Schools Facing Grim Problems in South Bay as Homes Multiply

John Gugerty stands in his office and watches the future of education in the South Bay take shape outside his window.

Four hundred apartments--row upon row, cluster upon cluster of densely packed housing--have sprouted across the street from San Ysidro’s Willow Elementary School, where Gugerty is principal, in the last 18 months. Soon, 482 more will be completed in the surrounding neighborhood.

Where there are apartments, there are inevitably children.

For every 10 units occupied, Gugerty can expect seven new arrivals to his spacious, well-kept school just a spitball’s throw from the Mexican border. Willow, home to 350 students this year, could be asked to take in 550 to 750 children in September--a staggering 114% enrollment increase if Gugerty’s worst fears are realized.

“A good bit of the damage is done,” Gugerty said ruefully a few weeks ago. “We have this housing, and it’s not going to go away.”

Across the South Bay, the leaders of the region’s five school districts are telling themselves much the same thing as they prepare for an onslaught of children from massive developments such as EastLake in Chula Vista and multiunit apartment complexes that are blooming in National City, Imperial Beach and San Ysidro.

“I can’t tell from one week to the next how many kids we’re going to have,” said Gary Smith, superintendent of the National School District in National City.

“There’s no way to come up with an approximation. I just go along waiting to see who’s coming through the door.”

The county Office of Education offers what it calls a conservative estimate that the South Bay student population, which numbers 54,568 this year, will reach 80,000 by 2000--the largest increase of any of the 13 “subregional areas” that the office tracks. District superintendents believe the count could go higher.

The South Bay’s 47% student growth rate puts it behind rapidly developing North County districts but ahead of San Diego Unified and other parts of the county.

But if bodies--and where to put them--were the sole concern of the five school districts between San Diego and the border, the task of educating the children of the South Bay would be far simpler than it really is.

Unfortunately, many of the children expected to tax the region’s schools will also bring with them a range of problems that pose far larger challenges to teachers and administrators. Rooted largely in the socioeconomic status of the South Bay’s sizable minority population, those problems include unrelenting student mobility, an alarming dropout rate, large numbers of non-English-speaking students and poverty--factors that spell trouble for schools.

More than half of the National School District’s students entered a district school sometime after September or left before June, a mobility rate of 55.8%. One San Ysidro school, Sunset Elementary, showed an 89.1% mobility rate last year.

Even the Sweetwater Union High School District, which includes students from stable, affluent sections of Chula Vista, showed a 25% mobility rate last year. The rate has increased every year for the last few years.

“This is like running a school in a Greyhound Bus station,” Al Goyocochea, principal of Sweetwater High School, said recently. “Since the start of school, we’ve enrolled 600 new kids. And these are not kids from our feeder schools.”

“They’re good learners if they’re here,” said Rosemarie Gray, a teacher at Sunset Elementary. “If they don’t stay or they move in and out, you don’t have a chance with them.”

The South Bay’s location as a convenient first stop for thousands of Mexican immigrants on the road north is the main cause of the maddening student procession through the public schools. In National City, the large number of military families also contributes. Poverty, which keeps families on the move searching for jobs and better housing, also plays a part.

“They’re the ones who come to look for a new rainbow,” said Gloria Sampson, assistant principal at Southwest High School. “Education is whipped cream and cherries. Survival first.”

Such families send the school children like David, a fifth-grader at Willow School who attended four schools in three school districts between April, 1985, and February, 1986.

“He’s going to have some problems, it would seem,” Gugerty said. “He’s going to be missing some key things in the fourth grade, such as reading and mathematics.

“He’s always going to be in a state of transition--learning where the bathroom is, learning the rules, learning who the schoolyard bullies are. He’s always going to be the first one picked on in a new school.”

Students like David and his peers run a greater risk of dropping out once they reach high school. In the Sweetwater district, the South Bay’s high school district, 27% of the district’s 25,000 students drop out of school every year, approximately the same as the state dropout rate.

South Bay students are susceptible to the same problems that lead students everywhere to quit school: boredom, low achievement, pregnancy and poverty, to name just a few.

“It just started in 10th grade,” said 15-year-old Claudette Infiesto, a former dropout now enrolled in a special computer-based learning program at Sweetwater High School. “It was mostly peer pressure in the beginning of the year: ‘C’mon, let’s go.’ And then it got really bad.”

During the summer vacation, “we were going out every night. And when school started, we weren’t finished with summer,” she said.

But the South Bay has a special problem. Latinos everywhere drop out at higher rates than other students, and the Latino population of the Sweetwater district is 47%. The dropout figure for Latino students in the Sweetwater district is probably double the rate for all students, said Ira Wetherill, special assistant to Supt. Anthony Trujillo.

The Latino population of South Bay’s other four districts is also exceptionally high and, in most cases, growing. In 1984-85, it was 42% in the Chula Vista city schools, 43% in the South Bay Union School District, 61% in the National School District and 88% in the San Ysidro School District.

Latinos also give the South Bay one of the county’s highest non-English-speaking populations. More than 14,000 South Bay students--26% of all students in the region--speak limited English. That leads to a proliferation of bilingual and English-as-a-second-language classes designed to bring students into the educational mainstream. The Sweetwater district last year spent about $2 million of its $100-million budget on such programs.

“You have children who may leave here on Friday and not hear any English for the rest of the weekend,” said Beverly McMartin, principal of Sunset Elementary school. “You’ve got children who go on a summer vacation (to Mexico) and may not hear any English for three months.”

South Bay students are also predominantly poor, a major hindrance in their quest for an education. Research shows that children from wealthier families do better in school, partly because their parents have more time and resources to spend on them.

“It’s not just money or language . . . it’s the deprivation of the environment,” said Mary DiSessa, director of the South County team for the county Office of Education. “It’s the stimulation and games and quiet time every night.”

The number of people on welfare varies widely in the South Bay, from the 35% of students in San Ysidro whose families are on welfare, to the 13% of Chula Vista city schools students who receive such payments.

But sections of Chula Vista and Bonita are home to affluent, professional families and high schools such as Bonita Vista High School, where students’ achievement profiles look more like those of kids in La Jolla than in San Ysidro.

“It has to do with the parental background, economic factors,” Principal Dale Newell said. “In San Diego County, it’s one of the higher-income groups. Parents are highly motivated and they motivate their students.”

Across the five districts, a concerted effort to raise test scores has produced healthy increases in the last several years. And when compared to other California school districts with similar ethnic and socioeconomic populations, South Bay schools fare well.

The districts are run by five superintendents who took over within the last four years, and all are devising new programs to combat the schools’ ills. As they recover from Proposition 13 budget cuts, the schools are becoming generally well-equipped, though San Ysidro students still learn from a 1966 science book in which man has yet to walk on the moon.

“Sure, we could be overwhelmed,” said Wetherill, of the Sweetwater district. “But I don’t believe that we are overwhelmed. We see that there are many things that can be done. We’re doing them, not talking about them.”

But the test scores also show how far the South Bay has to go. This year, Sweetwater district 12th-graders were last in the county in reading and math, and bested only tiny Borrego Springs Unified in written expression. Scores in the four other districts chronically lag behind the county average.

“There’s nothing I can do about the fact that the kids are new to the country or are on AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children),” said Smith, superintendent of the National School District. “What I can do is make sure those kids have the tools, and mold our educational system to benefit those kids.”

For all five South Bay school districts, the first step in supplying those tools will be finding space for the coming wave of students.

In the Chula Vista city schools, money is on hand and growth appears manageable. The 14,366-student school district forecasts an enrollment of 16,500 by 1990 and the need for two or three more elementary schools.

John Linn, assistant superintendent for business management, said that the Chula Vista district has banked a sizable chunk of the fees developers must pay school districts when they build housing. That income will give the district the money to handle new arrivals from EastLake and other developments.

“We’ll be able to handle it in the next five-year time frame,” Linn said.

But in other districts, the situation is closer to grim. In San Ysidro, where about 3,300 students are now enrolled, Supt. Gilberto Anzaldua predicts that enrollment could soar to 8,000 by 1990 and 9,500 by the end of the century.

How will the district handle the growth? “Probably, we’re going to pray a lot,” Anzaldua said.

The Sweetwater district, where nearly 25,000 students attend junior and senior high school, will add 7,500 students by the end of the century from EastLake, Rancho del Rey and Otay Mesa developments, and from apartment complexes across the South Bay.

Four Sweetwater district schools--Montgomery Junior High School, Montgomery High School, Southwest Junior High School and Southwest High School--are already hundreds of students over capacity, largely because of the pressure from apartments in San Ysidro and surrounding areas. Families will move into EastLake three to four years before the district builds a high school there, creating overcrowding at Bonita Vista High School.

If United Enterprises moves quickly in developing the 25,000-acre Rancho Otay, “it could be catastrophic,” said Andrew Campbell, administrator of planning for the Sweetwater district.

South Bay Union District, where 7,600 students are enrolled this year, expects an increase of 1,900 over the next nine years. National School District, hemmed in by surrounding cities and the bay, has 5,580 students this year and expects 5,840 by 1988.

With no developer fees flowing into the Sweetwater district from South San Diego and overcrowding showing no signs of slowing, the Sweetwater Board of Education this month voted to ask the City Council for a moratorium on all housing construction south of the Otay River.

The freeze is designed to buy the district time while it applies for the right to collect developer fees and spur the creation of a master plan for the area, Campbell said.

South Bay Union, which currently receives no fees from the City of Imperial Beach, also wants them levied. National and San Ysidro districts are looking to raise their revenue from developers’ fees.

Generally, such fees run from under $1,000 to over $3,000 per unit. They finance construction of either temporary or permanent school buildings, depending on the law governing the fee collection.

The Sweetwater and Chula Vista districts also are seeking to establish assessment districts at EastLake, to pay for the schools the development’s residents will need. South Bay Union District is considering a proposal to put all of its students on a year-round schedule.

School officials--even those from Sweetwater--say they are not looking to undercut the South Bay’s building boom with cries that the schools cannot keep up.

“We’re not opposed to building,” Campbell said. “I don’t want that to be inferred. All we feel is that there ought to be a master plan in place and we ought to collect those fees.”

“The community is not here to serve the district. The district is here to serve the community,” said James Stark, assistant superintendent for general services of South Bay Union District. “If the community is in a growth mode, then we’ve got to deal with that.”

See related story, Part IV, Page 2A.