FULLERTON : Kindergarten Urged for Maple Center

The school board is continuing its debate over whether to convert part of the Maple Community Center into a kindergarten and end 24 years of busing the neighborhood’s youngest schoolchildren.

If the plan goes through, kindergartners will stay in their neighborhood, but students in first grade and beyond will continue to be bused.

The school district says about 78 children from the Maple neighborhood will enter kindergarten next year and parents want their children closer to home.

“A lot of the people from here have little kids and they don’t have cars . . . and if (the children) are sick, it’s hard for the parents to go and get them,” said Rose Mary Espinoza, 36, who attended Maple Elementary before busing began in 1970 as a result of a court desegregation order.

Espinoza said she would gladly send her 5-year-old daughter to kindergarten at the community center as long as it has the same quality education as Laguna Road Elementary, where her 7-year-old son studies.

For six years, the school district has been looking into the possibility of converting the center into a school. The board hoped to create a K-6 school at the site but was not able to raise the more than $1 million for the project, said Pat Puleo, director of instructional services for Fullerton School District.

Now the school board is focusing on the possibility of a kindergarten, which is estimated to cost $50,000, Puleo said. The city has already sunk $500,000 into the center to renovate an office and two classrooms, she said.

If the kindergarten is opened, community programs now at the center could be eliminated or scaled down, Puleo said.

Describing a possible way to make room for the kindergarten, Puleo said at last week’s school board meeting that the high school diploma completion program could be cut and classrooms for English instruction to adults could decrease.

The Fullerton Interfaith Emergency Services to the poor and homeless would most likely be relocated, but other services such as Head Start and child care would remain in the building, she said.