Costa Mesa : School Board to Vote on Closing Davis School

Newport-Mesa Unified School District School Board members will vote next week on the fate of Davis Intermediate School, district Supt. John W. Nicoll said Wednesday.

“My recommendation will be that Davis be closed and become a part of Costa Mesa High, effective September, 1987,” Nicoll said. “I’m not going to predict what the board will do.”

Some decision is necessary, Nicoll said, because both Davis Intermediate and Costa Mesa High have declining enrollments. He said that merging the seventh and eighth grades into Costa Mesa High seems to be the best solution for both problems.

“The board several years ago made a decision to keep the high schools open,” Nicoll said, noting that putting the 430 students from Davis Intermediate into Costa Mesa High would bolster the sagging enrollment of that school, while also making more learning opportunities available to the junior high students.

“We did the same thing with Lincoln Intermediate two years ago when it joined Corona del Mar High School,” Nicoll said. “We’ve had no problems there.”

But Nicoll said some parents are strenuously opposing the proposed closure of Davis Intermediate. “We’ve had several hearings, with a fair turnout of people, and I would guess that more at the meetings were opposed to the closure than were for it.”

Nonetheless, Nicoll said, some action must be taken because enrollment at Davis has slipped from a high of 1,200 students in the 1970s to its current level of 430.

School closures, Nicoll said, are a decade-long norm for Newport-Mesa Unified. “We started losing enrollment in 1973,” he said. “Our high was in 1972-73, when we had more than 26,000 students. Since then we’ve had to close 16 schools, and we’re down to about 16,000 students now. It looks like we’ll have a year or two more of decline until we get down to 15,000, and then we expect to start slowly growing again.”

The high price of housing in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, where the district lies, is the main reason for the enrollment decline, Nicoll said. He said it is difficult for young families with school-age children to afford housing in the two cities.

“But we have been careful to save the schools we’ve closed, and we’re ready for an enrollment increase when the children of baby boomers start arriving,” Nicoll said.

In the meantime, he said, the district still must face closure decisions--including the upcoming one involving Davis Intermediate.