District to Consolidate Its 3 Schools Into 1

Faced with too few students and mounting money problems, the Palos Verdes Peninsula school board has voted to consolidate the district’s three high schools into one by next fall.

Under a plan adopted late Tuesday, Miraleste and Palos Verdes high schools will be closed and their students reassigned to Rolling Hills High School. That campus, which will be renamed and given new school colors, will be expanded with portable classrooms to accommodate an estimated 3,000 9th- through 12th-graders.

“What it means for the district emotionally is a painful reorganization,” board member Jeffrey Younggren said Wednesday. “But if the community can get behind it . . . we can really have a great high school.”

In recent years, district enrollment has dropped to 9,000 pupils, about half the number of 17 years ago.