With Loss of High School Site, Yorba Linda Ponders Annexation

Despite more than 10 years of rebuffs, Yorba Linda education officials are still looking for a way to withdraw the city’s students from Fullerton’s high schools in favor of a place closer to home.

Recently, Yorba Linda suggested state legislation to allow the community to withdraw from Fullerton Joint Union High School District and be annexed by the Placentia Unified or Brea-Olinda Unified school systems. Either would be closer than Fullerton to the city of 35,000.

Hope for an End to Fight But Fullerton officials, who have resisted Yorba Linda’s decade-long threat to secede, say they keep hoping Yorba Linda will finally drop the battle.

Yorba Linda has no high school of its own. Its teen-agers must travel by bus or private car as far as seven miles and across one or two other school districts to get to high schools in Fullerton.

“We’re still the only (elementary) school district in California not contiguous to our high school district,” said Sara Lee Martin, vice president of the Yorba Linda School District.

“And people here in Yorba Linda are still unhappy that our high school students have to travel so far to get to their schools.”

And so, said Martin in an interview Monday, the Yorba Linda School Board continues to seek something better. She added that the community’s hopes for building its own high school, however, are now but a faded dream.

The last remnants of hope for a separate Yorba Linda high school were laid to rest by the community’s elementary school district last Thursday.

The Yorba Linda board voted to drop its appeal of legal decisions that have blocked the city’s effort to secede and form its own school district with its own high school.

“We decided to drop the appeal because Fullerton has now sold the only land that we could have built a high school on,” said Martin.

On Dec. 28, the Fullerton Joint Union School Board sold, for about $6.5 million, a 38-acre site in Yorba Linda that had long been proposed as a high school location.

Fullerton Disputes Need

Fullerton officials said the site was sold because population projections clearly show Yorba Linda doesn’t need a high school.

“Yorba Linda has a declining school-age population,” said Joe Merlo, president of the Fullerton high school district. “Our studies show that no high school is needed for that area, but our district badly needs the money that could be made from selling that school site. We’re investing the money (from the land sale) and using the interest to help our school district.”

Martin, of the Yorba Linda School Board, said Yorba Linda is now forced to look for a solution other than building its own high school.

“We’re having informal talks now with the Fullerton (high school) board, trying to find some sort of compromise,” Martin said. She would not say what sort of compromise might emerge, pointing out that the talks have just begun.

In a separate interview, Merlo also declined to speculate about what kind of compromise could come out of the Yorba Linda-Fullerton talks. He added, however, “Sometimes I think the only thing that would please them (Yorba Linda school officials) is to allow them to secede.” He said Fullerton’s high school district would be severely hurt if Yorba Linda’s 900 high school students went somewhere else.

“We’d have to close at least one of our high schools,” Merlo said.

Half from Yorba Linda

Merlo and other district officials have pointed out that well over half of the 1,600 students at Fullerton’s Troy High School come from Yorba Linda. He said that, while it is not known if it would be Troy or another high school that would have to close if Yorba Linda seceded from the district, “there would be at least one school closing and redistricting for everybody else in the district.”

Merlo, who lives in Yorba Linda, said the community long ago decided to stick with Fullerton and not to join any of the new high school districts as they were formed during Orange County’s peak growth years.

Thus, he said, it is not a strong argument for Yorba Linda to say its students must drive through other districts to get to Fullerton high schools. “We also have students in other parts of our (Fullerton) district who have to drive farther than students in Yorba Linda,” Merlo said.

Yorba Linda came close to getting its own high school and unified district in 1977, when the state Board of Education said it would allow Yorba Linda to secede and form its own elementary and high school district if a majority of Yorba Linda voters approved.

Fullerton Won Point

Fullerton school officials challenged the state board’s ruling in court, before an election could take place. After years of litigation, the state Supreme Court in 1982 ruled that Fullerton was correct in saying that all the voters in the high school district, and not just those in Yorba Linda, should take part in any secession vote.

The ruling sent the matter back to the state Board of Education, which heard the request all over again last March, and, to the dismay of Yorba Linda school officials, decided to deny it for a second time. Yorba Linda school officials then started work on appealing that decision, and it was that appeal that was discarded last week.

“Now that we don’t have any school land to build on, there’s just no possibility for our own high school,” Martin said. “So we’ve been looking at the possibility of state legislation, something that would allow our annexation to Placentia Unified or Brea-Olinda Unified.”

Those possibilities, she added, would be pursued only if no compromise is forthcoming from the Fullerton-Yorba Linda talks.

Martin, however, said residents of Yorba Linda have made it clear that some change in their high school situation must be made.

“Hardly anyone wants it (the cross-district high school situation) to stay the way it is now,” she said.