School Festers as Bond Issue Vote Fails : Education: Fallbrook’s fifth such measure since 1978 falls just short of Prop. 13’s requirement for two-thirds of the vote.

Betty Rupp volunteers at a high school nurse’s office that has no bathroom, near a school library too small to hold the number of students who rely on it or the books to serve them.

Assembly and lunch hour are held in two shifts, and still the cafeteria and gymnasium are stuffed. And most of the open space on the school grounds is now dotted with more than two dozen portable classrooms.

Welcome to Fallbrook Union High School--built 33 years ago to fit 1,200 students, but struggling to handle a population that topped 2,400 this year and continues to grow. It’s also the source of a bond measure that just won’t pass.

Fallbrook voters Tuesday rejected an $11.8-million bond that would have paid to overhaul the high school. The defeat was Fallbrook Union High School’s fifth since 1978, and the fourth in the past two years alone. It may not be the last.

“I don’t know what the options are except to continue to put it on the ballot,” said Jeff Lyon, a Fallbrook architect and father who has held forums to educate the community about the high school’s sorry situation. “There’s no state money available, and the kids are coming, and there’s no other choice but to go back to the community again and again and again.”

What makes the task all the more frustrating is the fact that the majority of the community has supported every one of the five ballot measures. But state law says that’s not good enough. It’s two-thirds or nothing.

“I blame Proposition 13. It’s the law. There’s no question of that, but it’s extremely difficult to get two-thirds approval,” said Jack Boline, a retiree who volunteered to run the bond campaign in June and November of this year. “It’s a tough nut to crack.”

The school district also owns an empty lot off Gird Road where some want to see a new high school built to relieve the strain. The two bond measures in 1990 focused on building on the new site, and the June initiative would have moved ninth grade to Gird Road and partly financed an overhaul of the existing high school.

But all those measures were defeated: Some residents felt building a new school would divide the community and that the money should be spent to fix up the old site first.

So the measure was overhauled. But Tuesday the revamped bond flopped again, fewer than 4 percentage points short of the 66% needed for victory.

“The overt opposition seemed quite a bit smaller this time and gave us this hope, but when the actual vote came in it seemed to be almost the same,” said Al Walker, a biology teacher and president of the Fallbrook Teachers Assn. “I represent an outstanding group of teachers that tries to do an excellent job. . . . It hurts a little bit.”

Some optimism remains, however.

“I think there’s no question that I’m disappointed,” said Fallbrook Union High School Principal Jim Yahr. “But one of the things that is encouraging is that the majority of people in Fallbrook do support education.”

Rupp, 68, is one of those people. She got so tired of reading about Fallbrook High’s problem and mulling rumors over coffee that she came down to the school more than two years ago to see for herself.

The conditions startled her and so began her volunteer efforts.

“When one bond issue failed, I just started in with another committee, and then I tried the next bond issue, and then the next one and the next one,” said Rupp, adding that she doesn’t want to see the kids “go without.”

But Fallbrook continues to grow, and area schools continue to unload bigger batches of freshmen every fall at the archaic high school, upgraded in the 1960s to accommodate 1,800 students but inadequate today.

By the 1999-2000 school year, Yahr estimates, the enrollment will top 3,800.

“The kids are in the feeder schools now. We know they’re going to be coming,” Yahr said. “And we know that, when the economy turns around--and it has to at some point, we’re in a growth area.”

Neither Yahr nor the Fallbrook volunteers are willing to make any predictions about the next bond measure, but all said they hope the school board, with two newly elected members, will continue to involve the community in the search for a solution.

The district, Lyon said, should also spend all its development dollars first, to more easily justify to voters the need for a bond measure.

But the most hope lies in a possible 1994 ballot measure that would exempt school bonds from the two-thirds straitjacket imposed by Proposition 13, Boline said.

“It doesn’t take too many people under that old Prop. 13 to shoot something down,” he said.