Board Supports Agua Dulce High School Plan : Education: The district says it can afford the facility. But county officials could still override the decision.

The school district in Acton and Agua Dulce has decided to proceed with plans to start a local high school program this fall, despite a warning from the county superintendent of schools that doing so could bankrupt the district, officials said Friday.

The Soledad-Agua Dulce Union School District sent its response to Los Angeles County schools Supt. Stuart Gothold on Thursday saying the elementary district can afford to offer its own ninth-grade classes in September by gaining salary concessions from district employees.

But a tentative contract agreement with the district’s teachers granting the concessions had not been completed as of Friday. And county education officials, who could overrule the ninth-grade decision, said they may take a week or more to evaluate the district’s response.

In other business, the school board voted Thursday night to name its planned new campus Vasquez High School after famous mid-19th-Century bandit Tiburcio Vasquez. The school site is a short distance from the county’s Vasquez Rocks Park, so named because Vasquez used to hide out there.

Naming a high school after a bandit who was hanged in 1875 for murder had raised some residents’ eyebrows when the board signaled its choice a week earlier. But Vasquez’s name was the top choice suggested by residents, and some Latinos consider Vasquez a Robin Hood-like figure of his era.

The elementary district is dealing with the ninth grade and high school name issues because residents in Acton and Agua Dulce voted overwhelmingly in November to add secondary education. The district will be renamed the Acton-Agua Dulce Unified School District in July.

The district has a 40-acre site in Agua Dulce but no high school. So this fall’s ninth-grade class would be housed at the district’s High Desert middle school in Acton. Tenth- through 12th-graders would continue to attend schools in the Antelope Valley Union High School District.

To ease the county superintendent’s financial concerns, district officials have been trying to negotiate agreements to defer more than $420,000 in back salary owed employees for a 7% raise the district has been unable to pay, and to avoid paying that same raise this coming school year.

A tentative deal with the teachers union to defer those obligations in exchange for a union-proposed provision on dues unraveled mid-week after the school board balked. On Friday, the teachers union accused the board of making teachers scapegoats for the district’s financial problems.

In an April 2 letter, Gothold had warned the district it might not be able to afford a local ninth-grade program. On Friday, Dist. Supt. Tom Brown said he plans to give the county a newly revised budget that shows the local ninth grade generating more money than it would cost to run.