Schools : Ruling Doesn’t Stop Plan for High School

San Gabriel school officials say they will go ahead with plans to open a high school in the fall despite a Superior Court ruling invalidating the 1992 election creating the district.

The decision, released late Monday by Judge Diane Wayne, found that the State Board of Education’s decision to limit voting to residents of the 3,218-student San Gabriel Elementary School District violated the constitutional rights of the residents of the Alhambra City and High School District by excluding them from the election.

Alhambra officials said they were elated with the decision.

“The court ruling vindicates us; it says, ‘Yeah, you were right,’ ” said Heber Meeks, superintendent of the 21,000-student district. “Our contention all along was that you can’t hold an election without including voters in Alhambra.”

Wayne’s order, which declares the election null and void, restores the authority of the Alhambra school district to enroll high school students from San Gabriel. Until the 1992 election, San Gabriel students attended elementary school in their own district, then attended high school in the larger Alhambra district. The election, in effect, had San Gabriel seceding from the Alhambra district.

Meeks said parents with incoming ninth-graders this fall should enroll them at San Gabriel High School in the Alhambra School District, just as they always have.

But San Gabriel superintendent Gary Goodson said their high school will operate as planned next fall pending an appeal. “We’re going right ahead with our plans for the high school this year. This is part of the ongoing process of this legal issue. It’s very premature for Alhambra to make announcements to the kids in this district to go ahead and enroll in their district.”

Meeks said, however, that he requested the names and addresses of students enrolled in San Gabriel next year from the San Gabriel school district and will consider further legal action if the district does not comply.

“The kids, at this point until an appeal is filed, belong to Alhambra, not San Gabriel,” Goodson said.

San Gabriel has existed as a unified school district for two years. It has hired teachers, modernized buildings and prepared to enroll high school students this fall at temporary facilities in Jefferson Intermediate School until a new high school could be built.

But plans for a new high school were dashed in April, when San Gabriel voters rejected a $30-million bond issue that would have paid for a new campus.

This week’s decision is the latest twist in a dispute that has consumed officials and lawyers for more than three years.

Controversy intensified several years ago, when the State Board of Education, in a highly contentious decision, ruled that only voters within the boundaries of the San Gabriel School District would be allowed to vote in the April 1992 unification election.

This incensed officials in Alhambra, who responded by suing the State Board of Education. In a preliminary ruling issued March 22, Wayne agreed that the Alhambra district would lose state funding because of the election, a matter that greatly concerned voters in that district.

But Goodson pointed out that Wayne also declared that San Gabriel’s unification would not harm the ethnic balance or disrupt education in Alhambra.

“There are so many aspects of Judge Wayne’s decision that can be appealed,” he said. “An appellate judge taking a look at it is going to wonder how it was allowed to go this far.”