Unification Remains Hot Issue : Education: With rural schools opposed to becoming part of Escondido’s large district, the long-debated plan is a long way from being settled.

With the recent purchase of land for a new Valley Center high school, and a superintendent vacancy in nearby Escondido, the long-debated issue of unifying all or some of the area’s four school districts has again been raised. But officials on all sides concede that nothing will happen soon.

There is support for unification among parents and educators in the Escondido’s elementary and high school districts, who say it would improve curriculum coordination and communication among teachers and administrators at various grade levels.

But sentiment also runs strong that bigger is not necessarily better. Trustees and superintendents in the neighboring rural areas of San Pasqual and Valley Center don’t want to be swallowed up by a large, centralized district based in Escondido. There are now more than 24,000 students in the four districts, more than half of them in the Escondido elementary district.

Currently, three separate elementary school districts--Escondido Union, Valley Center Union and San Pasqual Union--all send their high school students to the 6,600-student Escondido Union High School District, which encompasses some 270 square miles. Its four schools are all in Escondido.

“We’re not trying to suck anybody in to what we want,” said Escondido elementary trustee Kathy Marler, at a recent and frequently heated joint meeting of the four school boards. “I’m for the unification of our (two) Escondido districts. I’m not trying to get Valley Center or San Pasqual as part of that.”

Long-term trustees were aware of the Valley Center and San Pasqual positions going into the joint meeting. They said the discussion was not intended to settle the unification issue, but to merely continue longstanding talks and familiarize new board members with the issue.

“It had been two years since we had a meeting” on the issue, said high school trustee Bill Horn. “We weren’t going to go into that meeting and unify the districts. . . . We were just kind of assessing the situation.”

Marler said after the meeting that Valley Center has stalled any unification talks, even for just the two Escondido districts, because they want the high school district first to build a secondary school in their community.

The high school district recently paid $1.9 million for 52 acres of orange groves to build a high school in Valley Center, but there is no funding now for construction. District officials estimate it will take five to seven years before the school can open, although Valley Center officials want the timing speeded up. They eventually want to take that school and form a unified district of their own.

Indeed, Valley Center officials get a bit nervous whenever unification is brought up. They say it took a long time just to get the high school district to buy land for a school, and now some of those supportive high school trustees are nearing retirement from the board. Valley Center Union Supt. Jeff Mulford and his trustees said they were afraid the new school would be placed even further back in priority if the Escondido districts unified now and eliminated the representation that Valley Center now enjoys on the separate high school board.

But John Damelio, a high school trustee, tried to calm their fears, saying, “I’ve heard about unification in this community for 30 years. Don’t panic.”

There’s little or no support for all four of the districts to unify, and a feasibility study done the last time the issue was raised seriously, in 1990, concluded as much.

But that report said it was feasible to create a Valley Center unified district once a high school site was bought and a funding plan in place, and then create an Escondido unified district with the remaining schools.

The one-school, 230-student San Pasqual district doesn’t want to be included in any unification, and officials there are content to watch the topic languish until the Valley Center issue is resolved.