Fears Grow Over Skewed Ethnic Mix in Schools : Education: New North County classrooms are being filled predominantly with white students while older schools near city centers are overloaded with minorities.

As more minority students enroll in existing schools, and because most Tnew schools are being built in white areas, North County classrooms are growing increasingly segregated, raising fears that “inner-city” schools are developing in the suburbs.

In one Escondido school, 92% of the students are white; in another, only 32% are white. Two of Carlsbad’s elementary schools have seen the ethnic-minority population grow to more than 55%, but a new school in the district will have less than 10% minority students.

School officials say the racial makeup of communities changes so quickly and in such concentrated ways that they can’t change the school boundaries fast enough to keep a balance.

But some parents and teachers say that districts have had ample opportunities to adjust attendance boundaries to achieve better racial balance, and they accuse district administrators of neglecting schools with large Latino populations, which tend to be older and sometimes more crowded than other schools.

One teacher at San Marcos Elementary charges that not only are Latino students being “dumped” into the school--one of the oldest in San Marcos Unified--but also that their needs are being ignored.

“I would like to see at least an ethnic balance close to what the other schools in the district have,” said Rudy Gutierrez, a bilingual education teacher at San Marcos Elementary, where minorities make up two-thirds of the student population. “I just don’t understand why, rather than trying to balance out the population, they increased the minority population another 3 or 4%.”

But school officials say that San Marcos Elementary’s location makes it the hardest to balance out.

“Probably the place that is most difficult to achieve balance is in schools that already exist because, then you’re talking about a significant dislocation of people,” said Mac Bernd, superintendent of San Marcos Unified.

A parent at a recent San Marcos Unified school board meeting expressed fear that San Marcos Elementary is developing into an “inner-city school.”

San Marcos Unified is typical of school districts across North County that are experiencing not only tremendous growth, but also increased proportions of minority, especially Latino, students.

“We grew by about 700 to 800 students this year, and probably three quarters of that was Hispanic,” said Joe DeDiminicantanio, assistant superintendent at San Marcos Unified.

What happens there, and in many other North County school districts, is that new housing developments are too expensive for most ethnic-minority families, who tend to live in the less-expensive downtowns. But the schools are built near the outlying tracts because that’s where the school districts can get developers to give them land.

The result, school officials concede, is that a disproportionate percentage of minority students are in older schools near low-cost housing in the “inner city” of the town, while the new schools are populated mostly by whites in outlying areas.

Unlike the San Diego city schools, which use voluntary busing to achieve racial balance, North County school districts are not under court order to desegregate, so they don’t get state funds for busing, officials point out.

The county Office of Education projects that 11 North County school districts will be among the 12 fastest-growing districts in the county over the next 10 years, and many of those districts expect much of that growth to be among Latino students.

Many districts have policies that limit how far a school’s racial balance can stray from the district average. Yet almost every district has at least one school that violates the policy, and districts claim they can do little about it.

The policy at the Oceanside Unified School District, for example, is not to have any school fall 15 percentage points above or below the district-wide average, which, for elementary schools, is 56% ethnic minority. In other words, no school is supposed to draw less than 41% or more than 71% of its students from ethnic minorities.

Five of the district’s 15 elementary schools, however, fall outside those boundaries.

At the Christa McAuliffe School, which opened in 1989, ethnic minorities make up 33.6% of the students, while, on the other end of the spectrum, 83.9% of the students at Ditmar School are nonwhite.

“We have done everything we can do to maintain that ethnic balance throughout the district,” said Supt. Steven Speach. “There have been several boundary changes in the past four or five years to try and maintain the ethnic balance.”

Oceanside follows the North County pattern of having its new schools in the areas where growth is projected--and where school sites are available.

In primarily Latino areas, which tend to be in already-developed parts of the city, there are few school sites available, Speach said.

“The funding for school construction is very, very limited,” Speach said. “We have two sources: development fees and the state building program. What we have done is, wherever there was a large development, we’ve gone in and negotiated with the developer and said, look, in lieu of fees, we’ll take land.

“And, well, you take land wherever you can get it.”

Similarly, at Carlsbad Unified, Aviara Oaks Elementary School plans to open in September on the outskirts of the district’s boundaries with a projected ethnic-minority enrollment of 5% to 10%, and to push the ethnic-minority enrollment of neighboring Pine and Jefferson Elementary schools into the 60% to 70% range. The district average is 27%.

The cost of the houses being built in the attendance area of the new school is admittedly prohibitive to a large percentage of the ethnic minorities.

“There won’t be even anything available in the area (near Aviara Oaks) for Latinos to rent, not to mention buy,” said Cheryl Ernst, assistant superintendent at Carlsbad Unified.

Vista Unified School District’s elementary schools have steadily become more segregated during the past five years. Santa Fe/California Elementary School in the center of town has the heaviest concentration of Latinos, blacks and Asians in the district. Its enrollment has steadily climbed from 51.7% ethnic-minority in 1986 to 64% in 1989.

Meanwhile, Vista Unified’s three newest elementary schools, Alamosa Park, Lake and Empresa, have the lowest concentrations of ethnic-minority students in the district, with 17.9%, 24.6% and 19.6% respectively in 1989.

And the situation in Vista Unified is likely to become more unbalanced.

Ron Riedberger, assistant superintendent of administrative services, said the minority population in the district climbs another percentage point or two every year. Now it is 36%, and he sees no end in the trend.

“The Hispanic population is moving into the Santa Fe and Bobier Elementary School attendance areas,” Riedberger said. “But, on the other hand, we know that the new schools that we’ve built in the last four years have taken away from schools like Bobier and Santa Fe some of their Anglo” students.

In contrast, the newest San Marcos elementary school, Knob Hill Elementary, opened in 1988 with an ethnic-minority enrollment of 43%, slightly above the district average, and an elementary school scheduled to open in September will have a similar racial composition.

“Our approach has been that, at least over the past four or five years, as we put new schools on line, we’ve tried to create attendance boundaries so that the student bodies in those new schools are pretty reflective of the average mix in our district,” said Supt. Bernd.

But San Marcos Elementary School, with 66% minority enrollment, sits in stark contrast to Woodland Park and La Costa Meadows Elementary schools, where the minority enrollments are 21% and 13%, respectively.

San Marcos Elementary teacher Gutierrez characterized many of her school’s students as at risk, coming from single-parent and transient homes where participation in school matters typically is lower than in more affluent areas. And the district, she complained, has done little to help.

For example, Gutierrez said, San Marcos Elementary has had no playground equipment for the past school year until recently.

“Why wasn’t the problem of playground equipment dealt with immediately? These children need their exercise, and it was wrong to leave them without some sort of playground,” Gutierrez said. “Would this have happened at La Costa Meadows? No way.

“A lot of school board decisions made for this one school are really inadequate because they know that the parents at this school are disenfranchised because they don’t have any voice,” Gutierrez said.

Members of the San Marcos Unified school board maintain that the education received at all of the schools is equal, but some parents argue that the high concentration of minority students makes it inherently unequal.

“It’s ludicrous for them to say that the schools are equal,” said Donna Hernandez, a parent of two elementary school students and a member of the San Marcos group Citizens for a Better Board.

“The societal problems at each school vary drastically when you have 26% white at one school and 87% at another,” Hernandez said. “The board just has not been responsive when it comes to racial balance.”

Hernandez understands that integration cannot be achieved overnight, but she thinks that the district failed to seize an opportunity in its recent boundary adjustments to take steps toward integrating San Marcos Elementary.

Bernd said that, to bring the ethnic-minority enrollment of San Marcos Elementary close to the district average, 2,400 students would have to be dislocated, three times the number that will already be dislocated in the opening of the new school.

“We’re not just dealing with ethnic balance in adjusting boundaries,” Bernd said. “We’re also dealing with school size, natural boundaries, safety considerations, transportation costs, and you have ethnic balance, and we looked at all of those factors when we drew the new boundaries.”

State laws do not require school districts to apply any hard-and-fast numbers to determine whether schools have become segregated, only that they “undertake reasonably feasible steps to alleviate” segregation, according to a 1976 state Supreme Court decision, said Christina Dyer, general counsel for San Diego City Schools.

And, as a practical matter, some school officials said, the cost of English as a second language and bilingual programs makes it more cost-efficient for financially strapped school districts to group Latino students together, according to some school officials.

“In some ways, it makes things a little bit easier because, if you have a higher concentration of minorities, you can concentrate your resources,” San Marcos assistant superintendent DeDiminicantanio said.

Dyer said she sympathizes with the North County school districts’ situation.

“Their growth needs are so tremendous up in North County,” Dyer said. “If you don’t have places for kids coming to school, first you’ve got to get a roof over their heads, then you start looking at, OK, now I’ve got them in a school, what’s going on in the school, and then is it integrated?”

NORTH COUNTY ETHNIC-MINORITY STUDENTS North County Ethnic-Minority Student population, by district

Percent of Ethnic-Minority Students District 1970 1979 1985 1989 Bonsall 35.6% 42.6% 41.6% 43.5% Borrego Springs 33.9% 36.0% 38.8% 51.4% Cardiff 13.6% 15.5% 17.4% 19.8% Carlsbad 20.9% 18.5% 23.2% 25.7% Del Mar 4.9% 6.4% 7.9% 9.5% Encinitas 20.9% 17.1% 16.2% 17.4% Escondido Elementary 14.8% 23.3% 27.0% 35.0% Escondido High 11.2% 14.8% 19.9% 29.2% Fallbrook Elementary 18.5% 27.5% 30.6% 33.1% Julian Elementary 4.3% 6.4% 8.3% 13.9% Julian High 13.5% 13.8% 12.4% 22.5% Oceanside 28.0% 45.4% 54.0% 56.8% Pauma 61.2% 58.5% 70.2% 73.6% Poway 4.1% 13.2% 15.1% 19.0% Ramona 12.9% 13.3% 16.9% 18.6% Rancho Santa Fe 1/5% 5/6% 10.4% 10.9% San Dieguito 11.8% 11.9% 13.2% 16.7% San Marcos n/a 20.0% 25.1% 34.4% San Pasqual 44.3% 40.5% 38.8% 40.6% Solana Beach 15.8% 19.6% 24.7% 21.2% Vallecitos 5.9% 21.4% 55.6% 63.7% Valley Center 22,7% 28.7% 33.1% 31.7% Vista 18.6% 26.7% 29.7% 36.4%