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PLACENTIA : District Urged to Reassign Minorities

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Valencia High School’s Parents, Teachers and Students Assn. submitted a petition this week to the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District Board of Trustees, asking the board to redistribute minority students throughout the district.

Charlene Fink, co-president of the PTSA board of directors, presented the petition, which had 100 signatures.

“(We) implore you to take timely and effective action regarding student attendance and boundary issues,” Fink read from the petition.

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The PTSA petition suggests that students who lack proficiency in English should be distributed throughout the district instead of being concentrated at Valencia.

The PTSA also suggested including undeveloped property in Placentia in the Valencia attendance area and assigning all Van Buren Elementary students to Valencia. The current boundaries assign some Van Buren students to El Dorado High School.

The petition also requests a policy designating a school or a class full when the number of limited-English-speaking students exceeds the number of English-proficient students.

The organization protested the practice of taking gifted minority students out of Valencia’s feeder schools and sending them to a program at an El Dorado feeder school.

This year, 36% of the students at Valencia are Latino and 13% are Asian.

District figures indicate that 485 of Valencia’s 1,666 students have limited proficiency in English. At El Dorado, 59 of the 1,424 students have limited English proficiency, and at Esperanza High School, the figure is 87 out of 2,363.

The district is contemplating changes in school boundaries. A committee appointed by the superintendent is expected to submit boundary suggestions this month. One of the committee’s objectives is to evaluate the ethnic distribution of students and determine if all groups are given equal educational opportunities.

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Fink and other Valencia parents fear that the school will be overlooked in the committee’s recommendations, the first time in about 10 years that the district has considered changing boundaries districtwide.

“We’re hearing from other parents that more attention is being paid to Yorba Linda problems,” Fink said. “Valencia parents in the past haven’t been as vocal, and we started this petition effort so the board will know we are concerned.”

Fink said the PTSA has suggested transferring Topaz Elementary School, which has a substantial minority enrollment, to the El Dorado attendance area.

Transferring Topaz “makes sense geographically and would reduce the burden on Valencia,” Fink said.

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