The Big Squeeze: After Years of Declining Enrollment and Closures, San Diego School District Braces for Rapid Growth

The San Diego Unified School District, which has spent much of the last four years closing schools because of declining student enrollment, is preparing for a population boom that will force lasting educational changes in parts of the city through the turn of the century.

The rapid growth--fueled by continuing migration to the Sun Belt, more refugees and a “baby boomlet” among the generation born just after World War II--will force school officials to examine how children are taught, how to build enough classrooms to teach them in, who will teach them and how to pay for it all.

“We’re out of the decline area and we should be thinking growth,” said Ruben Carriedo, director of planning for the school district. “We should convince the general public that we are entering an area of growth like we had in the 1950s and 1960s.”

After 13 years of declining enrollment, San Diego’s schools registered an increase in student population in 1983-84. Demographers hired by the school district estimate that, by the year 2000, about 156,000 students will attend city schools, up from 113,000 today. The district will surpass its previous enrollment high by 1990, when an estimated 130,000 children will be going to school in San Diego.

The most growth is expected in four regions where overcrowding is already a problem: Mira Mesa and Scripps Ranch (Mira Mesa High School area); the South Bay (Morse High School area); Southeast San Diego (Lincoln High School, San Diego High School and Morse High School areas), and Mid-City (Hoover High School area).

At the same time, schools in established areas without new residents or young parents will continue to be under-used. In Serra Mesa, between California 163 and Interstate 15 north of Mission Valley, for example, Cubberley Elementary School has an enrollment of 253, about 200 under its capacity. Nearby, Wegeforth Elementary School, which was built for420 students, now has just 251 students. Clairemont High School, with 1,258 students, is far below its capacity.

The district, which has closed 18 schools in the last four years, may close more in the future even though total enrollment is surging, said Linda Sturak, schools utilization coordinator.

“If we had all of our wishes, the kids would be growing up where we have the schools,” Carriedo said. “Unfortunately, the numbers are appearing in places where we haven’t had them before.”

The school system has begun a massive citywide study designed to forecast how many new schools the district will need, where unexpected growth may occur, how many teachers will be required and how to fund the changes. This fall, the committee will advise the Board of Education on alternatives, which could include construction, redrawing boundary lines, or busing students.

Facilities are the primary question, Supt. Thomas W. Payzant said. While the district has yet to determine how much construction and renovation will have to be done citywide, the San Diego County Office of Education predicts that an enrollment increase of 89,000 students will require the construction of 84 elementary schools, 23 junior high schools and 12 senior high schools countywide by 1995. Total cost is estimated at $750 million.

That is just a fraction of the spending needed statewide. According to the California Commission on the Teaching Profession, it will cost $6.35 billion to fund the current backlog of school construction applications, rehabilitate old school buildings and handle projected student growth for the next 10 years.

A community study shows that the Mira Mesa area needs an estimated $50 million in new school buildings, plus expansion and renovation of some existing schools.

The school district also will need $11 million for improvements at four Mid-City elementary schools. It has already spent $10.6 million to open two new elementary schools in South Bay and a middle school in Tierrasanta this fall.

The effects of overcrowding already are plain in those areas. Mira Mesa High, San Diego’s most populous school, opened in 1976 with 1,560 students, virtually filled to capacity. Today, with 3,412 students, its 53 temporary classrooms outnumber its 52 permanent ones.

Row upon row of the temporary classrooms have usurped about one-third of the student parking lot. Shabby and in need of paint, the bungalows are an eyesore, Principal Jim Vlassis said.

“They’ve been like this for years,” Vlassis said. “How can you get kids to take pride in this?”

To relieve overcrowding, a storage closet has been converted into a weight-lifting room. A teacher’s lounge has been converted into a classroom, and classes are held in projection rooms and closed-circuit television rooms.

“Next year, if we don’t get more bungalows, we’re going to have to have classes meeting in the foyer of the gym,” Vlassis said.

Research shows that large classes affect learning because students receive less personal attention, said Linda Bond, executive director of the California Commission on the Teaching Profession.

With 30 to 35 students in each of five classes, English teachers spend about 15 hours a week outside of school grading a single writing assignment--at five minutes per student, said Tina Graham-Caso, chairman of the Mira Mesa English department. The National Council of Teachers of English recommends that English teachers work with no more than 100 students, she said.

But with enrollments booming and funds scarce, there is little hope of decreasing California’s ratio of students to teachers, which is already the highest in the nation, Payzant said.

“It definitely has a direct (effect) on how much personal attention (students) get and how much they feel a part of the school environment,” said Mike Toler, a math teacher at Mira Mesa. “I just can’t go as fast with those big classes. The amount of material you cover is definitely less in those big classes.”

At Central Elementary School--which is hemmed into a tiny 3.03-acre site at 4063 Polk Ave. in Mid-City--654 children attend a school built for 350, even though sixth-graders were moved to Wilson Middle School last year.

“The problem is going to be if we get any more kids,” said Principal Mary Louise Martin. “I have no place to create another classroom. I have utilized every bit of space in this school, every bit of it.”

Martin’s claim is not hyperbole. The school’s library has been moved into the auditorium. The old library has been converted into a language center for the never-ending influx of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian children moving into the area. There is no place for individualized tutoring, so it is done at two desks set up on the auditorium stage.

Within the next few years, school officials will be forced to consider some of the other ramifications of the population boom. With a significant number of teachers retiring, the pool of teachers shrinking and class sizes already too large, a massive teacher shortage is forecast for the state.

At best, the state will be 35,000 short of the 85,000 new teachers needed by 1990, Bond said. At worst, the state will be 94,000 teachers short of that goal.

George Flanigan, director of certificated personnel for the school district, said city schools will need 3,500 new teachers in the next five years. Flanigan said he expects to be able to recruit them because San Diego has five teacher training institutions and because the city’s industry is attracting professionals. Nevertheless, the district is mounting an aggressive recruitment campaign, he said.

Those new teachers may find their jobs different from the roles of teachers today. In overcrowded high schools, the district may have to consider teaching students in large lecture halls like the ones used in colleges, Payzant said. The district may have to make more use of computers for teaching.

“We just may have to change our view of everything being done in groups of 30 or 35 with one teacher,” Payzant said.

Para-professionals and parent volunteers may handle an increasing amount of non-instructional classroom duties, said Kermeen Fristrom, director of basic education for the school district.

Year-round schools, a concept approved this week by the Los Angeles Board of Education, may have to be used in some parts of the city within 10 to 15 years, Payzant said. Attendance areas may have to be redrawn, and the school board may have to reconsider its policy against mandatory busing, Carriedo said. Because Hispanic and Asian enrollment will rise, high-quality second-language programs will be essential, George Frey, assistant superintendent for the district’s Community Relations and Integration Services Division, has said.

Hispanic enrollment is expected to grow substantially, from 23,543 (20.4% of the students) next fall to 36,242 (23.2%) in 2000. The Asian population will increase quickly after 1990, from 22,680 (17.3%) that year to 29,502 (18.9%) by 2000.

Black and white enrollment, which will also grow, will remain relatively stable as a percentage of the school population. Blacks, who will make up 16% of the district’s students next fall, will comprise 15.5% in 2000.

The district’s 53,345 whites, 46.2% of next fall’s enrollment, will grow to 66,041 by 2000. But they will still be 42.3% of the district’s student population, making San Diego the only one of the nation’s 10 largest school districts to maintain such a large white population, Carriedo said.

How will the school district afford all these changes?

The linchpin of the effort is its “property management program,” a simple, clever system that uses income from closed schools and unused district property to retire bonds that generate revenue to build schools. J. V. Ward, head of the program, said that for every dollar the system takes in, it can generate $8 to build schools by issuing 30-year bonds.

This year, the program is producing $1.2 million for the school system, but Ward predicts that long-term leases could one day produce “hundreds of millions in revenue” for the school system.

School officials said major portions of the program are on hold because of two lawsuits filed by community groups attempting to prevent the district from negotiating 99-year leases for the sites where Dana Junior High School in Point Loma and Farnum Elementary School in Pacific Beach stand. Both schools are closed.

Ward and Payzant said the district cannot go forward with its revenue plan until the suits are settled. “If we are not able to move ahead with those, then, quite frankly, that could put any building program to an end,” said Dean H. Nafziger, assistant to the superintendent for planning, research and evaluation.

“There is no clear-cut source of money to pay for the buildings we have to build,” Nafziger added. “It just doesn’t exist right now. There are potential sources.”

But Jerry Cluff, attorney for the coalition suing to stop the lease of Dana Junior High, said his community group wants school officials to seek public comment on the lease and file an environmental impact statement before leasing the sites to developers. The district maintains that it has met or will meet those requirements.

Little other money is available. Development fees from projects already approved will produce about $12.5 million--less than the price of a single junior high school. Future development will not yield nearly enough to fund construction needs, Nafziger said.

State support is unlikely given the current $1 billion need for more school buildings statewide, and the projected $6.35-billion bill over the next 10 years, he said.