New High School Brings District Hassles : Education: Prospective students, their parents squabble over who will attend Rancho Bernardo High.

Dividing two into three seems a simple enough problem, but Poway Unified School District administrators have been burning the midnight oil to come up with the answer.

When the school district’s third high school opens in Rancho Bernardo later this year, it will require about one-third of the students at Poway High and at Rancho Penasquitos’ Mt. Carmel High to transfer to the new school.

“A bummer,” commented one Poway high-schooler, who gave her name only as Carmen. “Just when you get in with a good bunch of friends and stuff, they want you to ship out to a new school. I don’t want to go, and I don’t know anybody who does.”

Poway district Supt. Robert Reeves will recommend at a special school board meeting Monday night that Rancho Penasquitos students now slated to go to the new high school be allowed to remain at Mt. Carmel. He also will recommend that the students slated to transfer to Ranch Bernardo High be segregated on the two present high-school campuses, attending classes with the faculty scheduled to staff the new school.

The board members will make the final decision. But the simmering discontent of both parents and students at any one of several boundary or scheduling proposals is expected to remain.

“We are all sort of dumbfounded,” admitted Leslie Fausset, communications director for the Poway district. “Everyone has been waiting for the new high school to be built because of the tremendous overcrowding at Poway and Mt. Carmel.

“Now we have five new schools opening and no one wants to go to any of them,” she said, only half-joking.

Three elementary schools, a new middle school and Rancho Bernardo High School are the new schools that Fausset was referring to. All require splitting up present school enrollments to populate the newcomers.

But the Rancho Bernardo High opening is the one that has caused the most grief, as parent groups from the three established communities--Rancho Bernardo, Poway and Rancho Penasquitos--and from the two new and growing communities of Sabre Springs and Carmel Mountain Ranch each seek a solution that is best for their own youngsters but not necessarily for the other groups.

Poway parent Linda Harkleroad has no part in the most recent fracas over who goes where in the coming year because her daughter will remain at Poway High School, “thank God,” as a junior next year. But, Harkleroad knows how her Poway neighbors feel.

“I think that the (school) board is underestimating the mood of the parents and ignoring the parents’ wishes,” she said. “I’ve heard talk of recall (of school board members) over this.”

What most parents want is territorial boundaries, Harkleroad said: “Poway students staying at Poway High. Rancho Penasquitos students staying at Mt. Carmel. And Rancho Bernardo High students coming from Rancho Bernardo, Carmel Mountain Ranch and Sabre Springs.”

The recommended boundary plan would do just about what the parent and student groups have indicated they want, Assistant Supt. Jim Abbott said.

Under the recommended boundaries, Mt. Carmel would serve Rancho Penasquitos, Poway High would serve all but a few Poway students, and Rancho Bernardo would serve that community, Sabre Springs and Carmel Mountain Ranch, Abbott said.

Only a few Poway students, from the area around Pomerado Hospital, would be transferred to the new high school, Abbott explained, “because they are within walking distance of the new school and it would be unreasonable not to include them within the boundaries.” The new school is on Paseo Lucido, north of Camino del Norte.

Walt Swanson, associate superintendent, said a territorial divison of students would not provide enough students to support a full curriculum at Rancho Bernardo High. Rancho Bernardo parents and students are seeking parity with the other two high schools, and school administrators are on record as favoring a full curriculum for the new school.

In other words, Swanson said, there couldn’t be computer labs, a full music program or a dozen other activities and classes that Poway and Mt. Carmel offer.

One thing that almost everyone seems to agree on is that moving into the new high school as soon as possible to relieve the overcrowding at the present two high schools. Poway now has an enrollment of more than 3,000 students in facilities designed to serve 2,000 to 2,200. Mt. Carmel has more than 3,200, at least 1,000 over its optimum enrollment.

Complicating the boundary dispute is the lagging construction schedule for the new high school. It was to have opened at the start of the fall semester, but delays have set the opening ahead to December at the earliest, meaning that students not only would be switching schools, but would be switching schools in the middle of a school year.

The Poway school board and Supt. Robert Reeves tried to remedy this by offering the contractor a $300,000 bonus to finish up a “core campus”--classrooms and necessary support buildings--by the start of the fall term. The gym and performing arts buildings would come later.

The contractor, however, estimated that a hurry-up job would cost an extra $5 million. That put an end to that endeavor, known as Plan A.

On to Plan B: double sessions at the Poway or Mt. Carmel campus, which Associate Supt. Walt Swanson said “got very little support from anyone” because “parents had a justified concern that the regular school day not be interfered with.”

So on to Plan C, which calls for regular-length school days at Mt. Carmel and Poway campuses, with students destined for the Rancho Bernardo campus assigned to teachers who also will move to the Rancho Bernardo campus. When the December move comes along, students and faculty could simply shift locations without the trauma of changing classes and teachers in mid-stream.

The catch with Plan C is that the schools would have to go on extended-day sessions, with half the students starting classes at 7 a.m. and the rest at 10 a.m.

Plan D would delay the opening of Rancho Bernardo High until the fall of 1991, and the majority of parents were against that, no matter what other allegiances they had, Swanson said.

Plan E calls for delaying the opening of the new high school until the semester break in January, then transferring only the sophomore and junior students to Rancho Bernardo.