SANTA CLARITA / ANTELOPE VALLEY : District Will Revamp Attendance Boundaries : Education: Officials plan open enrollment in response to new legislation and the addition of two schools. Community input is sought.

Teen-agers soon will be able to choose not only what classes they want, but which campus they’d like to attend.

The William S. Hart Union High School District will reconfigure its attendance boundaries in upcoming months to accommodate the opening of its new Valencia High School and La Mesa Junior High School in September.

The change comes amid new state legislation that requires California districts to offer open enrollment--allowing students to enroll in the school of their choice.

Altering attendance boundaries is traditionally a hot topic, and the district has scheduled a series of seven community meetings this month to talk with parents. The first session is at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Arroyo Seco Junior High School.

“One of our goals is to see that students are housed adequately, not just next year but in future years,” said Lew White, district facilities director. “If done right, boundaries won’t be redrawn until another school is built.”

Not all campuses offer the same programs, and administrators hope to balance the curriculum wishes of parents and students with the space crunch at Santa Clarita’s three high schools and three junior high schools.

More than 11,000 students are enrolled in the six schools, 37% more than the listed capacity of the buildings. Generally, a junior high school houses 900 to 1,000 students and a high school houses 1,600 to 1,700 students.

Hart officials have handled the extra enrollment with the stopgap measure of leasing portable classrooms. New boundaries ideally will allow the new $20-million high school and $13-million junior high school to siphon off similar numbers of students from each of the other campuses.

Both new schools are being opened with earlier grades this fall--seventh grade at La Mesa and ninth and 10th grade at Valencia. The later grades will be added in subsequent years. District officials believe few juniors and seniors will want to transfer to a new school.

White said no new boundary proposals have yet been drawn up, and that attendance areas will be guided by comments from parents.

Narrowing the district’s options, however, is the reality of where students live in Santa Clarita. Most are clustered in the Saugus, Newhall and Canyon Country communities--each of which contains one high and one junior high school.

Valencia High School is in Valencia and La Mesa Junior High School is in Canyon Country, southwest of the existing school in that community.

Other criteria for the new attendance areas include balancing enrollment among schools, ease of student travel, preserving ethnic and socioeconomic levels, keeping together students in the same neighborhood and allowing students to move together from junior high to high school.

School officials hope to determine the new boundaries by late February or early March. The longer it takes to set the boundaries, the less time there is to calculate enrollment and inform students where they will most likely attend and what classes will be offered where, district officials said.

Assembly Bill 1114, effective this year, requires California districts to allow students to attend the school of their choice. While this may reassure some parents that their son or daughter will be able to attend the school they want, regardless of boundary lines, it also complicates enrollment projections for each school.

“The issue of transfers is somewhat clouded because we are setting boundaries at the same time we’re doing open enrollment,” White said.