At issue is a document called the Facilities Master Plan, which is supposed to be updated every year by the Cabrillo Unified School District (CUSD) Board of Trustees, but has not been revised since it was created in 1996.
And since assumptions about student-enrollment growth were made seven years ago - and some of those numbers have fallen short of expectations - a new master plan might come to different conclusions about what school expansions the board needs to make.
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But revising the master plan is just not feasible, CUSD board president Ken Jones said.
"It's a huge undertaking," he said. "It's not something we have a staff to do.
"What Jonathan wants to do is change the numbers on the enrollment to justify not building the middle school."
Of course, like most issues before the school district, this one, too, goes back to the not-yet-built middle school.
The board chose Wavecrest Village as a site for a new middle school back in 1997, and it has been a controversial development because of environmental and growth issues. The California Coastal Commission still has not approved the site, and many opponents of Wavecrest say the school should be built on the current downtown site of the middle school, where Cunha Intermediate School is now.
Lundell jokingly refers to himself as the "world's foremost authority on the CUSD Facilities Master Plan," and he makes no secret of his opposition to Wavecrest as a site for the middle school. In fact, he said, that opposition is what led him to his push to see the plan revised.
"In trying to understand how we'd gotten into Wavecrest, I kept hearing about this mythical Facilities Master Plan," he said.
So Lundell read the plan - many, many times. He said he is now sure that a revision of the plan with new enrollment numbers would support building the new school at Cunha.
"I'm confident that if somebody sits down and does a serious job of revising, there's going to be one clear choice of where the middle school goes," he said.
The 1996 master plan projected student enrollment to the year 2020, and predicted enrollment would double in the next 25 years. The master plan calls for a new middle school and another elementary school at the Cunha site, as well as another elementary school and middle school, eventually, somewhere else on the Coastside.
But enrollment hasn't grown at the rate predicted. In fact, it has dropped.
The plan predicted a roughly 4 percent a year hike in enrollment numbers. And, since 1996, the number of students in the middle school have fallen from 956 to 860 students. And enrollment numbers at the four district elementary schools - which feed the middle school - has also dropped since 1996 by about 16 percent.
Here's a Catch-22: Jones thinks that part of the reason for the enrollment decline is that there is no new middle school.
"There are just as many kids as the plan said there would be, but that plan didn't include Sea Crest (a private school for kindergarten through eighth grade) and the
hundreds of kids going over the hill.
"And why are they doing that? We don't have a new middle school. The population is there - it's that we don't have a product that we can sell."
Jones said that Half Moon Bay's 1 percent growth cap, as dictated by Measure D passed in 1999, doesn't mean that a new middle school won't be needed - it's all about how many children are in the houses, not how many houses there are, he said.
"It's not just about what the growth is," he said. "You can get as many kids with 1 percent as with 3 percent."
And, regardless of any enrollment numbers, Jones said the new middle school is just as vital.
"Drive by Cunha or walk by Cunha," he said, "and tell me if you want that place to be the place where we educate our kids for the next 50 years,
"What's happening inside Cunha and the high school is as good or better as anywhere else on the Peninsula, but the facilities don't reflect that."
Allen Strohmeier was on the committee that helped craft the master plan in '96. He agrees that students need a better middle school facility - but, from his point of view, that could be at Cunha.
"The kids need an improved facility, but that doesn't mean a new facility," he said.
Strohmeier said he is in favor of building or remodeling at the current site - because, he said, it's a different world now than it was seven years ago.
"We did that during the time of the dot-com revolution and everybody wanted newer and better," he said.
"You've got to be practical. It doesn't need to be brand new - it needs to be remodeled.
John Bayless, superintendent of the district, said that to revise such a huge document would be prohibitively expensive.
"It would cost in the neighborhood of $50,000," he said.
Strohmeier disagreed, saying that, this time around, it would be easier and less expensive to revise the plan than it was to create it.
"The bottom line is, do you need to do it," he said. "It's always good to have updated information. They should spend some money, but it doesn't take a task force to do it. They don't have to spend $50,000 to do it."
"There's stuff in there that doesn't have to change, like goals," Lundell added. "A lot of it is boilerplate."
And, to Lundell, even if the revision cost $50,000, it'd be worth it.
"The budget to implement the Facilities Master Plan is around $140 million," he said. "Don't we think it's worth spending $50,000 to plan the next 20 to 25 years for the district? It's not going to come out of classroom money - it's going to come out of that facilities money."
There is one more question driving this whole discussion, Bayless said.
"The greater philosophical question is, what is the proper number of students for an elementary school," Bayless said.
Dwight Wilson, a school board trustee, is sure that some of the schools in the district are crowded with too many students.
"Hatch is over 600 kids," he said. "More than 600 would be stretching the infrastructure."
El Granada Elementary School is also overcrowded, Wilson said.
"Those two schools are impacted," he said. "In all fairness to our kids, we have to address that."
Even if the Cunha site doesn't become a new elementary school, Wilson said he thinks people here are more concerned with getting the middle school built than with updating the master plan.
"No one is arguing we shouldn't have a middle school," he said. "We've got to identify where we're going to land this thing."
Once that is decided, Wilson said, he thinks the plan should be revised.
"I'm all for redoing the master plan," he said. "I'm not for hostaging the process as far as making a decision about the middle school."
Lundell said he doesn't understand that logic - that the plan revision doesn't have to change where a middle school is sited.
"Enrollment drives the whole plan," he said. "Let's go back and fix the plan."
Jones says that isn't likely to happen.
"I don't think the voting public wants the board to make stupid decisions that waste $50,000," he said.
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