Palos Verdes School Board Moves Quickly With Merger Plan

A legal hurdle remains and parent protests continue, but Palos Verdes school officials are moving rapidly ahead with a plan to consolidate the district’s three high school campuses into one by next fall.

School board members this week gave preliminary approval for the purchase of 17 portable classrooms to be used at Rolling Hills High School. The school, which is expected to be renamed Peninsula High School, will accommodate an estimated 3,000 students when it becomes the district’s only high school in September.

Also this week, Supt. Michael Caston announced that Kelly Johnson, principal at Palos Verdes High School for the past two years, would assume the same position at the new high school.

The 42-year-old Johnson, who worked his way through college by working as a janitor at Rolling Hills High School for three years, has served in a variety of district positions and is popular with both administrators and teachers.

“I think the decision by the superintendent to choose him was a very tough one because we have very good people to choose from,” said Pam Lopez, president of the Palos Verdes Administrators Assn. “But Kelly has very good people skills.”

Principals at Miraleste and Rolling Hills have been offered administrative posts with the 9,000-student district, but it was uncertain whether they would accept the jobs, according to Caston.

The school board, confronted with declining enrollment and mounting financial woes, voted in December to close Miraleste and Palos Verdes high schools and reassign the students to the Rolling Hills campus.

At the same time, the board decided to convert the two closed high schools into intermediate campuses and close the existing intermediates. Those schools, Malaga Cove and Ridgecrest, are smaller than the high school campuses.

Board members had been expected Monday to approve an environmental impact report on school closures districtwide. The document, which the district was ordered to prepare by a judge after a parents’ group challenged an earlier board decision to close Miraleste, must be approved in court before the consolidation plan can be carried out.

Dist. Atty. Chuck Greenberg said he expects a judge to quickly decide the matter once the board submits the report to the court. The board is now scheduled to meet Jan. 21 to approve the document.

On Monday, board members were handed petitions bearing hundreds of signatures from peninsula residents critical of the consolidation plan. Some petition signers said they feared the plan would create traffic, while others belonging to a group calling itself Save Our Schools said they supported putting a parcel tax proposal before voters to avoid closing schools.

“It makes no sense to live in a wealthy community and not give our kids the programs they deserve,” SOS spokeswoman Joan Davidson said in an interview.

Despite the petitions, several board members said Monday that it is time to move forward and that they have received positive feedback from the community on the consolidation effort, dubbed “New Beginnings.”

Caston said administrators from the three schools already have been named to committees to study areas such as curriculum. Representatives from the four peninsula cities will be working with the district on parking and traffic issues, and a student group will determine the official colors of the new school and its mascot.

Caston said an estimated 17 teachers and administrators are expected to be fired because of the school closures. “It is all done on seniority for teachers, and administrators work on a year-to-year basis,” Caston said, adding that some affected administrators will be eligible to go back to teaching jobs.

The eliminated jobs are expected to save the district an estimated $3 million annually, or about 9% of its current operating budget, Caston said.

Johnson, who will continue serving as the Palos Verdes High School principal until the school closes, said he believes it is critical that the peninsula communities support the concept of one high school.

“Obviously, there has been a little bit of turmoil, and hopefully that is going to come to a (resolution),” Johnson said. “It is just imperative that this community . . . come together, and if they do, this can be successful. I think the community will do that.”

Kelly also said he did not foresee any problems housing 3,000 students at the Rolling Hills campus, which presently has about 1,300 students. When he served as the school’s assistant principal in 1978, the campus had about 2,700 to 2,800 students.

“We are not talking about something that is overwhelming,” Johnson said.