presented in Mandarin only. RSVP for log on info to [email protected]. Free.

LGBTQ Senior Empowerment & Connections Group2:30 to 4pm via Zoom, 1st & 3rd Mondays. Email [email protected] with subject “Connections” for log on info. Free.

Mar 2Techie Tuesdays Explore Tech Lectures2-3:15pm via Zoom, on Tuesdays. For information or to register email [email protected]. Free.

Mar 3Mindfulness Meditation, every Wednesday2-3pm, via Zoom. Visit www.Avenidas.org for log on information. Free.

Mar 4Wonder Women Lesbian Social Group via ZoomEvery 1st & 3rd Thursday, 3-4pm via Zoom. Email [email protected] for info and to register. Free.

Mar 5National Day of Unplugging.Try it. You might like it.

Mar 8Tech and Innovation Discussion Group via Zoom12-1pm, on Mondays. For info or to register email [email protected]. Free.

Mar 9Mandarin Multi-lingual Technology Program9:30-10:30 am via Zoom, on Tuesdays. Offered in Mandarin only. RSVP required by the Friday before the class. For more information or to register email [email protected]. Free.

Mar 10Book Club: The Moment of Lift by Melinda2:30-4pm, via Zoom. RSVP for log on info to [email protected]. Free.

Webinar: Hoarding: The Stuff Underneath the Stuff with Emily Nagaonkar MSW11am-12:15pm via Zoom. RSVP for log on info to [email protected]. Free.

Mar 11Gay Men’s Walking Group Planning Meeting3-3:30pm, 2nd & 4th Thursdays via Zoom. Email [email protected] for more info and to register. Free.

Song Appreciation Group “Road Trip Songs”3-4pm via Zoom. Email [email protected] for more info and to register. Free.

Mar 12National Plant a Flower Day.

Mar 15Bilingual webinar: Research Updates: Latest in Alzheimer’s Treatment and Research with Peining Chang1-2pm via Zoom. Presented in Mandarin only. RSVP for log on info to [email protected]. Free.

Mar 16Apple Tech Tutoring1:15-3:30pm via Zoom, on Tuesdays. RSVP required. Email [email protected]. Free.

Mar 17Town Hall: The Challenges of Aging, Caregiving in the Time of Covid-19: Strategies and Solutions with Dr. Mehrdad Ayati11am-12:30pm via Zoom. RSVP for log on info to [email protected]. Free.

Mar 18Tinnitus Support Group5:30-7:30pm via Zoom. RSVP for log on info to [email protected]. Free.

Mar 19World Sleep Day.Zzzzzzzzz….

Mar 22Getting Started on Zoom10-11am via Zoom, on Mondays. Senior Planet @Avenidas. RSVP to [email protected] for log on information. Free.

Mar 23National Puppy Day.And who doesn’t love puppies?

Mar 24Wellness Wednesdays Explore Tech Lectures2-3:15pm via Zoom, on Wednesdays. For info or to register email [email protected]. Free.

Mar 25Book Club: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart2:30-4pm, via Zoom. RSVP for log on info to [email protected]. Free.

Song Appreciation Group “Favorite Song from Movie Soundtrack”3-4pm via Zoom. Email [email protected] for more info and to register. Free.

Mar 26Spinach Day.Try a new recipe with this super-food.

Mar 29Meet Me Mondays Explore Tech Lectures2-3:15pm via Zoom, on Mondays. For info or to register email [email protected]. Free.

Mar 30Apple Tech Tutoring1:15-3:30pm, on Tuesdays. RSVP required. Email [email protected]. Free.

Mar 31Hosting A Zoom Meeting10-11am via Zoom, on Wednesdays, Senior Planet @Avenidas. RSVP to [email protected] for log on info. Free.


Your Realtor & You2021 Silicon Valley REALTORS® Leadership Installed

The Silicon Valley Association of REALTORS® 2021 leadership team was installed on Feb. 4 on Zoom. National Association of REALTORS® 2020 President Vince Malta administered the oath of office to 2021 SILVAR President Joanne Fraser. California Association of REALTORS® 2021 President Dave Walsh installed SILVAR's 2021 officers and board directors.

Fraser is a REALTOR® with Compass Los Altos. Along with Fraser, SILVAR's 2021 officers are Brett Caviness, a REALTOR® with Compass, Menlo Park, President-elect; and Jeff Bell, broker manager of Coldwell Banker Realty, Cupertino, Treasurer.

SILVAR's 2021 board directors are Mary Kay Groth (Sereno), Past President; Alan Barbic (Barbic Real Estate Group), Region 9 Chair; Jim Hamilton (Compass), NAR Director; District Chairs Katherine Frey (Katherine Frey Real Estate), Los Altos-Mountain View; Elizabeth Doyle (Sereno), Los Gatos-Saratoga; Selena Young (Coldwell Banker), Menlo Park-Atherton; Pat Kapowich (Kapowich Real Estate), Cupertino-Sunnyvale; Lori Buecheler (Compass), Palo Alto; and Directors At-large Ketan Jashapara (Compass), Karen Trolan (Sereno), Suzanne Yost (Compass), and Eileen Giorgi (Sereno).

Fraser moved to Mountain View from Maryland in 1970. She worked as an RN in the emergency room, critical care, medical and surgical at Stanford and El Camino hospitals until she decided to change careers in 1977.

A Certified Residential Specialist and member of the Residential Real Estate

Council (formerly CRS), Fraser served as 2007 president of the CRS NorCal chapter, was regional vice president, and served on the national RRC board. She was the 2006 and 2016 CRS of the Year and received the 2012 CRS Medallion award for her volunteer service.

Fraser has achieved NAR Emeritus status, served on NAR's Global Business & Alliances Committee and Certified International Property Specialist Advisory Board. At SILVAR, Fraser has served as president of the Silicon Valley REALTORS® Charitable Foundation, chair of the Global Busines Council, a board director and member of many committees.

Fraser said she wants to move on from a pandemic year. "It's the time to turn the page; it's not going to be the same old thing.”

Fraser urged members to get more involved in Association activities and share her passion for leadership. "Leadership is having a vision and looking for the future ... I'm truly looking forward to building a team, people who want to work together for a common goal, so that we can make SILVAR the best Association in the Bay Area."

Sponsors of the installation ceremony include Presenting Sponsor Compass, TourFactory, JCP-LGS Hazard Disclosures, and Water Tower Creative.

***

Information provided in this column is presented by the Silicon Valley Association of REALTORS®. Send questions to Rose Meily at [email protected].

CONFRONTING THE CLUTTER ... Social worker Emily Nagaonkar will discuss tools to deal with harmful behaviors in a free, virtual presentation titled “Hoarding: The Stuff Underneath the Stuff” on Wednesday, March 10, at 11 a.m. Nagaonkar will address indicators and risks of hoarding behaviors as well as tools and community resources to help. To register for the Zoom link, email [email protected].

FARMWORKER PANDEMIC STORIES ... Hector Armienta, composer and artistic director of Opera Cultura — a Latinx opera company based in San Jose — will discuss the development of his newest work, “Mi Camino: The Pandemic Stories of Farmworkers,” on Tuesday, March 16, at 1 p.m. The free, virtual presentation is part of the Community Conversations series at the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center. To register for the Zoom link, email Michelle Rosengaus at [email protected].

PANDEMIC AND THE ARTS ... Angela McConnell, executive director of the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, will discuss “Art in the Times of Chaos,” Wednesday, March 17, from 12:25 to 1:30 p.m. McConnell, a Los Altos resident who previously headed the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, will address how the pandemic has impacted the arts and how creativity and innovation have inspired resilience and hope. The free, virtual event is sponsored by Branch 35 of Sons in

Retirement, which invites all men and women who are retired, or thinking about retiring, to join the online meeting. To register for the Zoom link, call Paul Schutz at 408-313-6852 by March 15.

LGBTQ NETWORKING ... The Avenidas Rainbow Collective offers an assortment of free and inclusive programs for friends and members of the LGBTQ community, including an LGBTQ Senior Empowerment and Connections Group, a Wonder Women’s Lesbian Social Group and a Gay Men’s Walking Group. For more information and schedules, go to avenidas.org and click on “Programs,” email Thomas Kingery at [email protected] or call 650 289-5433.

PERSISTENCE AFTER STROKE ... REACH, a 30-year-old local program offering rehabilitation therapy for stroke survivors, has re-opened virtually and is actively seeking new members. Occupational therapists, physical therapists and speech pathologists offer exercise, education, socialization and support. Before the pandemic, REACH was a longtime fixture at Cubberley Community Center. For more information, go to reachprogram.net.

THE FINAL CHAPTER ... Hospice nurse, author and filmmaker Barbara Karnes will read from an assortment of her books geared to supporting people navigating end-of-life issues in a free virtual event Thursday, March 25, at 7 p.m. For more information or to register for the Zoom link, go to missionhospice.org and click on “Events Calendar.”

Items for Senior Focus may be emailed to Palo Alto Weekly Contributing Writer Chris Kenrick at [email protected].

Senior Focus

A Better Way to CareHire a private nurse for Mom or Dad’s care, and get the peace of mind that accompanies working with a licensed medical professional.

To learn more or schedule a consultation with a Nursing Specialist, visit nurseregistry.com or call (650) 523-9149

Living Well

effort to exercise,” Kuhar said. “We were running, then walking and then he became wheelchair-bound, but there was always get-ting up from the wheelchair and shooting hoops or doing weights.”

A trainer friend came over twice a week to keep him moving.

“The day before he passed away, Bob was doing hand weights in his wheelchair — by that time he was no longer able to walk on his own,” Kuhar said. “I found it comfort-ing to feel his strong grip and to see the in-evitable smile when he was up and about, exercising at the level that he could.”

Kuhar enrolled her husband in the adult day program at Rosener House in Menlo Park, where he benefited from the social contact, she said. “At the beginning, he’d be hanging out by the coffee pot, talking with other people. He enjoyed the current

events discussions.“He did what he was able and, as his

abilities declined, he was more observing, watching and enjoying, but that was also a very rich experience.”

In different episodes, Kuhar draws on an array of top Alzheimer’s experts as well as people with firsthand experience as care-givers. In one episode titled “Friends,” she discusses ways that friends can support families caring for someone with dementia.

Based on her caregiving experience, Ku-har is keeping her podcast episodes short — about 10 minutes per week — and of-fering transcripts as well as audio. “People caring for someone with dementia and Al-zheimer’s don’t have much time,” she said. “Also, there’s a generation — actually my generation — who are not that much into podcasts, so they can read a transcript.”

For more information, go to bobsmara-thon.com.

Contributing Writer Chris Kenrick can be emailed at [email protected].

Last marathon(continued from page 28)


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