School Boundary Line Change Sought

A black line on a map should be no reason to force students to attend high school five miles away in La Habra, a group of parents argued to school district officials Tuesday night.

The school attendance boundary line for the Fullerton Joint Union High School District cuts across Rosecrans Avenue in Fullerton, requiring students living just north of the line in the Coyote Hills section to attend Sonora High School in La Habra, rather than the neighboring Sunny Hills High School about a mile and a half away.

After meeting several times this year with the Coyote Hills residents to hear their concerns, Supt. Kenneth Jones told about 30 parents Tuesday that he still recommends that school board members keep attendance boundaries intact. After hearing Jones’ report on the matter, the school board took no action.

Coyote Hills residents left the meeting right after the report, disappointed that no school board member commented on the matter and vowing to continue the fight.

“We tried to be polite and not make this thing explode,” said Robert Feng, who has a son who is a seventh-grader at Park Junior High destined to be bused to Sonora in two years. “But now we’ve had it.”

Over the next few days, he said, parents will be meeting to determine their next course of action, which includes asking an attorney what legal steps they can take to force the boundary change, he said.

Coyote Hills, with about 500 homes near Gilbert Street north of Rosecrans, was included in the attendance boundary in 1980, when only a few houses existed in the area. But development of the Coyote Hills Estates in the early 1980s brought more families and gathering resentment of the boundary lines.

Parents argue that the lines:

* Require that their children be bused to another city rather than walking to the nearer high school in Fullerton.

* Break up friendships when their children, who attended grade school and junior high school with children living just south of Rosecrans, must go to a different high school.

* Make after-school activities difficult.

* Encourage parents to violate the boundary either by enrolling their children in exotic-language classes at Sunny Hills that aren’t provided at Sonora, or by using false addresses inside the Sunny Hills boundary.

Jones said that moving the lines to accommodate the students would:

* Hurt the educational program at Sonora. Shifting the students would require shifting some teachers, reducing the types and number of classes that can be offered at Sonora, which already is the smallest high school in the district.

* Upset the racial mix at Sonora, which already has many minority, mostly Latino, students.

* Result in a “domino effect” of more parents asking to have boundary lines changed to allow their children to attend other schools.

Border Dispute Fullerton Joint Union High School District attendance boundaries require students living in the Coyote Hills area of Fullerton to attend Sonora High School in La Habra, a five-mile bus trip. P1634887022