Residents Ready for a Fight : They Protest County Refusal to Sell School Site

The apartment buildings along Standard Avenue and Minnie Street in Santa Ana are modest, overcrowded and sprayed with graffiti. And most of the predominantly Latino and Cambodian immigrants who live there are unfamiliar with the intricacies of local county politics.

But given the choice, they know they would rather have an elementary school than a new jail on six acres of nearby vacant county-owned land. And the Orange County Board of Supervisors’ refusal Tuesday to sell the land to the Santa Ana Unified School District has left some residents angry and ready to fight.

“We need help--to learn English, to learn how to live better, to eat better, to fight drugs and other bad things,” said Jannet Quinones, a Bolivian immigrant who manages one of the Standard Avenue buildings. “Instead of putting something negative like a jail across from my house, they should put other things--better parks, more schools. . . . I would feel ashamed if a jail went in there.”

The supervisors’ vote Tuesday does not mean the proposed 6,700-bed Gypsum Canyon jail will now be built on the six-acre county site on McFadden Avenue, just behind the county operations center.

But the county’s decision to hold onto the land rather than let the school district proceed with the planned construction of a new elementary school means that the property is still a potential jail site, even though it was considered previously by the board and rejected. Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, who led the move to retain the land, said that he is not proposing to build the jail there, but indicated that he may want to use it as a bargaining chip to acquire another site--particularly if an initiative sponsored by north county residents to restrict all future county jail construction to Santa Ana is adopted.

But Vasquez also did not say that under no conditions would the jail be built in the heavily populated neighborhood.

“Will anybody stand up and fight Gaddi Vasquez? You bet,” said Julie Barnheiser, an outreach worker at Madison School. “The Padres Unidos (United Parents, the school’s parents organization) at this school will. When you put people who don’t have the money to hire lawyers against people from Anaheim Hills, it’s like David against Goliath. But David won. And these people are fierce fighters.”

The Santa Ana school district operates three elementary schools within a few blocks of the county-owned property and is building a new high school just around the corner. One of the elementary schools, Roosevelt Annex, was opened this year to accommodate some of the overflow from the other two schools, Madison and Roosevelt.

Most of the 400 students enrolled at Roosevelt Annex would attend the Kennedy Elementary School that had been planned for the county site, district spokeswoman Diane Thomas said.

The decision by the Board of Supervisors is “an abuse against the community,” said Lorelly Mora, who, like Quinones, is a member of Padres Unidos.

“We just want to live in peace, and there are many other places they can build the jail,” Mora said in Spanish.

Born in Costa Rica, Mora came to Santa Ana four years ago and now lives with her family in their own house on McFadden Avenue. Her two children attend Madison School. “The community won’t permit this. Imagine, those people (north county residents) have money, so they want to send their prisoners here.”