High School Boundary Issue Solved in Poway

A five-year controversy over the new Rancho Bernardo High in the Poway Unified School District was settled when the board decided to use community boundaries to determine what school a student will attend.

School officials at first argued that division by communities would not provide the school with enough students to support a full curriculum of computer labs, music classes and other activities offered at Poway High and Mt. Carmel High.

But, in the final decision, they bowed to parents’ wishes, counting on growth in the next few years to resolve that concern.

In a 4-1 vote, the board decided Monday night that students living in Rancho Bernardo will go to Rancho Bernardo High, those in Rancho Penasquitos will attend Mt. Carmel and those in Poway will go to Poway High. Through 1991, however, students in northern Rancho Penasquitos, northern Rancho Bernardo and south Poway will be allowed to choose the school they want to attend. An area near Pomerado Hospital in Poway will remain an open-enrollment area indefinitely.

In a technical move, the school board also voted 3 to 2 to establish Rancho Bernardo High in September, even though the school itself will not be ready for students until December.

The actions came before a sharply divided crowd of more than 200 parents, students, teachers and district staff members packed into the Meadowbrook Middle School on Monday night.

The decision to create the new school in September means that future students and teachers of Rancho Bernardo High will remain at their current schools but will be in their own classes and extracurricular activities, including athletics, student government and band.

The main goal was to open the new school as quickly as possible. By segregating the schools, the students, staff and faculty will be ready to move once the main buildings of Rancho Bernardo High are finished, which is expected to be in December.

“Our No. 1 criteria has to be the downsizing of schools,” said Supt. Robert Reeves whose staff recommended the plan.

Reeves said that to transfer Rancho Bernardo students, staff and faculty in the middle of the school year without segregating them first would be “too disruptive” because it would require rescheduling classes for the 6,675 high school students in the district.

Parents of students from Poway and Rancho Penasquitos, however, claimed that segregating students while they are still in their original schools would be too complicated, creating factions and rivalries on the same campus. They would have preferred to delay the opening of the new school until the second semester, which starts in February.

Some parents were outraged with the way the decision was reached, claiming that the board had ignored recommendations made by community committees formed by the board, their main gripe being that the board didn’t wait until February to make the change.

“I don’t think they paid any attention to us,” said Sue Herndon, a parent from Poway. “They totally ignored the majority of the parents and teachers and what the community wanted. They made a decision to ignore us.”

The settlement giving some students a choice of school, however, seemed to please most of the parties involved.

Ninth-, 10th- and 11th-graders in northern Rancho Penasquitos, north Rancho Bernardo and southern Poway must choose their school by May, 1990, and incoming ninth-graders in those areas will be given a choice in May, 1991. The area near the Pomerado Hospital in Poway will remain an open-enrollment area because it is within walking distance of Rancho Bernardo High.

Rancho Bernardo High, which will have as many as 3,000 students, is on Paseo Lucido, north of Camino del Norte, and was originally scheduled to open in September.

Poway High and Mt. Carmel High are now the two largest high schools in the county, each holding more than 3,000 students. Each was designed to serve no more than 2,200 pupils. It was unclear how many students the new school will siphon off.