Hearing to Review School Boundary Options

The Palos Verdes Peninsula school board will hold a public hearing Monday night on revamping attendance boundaries on the east side of the hill in preparation for moving that area’s intermediate and high school students to other campuses next fall.

The hearing will start at 7:30 p.m. in the Theatre Arts Building at Miraleste High School, which is to close at the end of the school year as part of a district reorganization plan.

Under the plan, about 700 Miraleste-area students in the ninth through 12th grades will go to the district’s remaining two high schools: Rolling Hills, in the center of the Peninsula in Rolling Hills Estates, and the Palos Verdes campus on the west side in Palos Verdes Estates.

The plan is under attack by east-side residents who hope to block the closing of Miraleste through court action and then form a new school system.

The proposal to be reviewed Monday calls for high school students living south of Miraleste Drive along Palos Verdes Drive East to attend the Palos Verdes campus. If they live north of that line, they will be assigned to Rolling Hills High.

However, if a Palos Verdes Drive East student assigned to one high school prefers to attend the other, the proposal calls for honoring such choices, district spokeswoman Nancy Mahr said.

High school students who live along Palos Verdes Drive South would go to Palos Verdes High; those living in Rolling Hills would go to Rolling Hills High. Students residing along Palos Verdes Drive North would continue to attend Rolling Hills.

Mahr said students now in the seventh grade at Miraleste, which uses a seventh- through 12th-grade configuration, can continue next fall either at a high school or intermediate school. The option, she said, gives incoming eighth-graders a chance to continue taking foreign languages and other advanced courses offered only at the high schools.

District planners have two alternative proposals for east-side intermediate students in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades next year. The first, which uses the modified high school boundaries, would send youngsters in the Rolling Hills High attendance area to Ridgecrest Intermediate and those in the Palos Verdes High area would attend Malaga Cove school.

The second proposal is designed to give students residing along Palos Verdes Drive East a choice between the two intermediate schools. Those living south of that dividing line--Miraleste Drive--and along the south branch of Palos Verdes Drive would be assigned to Malaga Cove, but would have the option of attending Ridgecrest.

Similarly, east-branch students living north of that dividing line, along with those on the north branch of Palos Verdes Drive, would be assigned to Ridgecrest with an option to attend Malaga Cove. Intermediate students living in the interior of the City of Rolling Hills--not along Palos Verdes Drive North--would be assigned to Ridgecrest.