HUNTINGTON BEACH : 15 Months of Changing the Schools

After approving the district’s most sweeping redistricting plan ever, Ocean View School District officials during the next 15 months will face the task of revamping the school system while upgrading academic programs.

The reorganization, which the five-member board of trustees unanimously approved Tuesday, will close two schools and change four others to middle schools after the 1991-92 school year. It will also redraw boundaries districtwide, forcing an estimated one-fourth of Ocean View’s 8,600 students to change schools. Officials expect busing to increase fivefold.

Approval of the plan, designed to adjust sagging enrollment and burgeoning racial segregation, capped more than a year of study and debate by officials and a recent campaign by parents protesting the move.

“This is the point we’ve really been looking forward to, to get the go-ahead and put this (plan) into place,” district Supt. Monte McMurray said.

Beginning this fall, the district will plan new program offerings, finalize the expanded busing schedule, train teachers for new jobs, make building modifications at schools and familiarize parents and students with the imminent changes. In addition, officials will begin recruiting students for two magnet programs that will be established at Oak View Elementary School to help desegregate that chiefly Latino school.

Oak View, which will lose its sixth grade while taking steps to balance a student population that is currently 89% minority, will be dramatically overhauled. Its boundaries will be reduced to a single neighborhood east of the school, shaving its current home-school enrollment to 310 from 690. Those students will attend neighboring, largely Anglo schools to improve racial balance districtwide, officials said.

The Oak View desegregation effort got under way this year when about 40 students there moved to Golden View School under a voluntary transfer program. This fall, officials hope to encourage another 30 students each to move to Golden View and Hope View schools.

The district, which will bus an estimated 3,000 students a day beginning in September, 1992, will buy 10 new buses and stagger class starting times at its schools. Ocean View currently buses about 600 students daily, not including special education students.

The district will form teams of teachers, administrators and other employees to plan new programs, structure the new middle schools and decide which staff members will change schools, McMurray said.

Gay Davidson-Shepard, president of the Ocean View Teachers Assn., said union leaders will negotiate policies for teacher transfers as part of contract talks due to open next month. “I think we’ll be able to accommodate everyone’s needs,” she said.

The redistricting plan will make Ocean View the county’s last kindergarten-through-eighth-grade district to introduce middle schools. The district is now composed of six K-8 schools and 11 K-6 sites. In September, 1992, Marine View, Mesa View, Spring View and Vista View schools will become middle schools for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, and Crest View and Haven View schools will be closed. The remaining 11 sites will be changed to K-5 schools.

Some parents, who argue that the reorganization will cost too much, divide neighborhoods and undermine strong academic programs, said Wednesday that they will monitor the transition to assure that the promised educational benefits are realized.