Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Plan Lets Some Students Avoid Transfers

Students facing transfers away from their neighborhood school because of new attendance boundaries beginning in 1995 may instead go to their old campus under a revised plan by the William S. Hart Union High School District.

Authors of the proposed boundaries say allowing those students to choose campuses will temporarily address complaints by some Saugus parents about their children attending school in Canyon Country.

District trustees will have their first review of the proposed boundaries at their regular meeting tonight.

Some parents objected to the first draft of new attendance areas that called for shifting 220 to 250 students living in upper Bouquet Canyon from Arroyo Seco Junior High School to Sierra Vista Junior High School, beginning in 1995.

District organizers adjusted the plan, giving students the right to choose if they would rather attend their old school. Crowding at Arroyo Seco will be relieved by shifting those living in Valencia’s Northbridge neighborhood from the school to the new La Mesa Junior High.

Under recently enacted state law, a student may apply to attend any school within his or her district. The district option gives qualifying students--those who live near one campus but are slated to attend another under the boundary shift--higher priority in deciding which campus to attend.

Officials concede that the move is a temporary solution.

Children living in residences near Bouquet Canyon and Plum Canyon roads that are purchased after April 1 will be designated to go to Sierra Vista Junior High and Canyon High School. Those students will be shifted to the new schools in 1995, when Plum Canyon Road is extended to Whites Canyon Road.

“It won’t take care of all of them, forever,” said Lew White, district facilities director. “It will take care of all of them for now.”

Both new schools will open with lower grade levels this fall--seventh grade at La Mesa and ninth and 10th grade at Valencia--and will add the higher grades in subsequent years. District officials believe that few juniors and seniors will want to transfer away from their friends and into a new school.