Grade-Setup Shift Proposed for La Jolla

The La Jolla community will be asked to consider major grade-configuration changes to its schools beginning in the fall of 1990 under a plan presented Tuesday to the San Diego Unified School District Board of Education.

La Jolla High would change to a four-year, grades 9-12 configuration; Muirlands Junior High would become a grades 6-8 school, and the three elementary schools--Bird Rock, La Jolla and Torrey Pines--would change to grades kindergarten through 5.

The plan is designed to relieve crowding foreseen within the next couple of years in the elementary schools by taking advantage of empty classrooms expected at the secondary level.

Already, Bird Rock is at capacity, with 462 students, and La Jolla Elementary, with 565, and Torrey Pines, with 372, are close to capacity unless they try to squeeze portable classrooms onto playgrounds. But the high school will have room for 200 to 300 more students next year, and Muirlands has room now for an 300 more students.

Although the district’s planning staff supports the idea as the best way to solve capacity problems, it received board approval Tuesday only to discuss the plan with La Jolla community schools and organizations to reach a consensus before a decision is made in April.

But several board members said Tuesday that they believe the La Jolla community will overwhelmingly support the idea, especially since it is based on a similar proposal first suggested in 1983 by a La Jolla advisory committee but not acted upon because few capacity problems then existed.

As advantages to the plan, the staff listed: an end to crowding at Bird Rock; space for the district’s Early Admission to Kindergarten program at the three elementaries; space for the new fine arts instruction now unavailable because of a lack of classrooms; maintenance of existing neighborhood boundaries for schools, considered important in the long-established community; establishment of the middle-school concept, which educational researchers believe provides a better learning and social transition for pre-teens with its sixth- through eighth-grade setup than the traditional 7-9 program; opportunity for high school students to participate in four years of extracurricular programs.

Negatives Listed

As negatives, administrators pointed out: the need to train teachers and community in what to expect from a changed grade structure; parent fear and/or opposition to sending sixth-graders to a middle school; crowding at La Jolla High during the first year of the 9-12 configuration, until a science wing is completed in January, 1992.

Administrators rejected the alternative of reopening an elementary school shut in the 1970s because of declining enrollments and now leased out for private use. The continuing costs of reopening the school would far exceed the one-time, estimated $120,000 expense to begin the grade-configuration plan.

Multitrack year-round attendance, where three groups of students attend at any one time while a fourth group goes on vacation, was also rejected because a school needs at least 750 students to have its enrollment split equitably and receive all necessary educational services.