PERSPECTIVE : A City Tug-of-War Over How Best to Use Closed Schools

Though Wardlow Elementary School closed more than a decade ago because of falling enrollment, its corridors still ring with the voices of children who come to the campus for Little League baseball, piano lessons and karate practice.

Former classrooms are now home to a day-care center and a Head Start program, while the athletic fields have been taken over by Frisbee players and picnickers.

“It’s like a little community square around here,” said neighbor Louise Martin, 68, who is out most mornings for a walk around the Pioneer Drive campus.

To city officials, Wardlow and Huntington Beach’s 19 other shuttered schools are vital neighborhood assets. But to cash-strapped school districts, some of the properties are prime real estate that could be developed into homes and shopping centers.

Those conflicting visions are creating strife in a city where nearly a third of the 67 public school campuses are closed. At least five of those sites are now being considered for development.

For years, Huntington Beach has grappled with the issue of what to do with the closed sites. Debate heated up earlier this month when two council members proposed a citywide recreation tax that would be used in part to buy some closed schools.

“There’s a real need in this city for sites like these,” said community activist Chuck Beauregard, who supports the increased tax. “They’re important to us.”

Beauregard chairs a community group called Save Our Kids, which promotes youth activities and services. He maintains that neither children nor other residents are served by bulldozing vacant campuses, which offer precious open space and recreation facilities to the city’s far-flung neighborhoods.

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Educators say they have little choice but to consider selling surplus properties. The sale or long-term lease of even one campus could generate millions of dollars that school officials would use to repair aging but still operating schools and sustain educational programs.

City officials, too, would like to keep the open spaces for the neighborhoods.

“It breaks your heart to lose a school site,” said Huntington Beach Councilman Ralph Bauer, one of two council members who support the tax measure.

“People identify their neighborhoods through them. They are important to us,” he said. “When you shut them down, you take away a little of the vitality of the community.”

Though passage of the tax proposal is not assured, it has stirred up the strong loyalties that residents feel for their local schools.

During the dramatic development boom of the 1950s and ‘60s, most Orange County planners followed the so-called neighborhood concept when selecting school sites. Instead of building a few big regional schools, they opted instead for smaller sites within walking distance for most children. On weekends, schoolyards doubled as parks.

Cities considered the campuses a form of open space, allowing builders who included several schools in their developments to provide fewer parks, said Ron Hagan, Huntington Beach’s community services director.

“The assumption always was that the schools would be there to serve the residents’ open-space needs,” Hagan said.

But in the 1970s, school districts began to see enrollment declines as the city’s population aged, and rising real estate prices prevented many young families from buying homes in the area.

Tracy Pellman, a trustee at Ocean View School District, said the home that her parents bought for about $35,000 in 1965 is now worth at least $365,000, indicative of how much property values have risen.

The Ocean View district desperately needs money, Pellman said, to pay for repairs and improvements at its aging schools, where playground blacktops are cracked, roofs are dilapidated and some buildings haven’t been painted in years.

Losses in Orange County’s investment pool late last year drained Ocean View’s reserves, heightening the need for new revenue.

Ocean View has nearly a dozen closed campuses but is considering development of only a couple at the moment. The district is now evaluating its assets to determine which could be leased or sold.

Her priority, Pellman said, is providing students with top-notch instruction at campuses that are safe and well maintained. Supplying residents with recreational services is the city’s job, while “our primary role is education,” she added.

To some city officials, however, the dichotomy is not that clear. Bauer and other Huntington Beach leaders have urged a team approach in which the city and its five school districts would work together to preserve school properties.

The tax proposal that he and Councilman Tom Harman unveiled earlier this month would cost the average household $30 a year. The tax, which would generate $3 million annually for 10 years, would be used not only to buy some vacant schools but also build youth athletic complexes and a senior center.

Whatever the fate of the tax, officials say, it is vital to adopt a unified strategy.

“Hopefully, this won’t turn into a civil war,” Hagan said. “The big fear is, if the districts sell off the sites one by one without a master plan, that would be losing an opportunity.”