Panel Rapped on Out-of-Town Vote : Schools: Orange Unified School District trustees, under fire for voting in Palm Springs to change school boundaries, will consider barring away-from-home votes.

Stung by criticism over a vote taken in Palm Springs to change school attendance boundaries, Orange Unified School District trustees have decided to consider a measure that would bar them from voting at future out-of-town meetings.

Trustees also proposed Thursday night a wide-ranging study of the impact of boundary changes on the ethnic makeup at district schools in response to charges that shifting boundaries for the Linda Vista and Esplanade elementary schools creates racially segregated schools. But they did not rescind the boundary change, which took effect this fall.

The controversial 4-3 vote came during a district retreat in Palm Springs on Aug. 15 and 16, a meeting that many of the board’s critics said few members of the public could have known about.

Supt. John Ikerd, however, said the board complied with requirements of the state’s open-meeting law by posting a notice on the front door of the district offices on Glassell Street 72 hours before the retreat.

The change allowed about 40 Anglo students to transfer from Esplanade, which is 49% Latino, to Linda Vista, which is 90% Anglo when school began this fall. The two schools are less than a mile from each other.

At Thursday night’s board meeting, the board still was under attack for the way it conducted the vote.

“You should never discuss business where you and your taxpayers are not eyeball to eyeball,” chided Bob Bennyhoff, a resident of Orange Park Acres and crusading political writer for the community newspaper, Common Talk.

“It was a dumb thing to do,” he said. “The thought crosses my mind that you didn’t want anyone to hear you. Communications is one of this board’s biggest weaknesses.”

Bennyhoff said he learned of the vote days later, when he ran into one of the parents who had lobbied for the change. He said he then went to the school district offices to ask for the tape of the Palm Springs meeting, because all other board meetings are tape recorded.

“Lo and behold, there’s no tape,” he said.

In a letter to Ikerd, Dorothy Gibson, another resident critical of the boundary decision, said at Thursday night’s regular meeting that she was “outraged that the board would have the audacity to remove a public board meeting from the confines of their school district.”

Another resident, William G. Vasquez, asked trustees and the superintendent to demonstrate that families affected by the proposed boundary change were notified in advance that such a plan would be discussed and decided at the August meetings.

Normally, the district sends agendas of regular board meetings to about 100 individuals or organizations, such as PTA chapters and the news media, Ikerd said. In this case, a notice was posted only on the front door of the district offices. But that apparently meets the legal requirements of the state’s open-meeting law, the Brown Act, according to Patricia McGinnis, assistant to the chief legal counsel for the California Department of Education.

Several critics, however, say such an action smacks of the board trying to hide its involvement in the controversial change.

Board President Sandy G. Englander, who proposed limiting future board votes to meetings held within the district, said it is the perception of wrongdoing that bothers her.

“Apparently there’s been some concern raised (about) whether or not we were within the Brown Act,” Englander said. She said that while district officials have no doubt that they acted within the law, “sometimes perception seems to be a little different than reality.”

Of that perception, she added, “If there is ever any question of doubt, we need to clarify it.”

The board will consider the proposal at its next meeting Monday.

Gibson also requested that public notices of meetings be posted on the side doors as well as the front door of the administrative office. She said that would make the notices more accessible to people who drive into the district office parking lot looking for such notices.

Some board members balked at the suggestion.

“There is a limit,” said trustee Jeff Holstein. “I know we want to be good people and all that. But fair is fair and right is right. I don’t see why we have to jump at everything just when somebody brings it up.”

Englander and trustee Russ Barrios also proposed forming a committee of trustees and community members to examine the ethnic balance of each of the district’s schools.

Barrios, one of three trustees who voted against the boundary change, has said he was concerned about the motives of the parents who wanted their children to attend Linda Vista instead of Esplanade, which was named a Distinguished School last year, a recognition by the state of its academic excellence.

In an interview earlier in the week, Barrios said he was not going to go as far as calling the parents’ motives racist, but he said he could find no good reason for parents not to want their children to attend a school that was about the same distance from their home, and had no record of violence.

“I can’t look into another individual’s heart,” he said. “But I can look at what’s presented to me. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck . . . to my recollection, every single board member told me, ‘Hmmm, we know exactly what’s going on here.’ But when the vote came, that was cast aside. I was really disappointed and took it as a slight. I thought it was just plain shameful.”

Englander, who voted in favor of the boundary change, said the idea of forming a committee to study the ethnic breakdowns is not meant to be a retreat on the boundary issue.

“Without discussing how anyone voted or the position that anyone took. . . , I think that if anybody feels there is a concern (about the ethnic balance), then we should address this,” she said. “I don’t think this is an easy one to deal with.”