LAS COLINAS : Busing Plan Firm Despite Parents’ Pleas

Despite impassioned pleas from district parents, the Pleasant Valley School District Board held fast to an earlier decision to bus 200 Las Colinas seventh- and eighth-graders to a less crowded Monte Vista Junior High.

Dozens of parents urged the board at its Thursday meeting to reverse its decision, contending that students’ lives would be needlessly disrupted.

“Busing students will not only put an undue burden on these children and be a waste of productive time, but the money spent on excessive busing could be better used in the classroom, benefitting our children’s education,” said Jan McDonald, mother of a Las Colinas fifth-grader and spokeswoman for a group of parents protesting the busing plan.

The decision means all seventh- and eighth-graders will be moved from Las Colinas, limiting enrollment in the school to kindergarten through sixth grades.

“We can continue the busing as a Band-Aid approach or we can plan for the future” and build a new school, one unhappy parent said.

McDonald called for an “instant” school to be built on land purchased from a local developer, and completed by September, 1991.

Board members and school staff said it would be nearly impossible to build such a school.

“Schools don’t just go up over night. The words instant school are a misnomer. There is no such thing as an instant school. A school costs $6 million, and we don’t have $6 million,” board member Leonard Diamond said.

A temporary school would take nearly three years to complete, school officials said.

“The plans that they are recommending right now are not appropriate plans, they’re plans that we’ve dealt with over and over again and they’re plans that we have rejected each time,” Diamond said.

“The instant school is not going to work. It can’t work. We can’t get the portable classrooms in time. We can’t get the grading in time. We have been working for months and months with the developers to sign the papers for the land and we haven’t got that yet.”

The district is planning to build a new school on the same land the parents suggested as a site for an “instant” school, but officials said negotiations toward a purchase have run into problems.

“We are not withholding a school from you. We have been planning for years. These are not Band-Aid measures,” Diamond said of the board’s decisions. “I promise you as a board member . . . that your children will receive the best quality education that we can deliver, whether they are at Las Colinas, whether they are at Monte Vista, whether they are at Los Altos, wherever they are.”