Environmental Study Ordered : Ruling Likely to Keep Miraleste High Open

Miraleste High School is “likely” to remain open after June after all because of a Los Angeles Superior Court ruling, officials acknowledged Wednesday.

Nancy Mahr, spokeswoman for the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District, said delays caused by the ruling may not leave enough time for an orderly reassignment of Miraleste students to other Peninsula campuses before the next school year starts in September. School trustees will meet Monday night to decide on a course of action, she said.

The court ruling Tuesday came in a lawsuit brought by a parents group fighting to keep the campus open. The group had sought a preliminary injunction that would have barred the closure of Miraleste pending the outcome of the group’s effort to set up a separate school system on the east side of the Peninsula.

Although Judge Miriam A. Vogel denied that request, she gave the group, the East Peninsula Education Council, a peg on which to hang its hopes of forestalling the closure. She ruled that the district must consider the environmental effect of closing Miraleste, despite a 1983 law that generally exempts school districts from complying with the California Environmental Quality Act. The act requires most other governmental entities to study the environmental impacts of their decisions.

Claimed Major Victory

Leaders of the east-side parents group, which launched the secession effort last November after the school board voted to close Miraleste, hailed Vogel’s ruling as a major victory for their side.

“Obviously, the east side is elated,” Ted Gibbs, a spokesman for the parents group, said. “It is critical that Miraleste continue to operate as a viable campus while we complete the redistricting process.”

Public hearings on the group’s petition to form a new district are scheduled for Tuesday at Miraleste and May 26 at the Rolling Hills High School. Both meetings will start at 7 p.m.

Mahr said that if Miraleste stays open for another year, the district will have to make further program and staffing cuts to offset the loss of a projected $1.2-million savings that would have resulted from consolidating high school operations on the remaining two campuses.

Among other things, she said, administrative and non-teaching employees will lose a 6% boost in salaries planned for next year, since the increase was contingent on Miraleste closing on schedule. Current negotiations on teacher salaries also will be affected, Mahr said.

In denying a preliminary injunction, Judge Vogel rejected arguments by the parents group that trustees had acted improperly in selecting Miraleste for closure. The judge also rejected the argument that closing the school would in effect deprive east-side residents of their constitutional right to vote on the proposal to form a new district.

However, she said, the district was remiss in not evaluating the cumulative effect of its decisions to close three of the four elementary schools on the east side in recent years.

Vogel said long-established environmental quality laws require public officials to be accountable to their constituents for decisions that may have a substantial effect on a community’s environment.

Mahr said the district’s lawyers still believe that more recent laws exempt school districts from filing environmental impact reports when any number of campuses are closed. The lawyers are looking into ways of speeding the process of appealing Vogel’s ruling, if the board decides to do so. An appeal would normally take up to 18 months, she said.

Another district option, she said, is to file a simple statement declaring that no substantial environmental effect would result from closing Miraleste. That would take only several weeks and, Mahr said, Vogel indicated that such a declaration might suffice.

But the parents group would be almost certain to challenge that approach, leading to further delays in carrying out the board’s decision to close Miraleste, she said. Preparing a full-scale environmental impact report could take up to six months and cost the district about $100,000, Mahr said.

‘Open to Negotiated Solution’

Gibbs, the east-side spokesman, said his group does not want to “rub the noses of the west side” in Vogel’s environmental ruling.

“A two-district solution is not an absolute,” he said. “We are open to a rational, negotiated solution” to the Peninsula’s educational problems. But, he added, any proposal that involves closing Miraleste “will leave us with no choice but to proceed with the redistricting process. Keeping Miraleste open is an overriding objective.”

The district has already closed seven schools to adjust to sharp declines in enrollment in the past decade--three on the east side, three on the west and another--La Cresta Elementary--that served students on both sides of Crenshaw Boulevard, roughly the dividing line between the two sides.

Miraleste parents have contended that the east side has been unfairly stripped of its neighborhood schools. With the loss of Miraleste, the east side would be left with only Mira Catalina Elementary, and students in grades seven through 12 would have to commute over hazardous roads to campuses on the west side, Miraleste parents say.

District officials say it is financially impractical, in an era of sharply declining enrollment, to maintain more schools on the sparsely populated east side. They say traffic problems would be just as bad or worse if a west-side campus were closed and students there had to commute to the other end of the Peninsula.