Anaheim : School Board to Talk About Overcrowding

The Anaheim City School District board will meet in special session at 1 p.m. Sunday to pore over final details of its plan to decrease overcrowding on its campuses.

The plan, which calls for building five new schools, putting all of the district’s schools on a year-round calendar, increasing class size and eliminating after-school day-care programs, is scheduled for final consideration Tuesday. That meeting begins at 7:30 p.m.

Both meetings will be held at district headquarters, 890 S. Olive St.

“The board members want to have the time to slowly go over each of the proposals and understand them completely,” Supt. Meliton Lopez said of Sunday’s meeting. “They want to know what the effects and the consequences will be of each action.”

The 17,030-student district will exceed its student capacity of 17,250 next year and will continue to grow by nearly 1,000 students a year for the next 20 years, studies show. The downtown elementary school district, which had 11,000 students eight years ago, has 21 campuses.

To deal with the problem, the administration has proposed:

* Building five new schools by 1999 at a cost of $15 million each. Because the state’s school construction budget is underfunded, the district would get loans, similar to home mortgages, to finance the schools.

* Putting the last eight schools on a traditional September-to-June calendar on a year-round schedule, increasing their capacity by 25%. Affected schools would be Clara Barton, James M. Guinn, Benito Juarez, Loara, Madison, Theodore Roosevelt, Betsy Ross and Sunkist elementary schools.

* Increasing class size from the current district limit of 28 to the state limit of 33 students in kindergarten, 32 students in first through third grades and 36 students in grades four through six.

* Eliminating the after-school day-care programs at Thomas Jefferson, Sunkist and Benjamin Franklin elementary schools, which would make available four classrooms. About 120 students use the service, which is not available at other schools.