ORANGE : Parents Protest School Plan on Overcrowding

Parents in the Orange Unified School District showed up in force at a Board of Education meeting last week to protest a plan to alleviate overcrowding.

Designers of the plan--which draws new attendance boundaries for the 27,000-student district by 2000--told parents their concerns will be considered.

But members of the district’s subcommittee on overcrowding chose to relocate 142 sixth-graders in 1995-96 as the least disruptive way to cope with a problem that has been building for years, committee chairmen said.

New growth on the east and west sides means students need to be moved to schools in the center of the district, the subcommittee report said.

Plan A sends sixth-graders from West Orange Elementary to Portola Middle School.

Anaheim Hills fifth-graders attending Imperial Elementary this year will go to Crescent Intermediate School next year.

The move of students from Imperial is a stop-gap measure for Anaheim Hills until one of two new schools can be built, Supt. Robert L. French said. That building is not expected to open until 1997.

Residents there have paid about $9 million in Mello-Roos taxes to pay for the schools, and parents are upset that the building projects have not materialized.

“We have been faithfully paying our Mello-Roos (taxes) and told those schools would be there in a year, then another year,” Anaheim Hills resident Linda Ornellas said. “I don’t think we should make our children pay for the district’s ill-planning and lack of faith to its commitments.”

Board members were quick to note that they were not responsible for earlier inaction on the overcrowding issue.

“We are a relatively new board and we are willing to make the tough decisions so this does not go on another three years,” Trustee Max Reissmueller said.

The next public hearing for the plan to reorganize the district will be March 30.