HUNTINGTON BEACH : School Integration Subject of Meetings

The Ocean View School District this week started holding neighborhood meetings to tell parents about a racial integration plan that would close one school and reorganize at least three others.

The informal meetings, which began Wednesday, precede two public hearings that the Board of Trustees has scheduled for next month before it decides whether to adopt the integration proposal.

Upcoming neighborhood meetings, all of which will begin at 7 p.m., are scheduled tonight at Westmont School, Tuesday at Spring View School and Wednesday at Marine View School. On Jan. 31, meetings will be held at both Oak View and Village View schools.

District staff officials and at least one board member will be present at each meeting.

The board’s public hearings on the issue are scheduled for Feb. 5 and 19 at Westmont. Trustees will decide whether to adopt the plan after the second hearing.

The proposal--formally recommended last week by the board’s 40-member Integration Advisory Committee and supported in concept by the school board--aims to desegregate Oak View and Crest View schools. It also seeks to create a more balanced ethnic mix of students at five schools whose enrollments reflect an increasing trend toward racial isolation: Hope View, Lake View, Marine View, Mesa View and Star View.

The tentative plan calls for Crest View School, on Talbert Avenue near Beach Boulevard, to be closed, which district officials expect to be a controversial part of the proposal. When the district last spring suggested closing three other schools, hundreds of indignant parents packed a high school auditorium and persuaded the board to postpone the move.

Crest View’s seventh- and eighth-grade students, most of whom are Latino, would be transferred to neighboring schools. Crest View’s kindergarten and elementary students, who are predominantly Anglo, would be moved to Lake View to help offset that school’s large minority student enrollment.

Oak View, whose 89% ethnic minority student population ignited the district’s desegregation effort last year, would be radically changed under the proposal.

The regular kindergarten-through-sixth-grade school, which is situated in a primarily Latino neighborhood, would be changed to include a “newcomer center” for students in grades one through six who have limited English proficiency skills. These students would receive intensive English instruction for up to a year until they have attained a certain ability level in learning the new language.

Once they have reached that level, the students would be moved to a nearby school where they would continue with courses in English as a second language along with regular classroom instruction. Predominantly Anglo schools, such as Hope View, Marine View and Mesa View, would be targeted to receive many of these students.

In addition to its newcomer language instruction, Oak View would remain a regular neighborhood school for kindergarten and first-grade students in the area. At Star View, which has a burgeoning ethnic minority student population, a magnet program in science, math and technology would be established.