Silicon Valley International School, a private school known for its bilingual immersion programs, is preparing to expand its Palo Alto footprint by building a second campus on East Meadow Circle.

According to an application that the school filed in December, Silicon Valley International School is looking to close its existing campus on Pope Street in Menlo Park, where it's renting space, and construct a new two-story school with a playground and a rooftop yard at 1066 East Meadow Circle.

If approved, the new 46,000-square-foot facility would supplement the school's existing Palo Alto campus at 151 Laura Lane, which the school has owned and occupied since 2000.

The new building will contain classrooms, administrative offices, a multi-purpose room, a maker space, a library and collaborative workspaces for teachers, according to the application filed by Studio Bondy Architecture, which is representing the school. The new campus also proposes two outdoor play areas, one just outside the building and another on the rooftop.

The school, which serves students from preschool through 12th grade, acquired the property at East Meadow Circle last year. The project description notes that the newly constructed building would be for students in preschool through second grade.

Barbara Greiner, head of school at the Silicon Valley International School, told this publication that the school has been in Palo Alto since 1979 and has worked well the city. It also had two campuses in Palo Alto between 1995 and 2021 before it moved one of them to Menlo Park.

"As we are looking for a new home for our Menlo Park campus, it makes sense to have both campuses in the same town and county," Greiner said in an email.

The school's pre-application is the first step in Palo Alto's often lengthy and occasionally contentious approval process for new developments. Castilleja School, another private school with growing ambitions, faced six years of heated public hearings before finally winning the council's approval in June 2022.

Much like Castilleja, the Silicon Valley International School will require a conditional use permit to operate a school at its proposed location. There are, however, key differences between the two projects.

Castilleja's campus is located on Bryant Street in the Old Palo Alto neighborhood, and the tense approval process featured extensive debates over whether the project's proposed scale and its central features (most notably, an underground garage) belong in what is largely a single-family neighborhood.

These arguments are unlikely to apply to the Silicon Valley International School, whose East Meadow Circle site sits on a south Palo Alto property zoned for "research, office and light manufacturing." And the City Council did not seem particularly concerned about the project in April 2022, when it held a perfunctory public hearing to help the school finance the project. Not a single council member advocated for or against the project.

There are, however, numerous homes adjacent of the property, including Eichler-style dwellings along Louis Road. The school's architects wrote in the project description that the new school has been designed to "respect the scale and character of the surrounding neighborhood, while simultaneously using the school's programmatic needs to shape the building."

The existing single-story commercial building would be demolished and replaced with a two-story U-shaped building. The building's three sides would provide a "protected area" for the play yard, the project description notes.

"The U-shaped building is rotated so that the building provides visual and acoustic separation of the preschool play yard from the residential neighbors to the east and south," the project architects wrote. "This site plan also locates the parking lot furthest away from the residential neighbors." n