Parents Urge Trustees to Keep Bilingual Preschool

Parents at one of the county’s most unusual preschools packed a school board meeting this week, urging trustees to preserve the multicultural program after the school site is sold.

The 9-year-old Montessori International Early Childhood Education Center is one of the county’s few bilingual preschools, where teachers are fluent in Chinese, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Vietnamese. But the program is housed in eight portable buildings on a six-acre piece of land that the Irvine Unified School District intends to sell.

“Our school is a valuable asset, just like the land it sits on,” said parent Gilbert Nelsen, whose daughter attends the school.

The district-administered preschool and kindergarten program was founded in 1987 with a federal grant and became self-supporting this school year. The program’s 179 students are taught in their native languages and English.

Parents say the preschool is essential in helping limited-English speaking students prepare for public school.

“Most of our kindergarten students can read and write in fluent English before starting first grade,” parent Douglas Lee told school board members. “How many schools can boast that kind of continuous progress?”

School board members pledged to seek an alternate location for the program, but they also voted to put the school site up for sale. Its estimated worth is $4 million. The district will require a lease-back arrangement so the preschool can remain at the site until June 1997.

School board members will consider using proceeds from the sale to build a theater at Woodbridge High School.

School board President Mary Ellen Hadley said it is the board’s “moral responsibility” to find a suitable location for the program, “not just a dumping spot.”