COSTA MESA : Alternatives to New Boundaries Sought

Administrators will present more options to the school board on Tuesday to help relieve overcrowding in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, where schools are expected to reach capacity by the 1995-96 school year.

The board asked for more scenarios last month following a recommendation to add five portable classrooms to Killybrooke Elementary School in Costa Mesa.

That recommendation would mean redrawing boundary lines and shifting 189 elementary students throughout the Costa Mesa zone. Under the plan, students in the north part of College Park’s attendance area would be moved to Killybrooke; students in the the east part of the Paularino attendance area would move to Sonora, and those in the south part of Sonora’s attendance area would go to College Park.

The plan met with a heated reaction from parents who said they didn’t want more classrooms at Killybrooke, which already has one portable classroom and a trailer.

Dale Woolley, the district’s student services director, said the proposals to be presented at Tuesday’s meeting will include reopening Presidio, a kindergarten- through sixth-grade school that was closed about 17 years ago. The district is now leasing it to the Coastline Regional Occupational Program.

Woolley said the school could be used as a kindergarten center for all the zone’s kindergartners. The other elementary schools would then house only pupils in first through sixth grades.

The board is expected to make a final decision next month.

Officials began looking at the problem of overcrowding, zone by zone, a year ago when the board decided to reopen three schools in the Corona del Mar and Estancia zones.

The Newport area will be studied in the spring.