Drive to Split Palos Verdes School District Advances

An effort to split the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District into two separate systems passed its first major hurdle this week when supporters turned in a petition containing more than twice the number of signatures needed to start the secession process.

Susan Brooks, a spokeswoman for the East Peninsula Education Council (EPEC), said the petition submitted to county school officials bears 5,647 signatures, or nearly 58% of the registered voters in the proposed new school district, which is located generally east of Crenshaw Boulevard.

She said 87% of the voters reached by 350 volunteers in a five-week signature gathering drive favored the council’s plan, which grew out of a school board decision in November to close Miraleste High School on the east side this spring.

The group, which contends the east side is being unfairly stripped of its local schools, needed the backing of only 25% of the proposed district’s 9,786 voters to qualify the petition.

“The results clearly show the depth of community support for a new school district,” Brooks said. “We are greatly encouraged and I think we are in a much stronger position now to carry this drive through to a successful conclusion.”

Hearing in 60 Days

After the petition signatures are verified, the next step will be a public hearing within 60 days to be conducted in the proposed district by the county Committee on School District Organization.

Brooks said she hoped the remaining hurdles--approval of the plan by the county committee and the State Board of Education, followed by a favorable majority vote of affected Peninsula residents--can be surmounted by November.

That schedule, she said, would enable the council to form the new district, which could start admitting a projected 1,800 students in the fall of 1989.

School officials, who argue that splitting the district would lower the quality of education for all of the Peninsula’s children, said the secession process could take much longer, perhaps up to a year, because of the time allowed for each step along the way.

Both sides agree the final outcome could hinge on the State Board of Education’s decision about which voters would be affected by the secession: only those in the proposed district, where about one-quarter of the voters reside, or all voters in the four Peninsula cities served by the existing district.

Some west side residents have said at past public hearings that they will fight to preserve a Peninsula-wide district, while others have expressed the view that the east side should be allowed to go its own way in order to end factional disputes and rivalries.

The school board’s unanimous decision last fall to close Miraleste came after months of bitter disputes and public agonizing over how to deal with declining enrollment and budget deficits in the 9,800-student district.

Lawsuit Advances

In a related development this week, the council’s lawyers completed the discovery phase of a lawsuit aimed at preventing the school district from closing Miraleste until the outcome of the secession effort is known.

The group also is asking the courts to bar the district from selling or leasing the Dapplegray Intermediate campus, one of four east side schools already closed. Three schools have been closed on the west side.

A key contention in the council’s lawsuit, filed Dec. 18 in Los Angeles Superior Court, is that the trustees “capriciously and arbitrarily” picked Miraleste for closure.

In an attempt to prove that assertion and discover any other evidence that could support their position, the group’s lawyers copied stacks of district records and took depositions from three officials--Trustee Sally Burrage, the board president when the decision to close Miraleste was made, Supt. Jack Price and business manager David Capelouto.

The council made public a document from the district’s files, which it said shows that the Miraleste decision involved political considerations. The group said it would release additional documents after its lawyers review them.

The document disclosed Wednesday is an April 2, 1987, confidential memo from Price to the board, accompanied by 10 preliminary suggestions on how the district might consolidate its schools.

In the memo, Price warned the board that drastic measures must be taken to keep the district solvent. But he urged the board not to abandon the Peninsula’s intermediate-school system--which he said is “the best educationally for students”--by consolidating those grade levels at the district’s three high schools.

School Was Closed

The board a year ago decided to close Dapplegray Intermediate and send its seventh- and eighth-grade students to the Miraleste to boost enrollment on that campus. That move was interpreted by some Miraleste parents as a commitment not to close their school, if the east side accepted the loss of Dapplegray.

However, in the April memo, Price advised the board against extending Miraleste’s seventh-through-12th-grade configuration to the district’s other two high schools, Palos Verdes and Rolling Hills, “for two good reasons: one is educational, the other is political.”

Alluding to the political clout on the west side, Price said parents there “know that you aren’t going to close their (high) schools. These . . . are the people that cost us $200,000 in attorney fees over the Margate (Intermediate School) closure. Don’t believe they won’t work just as hard to prevent PV (Palos Verdes High) from going 7-12.”

If the board concluded that a mistake was made in closing Dapplegray and consolidating its students at Miraleste, Price wrote, the error “should be corrected, rather than glossed over and perpetuated.” He offered to take the blame, “should that be necessary.”

“When we are talking about the overall educational and fiscal health of the district . . . and the children we serve,” he wrote, “taking a little blame--or heat--is the least of the options.”

Brooks, the east side spokeswoman, said the Price memo “suggests that political criteria played a role in the board’s school consolidation decision. . . . EPEC has long been concerned that the decision to close Miraleste was not based on concrete data.”

District spokeswoman Nancy Mahr criticized the council’s use of the discovery process “to try to make its case in public” in advance of a court hearing on the merits of the group’s lawsuit.

“But it’s certainly not news that a governing body takes into account the sentiments of the people it represents,” she said. “Dr. Price, in the April 2 memo, was only doing his job by giving the board a realistic assessment of its options, along with his professional judgment on what is best for the district’s children.”

The council’s case for an independent district is spelled out in a 43-page document, which answers a series of questions posed by the county committee on schools.

East side schools “have long been focal points of community interest, activity, pride and solidarity,” the document says. “Formation of an east side school district is our only means of protecting our children and our community and ensuring the future welfare of both.”

District Boundary

The document, prepared by a dozen volunteer researchers and submitted to the county committee on Jan. 25, says the western boundary of the proposed district would run south along Crenshaw Boulevard, take a jog to the east on Palos Verdes Drive North to the Rolling Hills city line, follow that line south to the undeveloped Crenshaw right of way and then proceed on that course to the ocean.

About 13,500 people live in 5,000 homes in the 8.6 square-mile area, the document says. The area covers all of Rolling Hills, the eastern portion of Rancho Palos Verdes and a major section of Rolling Hills Estates.

The new district would lay claim to all school property on the east side, five campuses and two undeveloped sites. Its headquarters would be located at Dapplegray, which also would serve as an elementary school, maintenance facility and a place for community meetings.

Soccer and Little League baseball games could continue on the athletic fields at Dapplegray, the document says, and one portion might be used for a private equestrian venture to generate income for the new district.

Miraleste would continue as a seventh-through-12th-grade school and Mira Catalina, the east side’s only remaining elementary school, would continue to house kindergarten-through-sixth grade students.

The council proposes continuing to lease the Miraleste Elementary site, which closed in 1983, to community organizations, while using some space for a preschool day care center.

Council planners see no immediate need for the closed La Cresta campus, now used by the Peninsula district as a continuation high school and a warehouse-maintenance facility.

In the document, the council’s demographer, Nancy Bolton, disputes district projections that indicate a continuing enrollment decline on the east side as well as other parts of the Peninsula.

The council’s figures show the east side’s school-age population holding fairly steady at about 1,800 for four years, then beginning an upward trend. That trend would accelerate if the new district lures back some of the 600 students now attending private schools, and new housing is built.

“Over the next 10 years we may see as many as 700 new housing units in the east district,” the document says, noting longstanding proposals to use the so-called Chandler Quarry for a residential development.

Natural and man-made barriers, coupled with a limited road system, effectively isolate the east side from the rest of the Peninsula, the document says.

If the area loses Miraleste, intermediate and high school students will have to travel up to 14 miles on dangerous roads to reach campuses on the west side.

The document quotes former Miraleste Principal Larry Burnight as saying, “It’s those narrow, winding roads and (the area’s) seclusion from the west side that make a high school on the east side a necessity.”