MISSION VIEJO : New School Already Filled to the Brim

Cielo Vista Elementary School, the newest in the Saddleback Valley Unified School District, is already bursting at the seams, district officials say.

Three portable classrooms were added this summer to house up to 90 students, based on fall enrollment projections. In addition, two new teachers were hired to help reduce the workload in exceptionally large classes.

District officials are planning to add one or two more portables within a month, Principal Larry Callison said.

“What that really reflects is we have a new community of younger children and younger families,” Callison said.

Saddleback officials, trying to accommodate booming growth in the eastern and northeastern parts of the district, opened Cielo Vista in January, expecting 450 to 500 students the first year.

By the end of the last school year, however, 650 students had enrolled.

Although 64 sixth-grade graduated, 156 new kindergartners created a new crunch. “We just graduated two classes of sixth graders,” Callison said, “and we just enrolled five classes of kindergarten. We’ve gone from 650 to 742 without doing anything,”

And by the time school actually opened this month, enrollment had grown even more, to 870 students, he said. Cielo Vista draws from Coto de Caza, Rancho Santa Margarita and the Robinson Ranch area.

A sister school, Trabuco Mesa, about a mile away in Rancho Santa Margarita, has also had increased enrollment.

Trabuco Mesa’s enrollment jumped from 850 last year to 1,090 this year, Principal Jeff Herdman said.

But he still has room for up to 70 more students, he said. Part of the reason is that four portables are on site at the school, which was built three years ago. Students attended classes in portable rooms for two years while Trabuco Mesa’s permanent site was under construction.

Three years ago, most of the students moved into regular classrooms, while some continued in four portables.

Even now, 15 portables at the temporary site house an overflow of students from area schools.

To absorb future growth, the district is planning to add a third elementary school, tentatively called Trabuco Highlands, to house 650 to 700 students. It should be ready in two to four years.

In addition, six more elementaries and an intermediate school are in various stages of planning for the the next five years. The new schools would bring the district total to 38.