Countywide : Anaheim, Santa Ana Schools Feel Squeeze

Saying that the state’s system for funding school construction is biased against older and poorer communities, Anaheim and Santa Ana school officials said Wednesday that their cities will likely have overcrowded campuses for years to come.

Maria-Elena Romero, Anaheim City School District’s strategic planning director, and Mike Vail, Santa Ana Unified School District’s senior director of facilities, said that because the state this year began giving most of its school construction money to districts that can afford to pay for 50% of the construction themselves, poorer districts are at a distinct disadvantage.

According to state officials, they have been able to fund all of the new schools that are ready to be built in districts that can pay half of the construction costs but only about 60% of the projects in other districts.

“The fast-growing districts in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, they get grants from their developers that go toward school construction or the developer gives them the land for a school, which is 50% of the construction cost right there,” Romero said. “But inner-city districts such as Anaheim and Santa Ana, we don’t have a lot of development, so that’s not an option for us.”

Vail agreed, saying, “It’s no longer an even playing field when it comes to getting development money from the state. Suburban districts have an unfair advantage over urban districts.”

Anaheim City, which is an elementary school district, has about 15,500 students at its 21 campuses, which is about 21% more than the schools were designed to house, Romero said. Enrollment is increasing by about 750 students annually.

The district has plans to eventually build five new schools at an estimated cost of $90 million. It had hoped to open at least one or two schools by 1995, but Romero said, “I couldn’t even guesstimate” when the district might get a new campus.

Santa Ana Unified has 48,000 students at 42 elementary, intermediate and high schools and has been growing at an average rate of 1,700 students a year since 1980, Vail said. It has about 12,000 students being taught in portable classrooms, Vail said.

The district has opened eight new schools in the past three years, but Vail said the new rules giving state money to districts that can pay 50% of their own construction costs means it will be difficult for Santa Ana to get the $300 million it needs to build 11 more schools.

Both districts say their enrollment explosion is caused by arrival in the area of younger and larger families.

Leroy Small, a facilities administrator at the California Department of Education, said the state began giving most of its school construction money to districts that can raise their own money “because, naturally, the state wants to get the most bang for its buck.”

He said the situation is not unfair to districts in older communities because they can attempt to raise school construction revenue through local bonds.

But Vail and Romero said local bonds are not a viable option for their districts. To issue bonds--which raise local property taxes--a district must get the approval of two-thirds of its voters.

“That isn’t going to happen in either Santa Ana or Anaheim,” Vail said. “In Santa Ana, 83% of our students are Hispanic, but only 30% of the registered voters are Hispanic. Another 30% of the voters are over 50 years old.

“So, many voters don’t have children in the schools and they aren’t going to increase their taxes because they see no benefit to their own families. For Leroy Small to say we should try to pass a local bond measure shows how out of touch they are in Sacramento.”