Schools Chief Seeks to Mend Fences With Peninsula Parents : Education: The district superintendent asks parents who are upset with school closures to end their legal battles for the students’ sake.

In the aftermath of a court ruling that clears the way for school closures on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, district officials urged parents to call a truce and end their years of legal wrangling.

“Whether people agree or disagree with consolidation, for the welfare of the kids in this district we need to come together,” Supt. Michael Caston said Friday. “If we work together, we can have the best high school in the state.”

After a bitter, four-year battle between the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District and parents seeking to keep all three of the district’s high schools open, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge John Zebrowski ruled Friday that the district had complied with state law when it prepared an environmental impact report on school closures.

Zebrowski did not elaborate on his ruling.

The ruling was issued after attorneys for two parents’ groups argued that the district, which earlier had been ordered by another judge to prepare the impact report, had failed to adequately study traffic, parking and other potential environmental problems that could arise if the consolidation plan is carried out.

“There is going to be tremendous overcrowding,” Stephen Kristovich, the lawyer for the East Peninsula Education Council (EPEC), one of the parents’ groups, told the judge.

Citing a declining enrollment districtwide and mounting fiscal problems, board members voted last December to close Miraleste and Palos Verdes high schools and reassign those students to Rolling Hills High School.

The board estimated the move would save the 9,000-student district $2.3 million. District officials had projected a $2.6-million deficit for the 1991-92 school year unless some campuses were closed.

More than 50 parents showed up Friday for the hearing before Zebrowski. Many of them sported pink paper badges reading “Save Our Schools.”

School board member Brent Goodrich, himself an attorney, painted a bleak picture of the district’s finances to Zebrowski. He told the judge that if the district was prohibited from carrying out the consolidation plan, it could not afford to hire back teachers, administrators and others who have already been fired because of recent budget cuts.

“We’re going to have three high schools with one principal” if the schools are not consolidated, he said.

Several parents seeking to keep all three high schools open said afterward that they were bitterly disappointed with the judge’s ruling and predicted the district’s students would ultimately be the big losers.

“What we are going to have is a severely overcrowded high school,” said EPEC member Dawn Henry.

EPEC Chairman Tom Jankovich also predicted overcrowded conditions and contended that traffic on the peninsula’s narrow roadways would become snarled as the district’s 3,000 high school students make their way to one campus.

However, Jankovich said he personally would not favor appealing the judge’s decision to a higher court.

“I wouldn’t pursue it from this point,” he said. “From my standpoint, we got to get on with it.”

School board President Jack Bagdasar, who attended the court hearing with three other board members, echoed Caston’s call for the district’s parents to now work together with the district.

“The winners in all of this are our students,” Bagdasar said. “I have never been more excited in my whole life. To me this is like the end of World War II.”

Even though it was not certain whether the district would be allowed to proceed with its consolidation plan, it had moved forward in recent weeks to convert Rolling Hills High into the district’s only high school.

A principal has already been appointed, portable classrooms to handle the large influx of new students ordered and the campus renamed Palos Verdes Peninsula High School.

Under the plan, Ridgecrest and Malaga Cove intermediate schools will be closed and the students transferred to the former Miraleste and Palos Verdes high schools. No elementary schools will be closed.