District Weighs Bond to Finish Fillmore School

Against a backdrop of rising enrollment that some say is approaching the crisis stage, school officials here are considering placing a bond measure on the ballot within the next year to complete a long-unfinished middle school.

“I’d say there’s widespread support [for a bond],” Fillmore Unified School District Supt. Mario Contini said. “I know our board is very concerned. This has been one of their priorities to get the middle school done.”

With the city’s school-age population growing fast and schools already at capacity, the district has relied on portable classrooms and other stopgap measures to accommodate students.

A committee studying the problem for the past year gave a bond election the highest priority among 11 recommendations for addressing the longer-term needs. The committee’s report was discussed in detail for the first time Tuesday at a joint meeting of the district board and City Council.

A successful bond election in 1986 allowed the district to purchase land and begin construction of the school. But an $8-million bond to complete the school failed in 1989, resulting in persistent crowding.

The school board won’t formally accept or reject the report until its meeting Tuesday. But since the 12-member committee that wrote it includes Contini, the school board president and a representative of the Parent Teacher Assn., the concept is likely to be embraced.

“I think we need that bond, I think we need that middle school done and I think that’s the most important thing we need at this point,” said Virginia de la Piedra, a trustee and committee member.

She also believes that the community would support a bond, even though school officials are loathe to discuss a specific dollar figure just yet. Less popular are some of the other recommendations, which Contini describes as “ugly stuff.”

Those include holding separate morning and afternoon sessions, which would effectively double classroom capacity, but lead to disruption of extracurricular activities, family life and bus transportation.

Placing students on different year-round classroom schedules--dubbed a “multitrack” program--is another possibility to avoid costly construction.

But the district wants to avoid such controversial measures, especially given the furor that erupted in the community when single-track, year-round education began in the mid-1980s.

“Can you imagine what would occur if we went to multitrack in this district?” Contini said. “Clearly, there’s not a whole lot of options [to a bond measure] in the short run.”

Still, even such drastic possibilities failed to generate much of an audience Tuesday. Contini called the turnout dismal to hear the committee’s findings.

“I think people have accepted the fact [a bond] is a real need,” he said.

Completion of the middle school by 1998 and reconfiguration of grades at elementary, middle and high schools would provide enough room for students until about the turn of the century, he said.

Since 1992, the 3,500-student district has built 18 classrooms to accommodate increasing enrollment.

The school board had previously approved one of the committee’s 11 recommendations--constructing another four-classroom annex at the middle school at an estimated cost of $720,000. Moreover, the committee is recommending implementation of an emergency plan to combine classes or split rooms into two next year at some schools. However, those are merely stopgap measures, Contini said.

“No longer is the district going to be in a slow-growth situation,” he said. “For the next few years, it’s going to be a little faster.”

Indeed, Fillmore’s growth is projected to outstrip that foreseen in the state as a whole. That would mean that Fillmore will probably exceed the expected 27% increase in children between the ages of 5 and 17 in California over the next decade, the committee said.

A reappearance of classroom shortages will demand construction of another elementary school shortly after the year 2001, the report said. The district has already begun a search for a potential site, as recommended by the committee.

Another committee recommendation that could be pursued is converting the district’s office, circa 1922, into classrooms, but that may require prohibitively costly earthquake retrofitting.