More than 40 speakers on both sides of the issue addressed the school board, many of them expressing exasperation over the lengthy process to come up with a new middle school.
One speaker submitted a petition with almost 1,300 signatures of people calling on the board to consider Cunha as a site for a new or refurbished middle school.
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With the project at a standstill, the board decided at the March meeting to look at other sites besides Wavecrest, including the Cunha site downtown, where the middle school is currently located.
Lisa Longaker, a physical education teacher at Cunha, read a letter signed by 20 teachers from the middle school stating the reasons they wanted a new site. They said that Cunha is too small and that it was not designed to be a middle school.
"(The kids) deserve a new school," said Longaker. "They do not deserve a cut-and-paste job."
Supporters of the Cunha site say it is central, the best site environmentally and economically and will avoid urban sprawl and traffic congestion. They admitted it was not ideal, but that the community could find a way to make it work.
"There is no perfect site," said Sonja Myhre. "There are absolutely challenges but I think we can rise to the challenge."
A bigger challenge might be toning down the heated rhetoric around the choosing of a middle school site, said Leslie McCarthy, who favors the Cunha site.
"I was disturbed at the end of the last meeting when I felt that at the end we were dismissed as obstructionists or extremists," she said. "I'm a good citizen and, like all good citizens, I want what's best for my kids and all of Half Moon Bay's kids."
McCarthy presented the board with a petition with nearly 1,300 signatures of people who said they supported building at the Cunha site.
The petition itself was assailed by some of the speakers, one of whom said that they felt people had been "strong-armed" into signing the petition.
Trustee Ken Wilson said that he saw at least a half dozen names on the petition who had told him they supported Wavecrest and one woman had called him saying she'd been accosted outside of Safeway.
"It causes me to question the veracity of the numbers," he said. "I know there aren't 1,300 people who signed that petition voluntarily."
Nonsense, said Cunha site supporters. The sheer number of signatures accumulated in less than a week is a sign, they said, that there is more support than the petition suggests, not less.
"That's democracy in action," said John Lynch, co-chair of League for Coastside Protection.
"I didn't see any strong-arming. I had people ripping it out of my hands."
"We thought you wanted to hear the voice of the community," MidCoast Councilman Ric Lohman told the school board. "So we go get 1,300 signatures. That's in 5 or 6 days ...I think 1,300 people should be listened to."
People at the Thursday night meeting constantly referred back to the heated May 20 meeting, where the mood turned contentious when Trustee Ken Wilson said that, because of the wording of the bond measure, the board might not be able to rebuild at Cunha. One speaker said he would lie down in front of the bulldozers if construction started at Wavecrest. School Board President Ken Jones called people who said it was Cunha or nothing "eco-terrorists."
Leonard Woren, a member of the League for Coastside Protection, which has opposed Wavecrest, demanded an apology from Jones, saying that the definition of an eco-terrorist is a person who commits a crime to save nature. "I don't see any crime that's been committed here," he said.
Former school board member Burt Jones gave the board a toy bulldozer, suggesting that the president give it out as the "Bull Award" to the person who makes the most ridiculous statement at a school board meeting.
But Cunha teacher Ben Pittenger said that the hot tone of the debate came about because it's an important one. He said he has friends on all sides of the issue and that, although he was concerned about Cunha, he was more concerned about Wavecrest because of the environmental impact.
"When we're talking about wetlands, we're talking about the incubation of an entire species," he said.
Pittenger added that, although environmentalists were now being called obstructionists, there had been obstruction in the past to obtaining evidence about wetlands at Wavecrest.
Dorothy Tigerman, a retired teacher from Cunha, said that the site was as old as she was and it was time to move on.
"Think what puberty does," she said. "Children 12 to 14 do not belong in the center of town. I'm tired of roadblocks. I think the Coastal Commission is going to approve Wavecrest."
Some students came to the meeting to express their views about a new site. Alisa Gammon and her brother Ben, both at Half Moon Bay High School, said Cunha is too small and crowded. Their brother, Gabe, a graduate, said the same thing in his remarks.
But not all students agree. The day after the meeting, in front of Cunha, seventh-grader Heather Rose said that she doesn't feel crowded and if the school was at Wavecrest, kids would have to walk further.
"I think they should just leave the school how it is," she said. "Cunha has nothing wrong with it."
Sixth-grader Jonathon Lee agreed. "It would be harder for all the people who live in El Granada and stuff to get to school," he said. "I don't think they should build a new school. The only problem is they need a new heater."
Chris Cunningham, a ninth-grader, said he liked being near to downtown at Cunha. "There's a lot of things you can do," he said. "(Wavecrest) would be too far away."
Trustee Ken Wilson said the more he looked at the bond, the more certain he was that it would be a violation of its terms to build at Cunha.
"This is what I do for a living," he said. "I look at laws and try and figure out how they should be interpreted.
"We are absolutely without viable alternatives as to how to move forward," Jones said.
Trustee Ruth Palmer said she felt like Sisyphus, continually rolling a large, heavy rock uphill.
"This is so bizarre," she said. "It feels like a film running backwards."
Palmer said she thought it was the right decision to build the school at Wavecrest.
"Our small town can afford to grow," she said. "Sometimes small can be too small."
The board voted 4 to 1 to remove Cunha from consideration as a site and 4 to 1 to reaffirm Wavecrest as the best site. The board invited people in the community to come forward with other sites that would meet the criteria.
The day after the meeting, Lynch said that even if the Wavecrest site eventually gets Coastal Commission approval, construction will still be held up.
"It will be five or six years before they put a spade in the ground, with challenges and so forth," he said.
Many of the people at the meeting who spoke in support of Wavecrest were members of the Coastsiders for Quality Living (CQL), Lynch claimed.
"Ken Jones is a founding member of CQL, but that never gets mentioned," he said. "The only one that gets mentioned is the League for Coastside Protection, and we're the dirty dogs. All we're trying to do is uphold the law."
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