School Restructuring Plans to Be Discussed : Education: Public hearings will focus on such recommendations as year-round scheduling and sale of unused property.

Faced with increasing enrollment and dwindling resources, the Arcadia Unified School District has scheduled several public hearings on possible restructuring of its schools.

The hearings will focus on school task force recommendations, which already have sparked considerable controversy in the 8,037-student district. Among them:

* Starting pilot year-round school programs at Baldwin Stocker and Holly Avenue elementary schools to relieve overcrowding. The programs would be voluntary.

* Adding ninth grade to high schools that currently serve grades 10 through 12 and setting up middle schools for sixth- through eighth-graders.

* Selling the now-closed Santa Anita Elementary School property to pay for new classrooms at Dana and Foothill junior high schools and Arcadia High School. Santa Anita school was closed when enrollment slumped in the early 1980s.

* Closing First Avenue Junior High School and leasing the land to bring in money.

* Leasing Bonita Park Elementary School, which currently houses the Huntington High and Rancho High continuation schools for troubled high school students.

* Closing a mini-school within Hugo Reid Elementary School that serves kindergarten through third-graders and moving those students onto the main Hugo Reid campus down the street. The old K-3 mini-school would house continuation students who currently attend school at the Bonita site.

District officials say they favor selling and leasing unused school parcels because of the prohibitive cost of renovating the buildings and bringing them up to current standards.

For instance, the district says it would have to spend $1 million to reopen Santa Anita and $300,000 per year in operational expenses, while reconfiguring would create more space at lower grades for a fraction of that amount.

School officials stressed that the board will not act on the recommendations before hearing from the public.

“There are a lot of things in the report that are threatening to a lot of people,” said Joann Steinmeier, president of the Arcadia Board of Education.

“The purpose of this was to get a think tank of ideas going,” she said. “I’d like to dispel the myth that this is a done deal.”

One hearing was held at Hugo Reid school. Others will be Monday at Foothills Junior High School, 171 E. Sycamore Ave., and Oct. 9 at Holly Avenue Elementary School, 360 W. Duarte Road. They will run from 7 to 9 p.m.

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