Students, Students Everywhere and Nary a Place to Sit : Districts Race to Cope With County Growth

For parent Gwen Tamayo, the start of the new school year in a county that is growing topsy-turvy is like an extended good-news, bad-news joke.

The good news for Tamayo, who recently moved from North Carolina to a new housing development in burgeoning eastern Oceanside, was the letter she received from the Vista Unified School District announcing that her neighborhood will be served by a brand-new elementary school.

The bad news was that the school--Empresa Elementary--won’t be open this fall.

The good news was that her child could attend classes in temporary buildings on a campus where a new middle school opened just last year.

The bad news was that, when Tamayo took her child to the school last Thursday, she found an instant--albeit temporary--campus of classrooms in trailers, with no playground equipment and no grass.

The good news is that when her permanent school opens--maybe in January, maybe in February--it will be a state-of-the-art educational facility on a 10-acre hilltop with a 270-degree view that sweeps over much of Oceanside’s and Vista’s rolling hills--carpeted by thousands of new homes recently completed or still under construction.

But maybe that’s bad news--because still more schools will have to be built.

Outstripped by Growth

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” Tamayo sighed last Thursday after dropping off her child on the first day of classes in the Vista school district, which serves eastern Oceanside as well. “Shouldn’t they build schools before they build the homes?”

Maybe so, but that’s not the reality in San Diego’s suburban communities this fall, where growth is outstripping public education’s ability to accommodate new students, and officials from Fallbrook to San Ysidro are hustling for money to build new schools as quickly as possible.

New-school construction money from the state has dried up. Voters, for the most part, refuse to assess themselves higher taxes. The funds derived from developer-impact fees cover less than half the cost of new schools. And it’s the exception when a developer will pop for a new school to serve the neighborhoods he creates. More typically, at best, these large-scale builders allow their developments to be taxed--assessments that will be unilaterally passed on to the new homeowners when they move in.

The crisis has left some schools at 50% over their designed capacity. In some districts--including Vista, San Marcos and Escondido’s elementaries--a third of the students are taught in portable classrooms, outside the main school buildings.

Year-round school--with three-week mini-breaks instead of the traditional summer vacation--is a fact of life for about 25% of the county’s students. And some school officials are talking of worst-case scenarios: double sessions--with increased teaching costs--where some children could begin classes as early as 7 a.m. and others still be in school after 5 p.m.

Will Climb Higher

The rate of student enrollment is going to climb even higher. In the past 11 years, enrollment in the county increased 14%. In the next 11 years, it is expected to increase 41%.

The faster the county grows, the more behind the schools get.

Planners for the county’s Office of Education figure that by the year 2000, 200 new schools will have to be constructed in San Diego County--over and above the 495 that now serve it. Administrators who thought they got into the business of developing curriculums, improving teaching methods and producing smart kids are now finding themselves distracted by the business of playing with mirrors and learning the ropes of school financing schemes just so they can find classrooms for the kids.

“I like to consider myself an instructional superintendent,” said Gilberto Anzaldua, superintendent of the

San Ysidro Union School District, which is expected to be the county’s fastest-growing district over the next 11 years. “I want to be working with the kids, but I’m spending time looking for where the next batch of money will come from to build schools. You’ve got to do that before you can provide the instruction.”

Mac Bernd, superintendent of the San Marcos Unified School District, added, only half-facetiously: “We don’t have nightmares of having classes in tents instead of in classrooms. A superintendent’s nightmare is having the roof of the tent half-eaten by moths.”

‘A Very Serious Challenge’

Tom Robinson, the director of facilities for the county’s Office of Education, said that every child in the county will find a classroom this fall--but may not be in the school closest to home and may find himself in temporary facilities considered inadequate for the long run.

“We have a very serious challenge over the next five years in trying to identify a means of financing the necessary school facilities,” Robinson said. “The crisis hasn’t occurred yet, but it’s upon us.”

The San Ysidro district’s pace-setting growth will come in part because of the explosion of apartment housing there, much of it publicly subsidized, and because of the high ratio of children per family and the frequency of multiple families occupying single dwelling units.

But after San Ysidro, the next nine fastest-growing districts in the county, according to projections by the San Diego Assn. of Governments, are all in North County, where entire tracts of open land are being developed into new neighborhoods and where many young, affluent families are drawn in part by the perception of good, homogeneous--and smaller--schools.

And while some of the county’s largest schools are in the metropolitan San Diego Unified School District, the county’s two largest high schools are in the Poway Unified--Mt. Carmel High School, serving Rancho Penasquitos with 3,300 students, and Poway High School, with 3,200 students.

The most hard-pressed district in the county, by Robinson’s estimate, is the Vista Unified, where classes started last Thursday.

Portable Dilemma

More than a third of Vista’s 17,000 students are assigned to trailers-turned-classrooms erected on playgrounds.

Portable, relocatable classrooms may relieve classroom shortage on any given campus, but they don’t alleviate congestion--and, in fact, exacerbate it--in the libraries, cafeterias, computer learning centers and on the playgrounds. Assemblies, recesses and lunch periods must be staggered to accommodate all the children, and moms and dads groan as they face increased traffic when they drop off and pick up their young charges daily.

Last November, Vista school officials asked voters to approve a $63-million bond measure to rehabilitate older schools and build new ones. The measure failed, and this November the same voters will be asked to approve a $38.8-million bond to finance half of the district’s wish list of new construction.

The district says it needs 17 new schools by the year 2000--13 elementary schools, three middle schools and a new high school.

If the Legislature agrees, as has been proposed, to put a $1-billion school bonds issue on the ballot in June to help districts finance new construction, Vista--like other districts--would hope that the state would match the locally generated money with an equal amount of state bond money. Districts that offer to match state funds with their own will receive a higher priority when the money is doled out.

But if the Vista bond measure fails in November, says Supt. Rene Townsend, “there will be no way to avoid double sessions in two or three years. We will have run out of solutions, and we will have run out of space.”

Staggered Sessions

As it is, Vista’s 11 elementary schools and three middle schools will begin year-round schedules in July. The technique, in which students are divided into four staggered tracks--three of which, at any given time, are in session--has the logistical effect of increasing school capacities by a third.

Escondido’s elementary schools faced a similar plight to Vista’s, and were looking to go on a year-round schedule and possible double sessions as well, until voters there in June approved a $27-million bond issue.

“We’ve maximized almost all our campuses as far as additional relocatables are concerned,” said Gene Hartline, assistant superintendent for business services for the 16-school district.

Three of the district’s elementary schools, their campuses already saturated with relocatable classrooms, closed their doors to new enrollment last spring, and one school was on a year-round schedule, but the bond measure has given the district new breathing room, he said.

Now construction is under way next to Kit Carson Park for a so-called instant campus--L. R. Green Elementary School, where relocatable classrooms will be put on foundations in time for 600 students to attend classes in January. In the meantime, those students are taking courses in temporary facilities at two other elementary schools in Escondido, similar to the situation in Oceanside.

Escondido school administrators are also looking at moving their management offices to a shopping center, freeing up a 9-acre site that will be reconfigured into an elementary school in time for classes in September, 1991.

All told, Escondido hopes to open five new elementary schools by 1994.

“To bring all of our schools to within their designed enrollment capacities, without having to rely on relocatables, we’d need four new schools right now,” Hartline said.

Making Room

Just as Escondido will abandon its management offices to make room for a new school, the San Dieguito Union High School District is also doing some shuffling to accommodate more students.

Administrators there are moving into a leased professional building; a maintenance facility that had occupied part of the San Dieguito High School campus will be moved to the old district offices, and school buses that had been parked on the campus will now be parked at the Del Mar Fairgrounds--all so more portable classrooms can be added at the high school.

In the Poway Unified School District--the county’s third-largest with 23,500 students in 20 schools--five new schools are under construction, including a high school to serve Rancho Bernardo and relieve overcrowding at the Poway and Mt. Carmel High Schools that are now 50% above capacity. Supt. Bob Reeves says another 10 schools will be needed within 10 years.

Poway voters last year rejected, by a scant 117 votes, a $56-million bond issue, and now Reeves is looking to developers--and ultimately new homeowners--to help finance the new schools.

Even the best of planning doesn’t always accommodate the growth in North County. Consider what happened in the Oceanside Unified School District, which is growing by about 1,000 students--or the equivalent of more than one elementary school--every year.

Last year, the district opened a new elementary school, Reynolds.

“We expected, based on our projections and growth in the area, that the school would serve about 500 youngsters that first year,” said district spokesman Dan Armstrong. “But when school opened up, 750 kids showed up.”