PLACENTIA YORBA LINDA : School Boundaries to Be Aired in April

The public will have a chance to comment next month on still-undisclosed proposals for changing school attendance boundaries, but district officials say most major changes will probably not go into effect until after the 1993-94 school year.

The Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District is looking for ways to handle population shifts in the district and, at the same time, to make better use of its facilities, cut down on transportation costs and promote ethnic balance in the schools.

Last spring, the district created a boundary advisory committee, made up of 12 parents, to study the issue. The committee is scheduled to announce its recommendation at an April 14 public meeting, then parents will have the chance to comment or respond later in writing.

No immediate decisions will be made. District Supt. James O. Fleming is not expected to make any recommendations to the Board of Trustees for final action until after the district has had time to study the plan and parents have commented on it.

Fleming said last week that he had not yet seen the report, nor does he know the extent of the proposed changes. The superintendent said he would probably bring his recommendations to the board on a case-by-case basis.

“Since I haven’t seen the report, I can’t predict when the changes might be implemented,” Fleming said. “Some will take longer than others to study, and some, such as school closings and building new schools, it won’t be possible to implement right away.”

The committee held three public hearings earlier this year to gather public input on how the current attendance boundaries have worked and how they might be changed. What emerged was a strong opposition to busing students away from neighborhood schools, as well as support for maintaining the current elementary school, junior high school and high school feeder system.

Even many parents who felt their children’s schools were too crowded wanted the district to maintain current boundaries and not bus students to under-enrolled schools.

One call for change, however, involved Valencia High School. The school’s Parent Teacher Student Assn. directors want the district to move several new Placentia housing developments out of El Dorado High School’s attendance area into Valencia’s attendance area and to reassign an elementary school from Valencia to El Dorado’s attendance area.

The PTSA said those moves would more fairly distribute the district’s non- English-speaking students among the district’s schools, rather than concentrating them at Valencia.

The meeting on the new proposals will begin at 7 p.m. April 14 in the board room at the Education Services Center, 4999 Casa Loma Avenue, Yorba Linda.