180 Days of Learning : GARDEN GROVE UNIFIED

A campus that had been closed will reopen this fall, about 300 teachers will join faculties across the district and several schools will have new technology for the 46,000 students expected to report for classes Sept. 4.

To meet two goals--to reduce class size in primary grades and accommodate growing enrollment--district officials also are spending about $715,000 to reopen Skylark Elementary School at 11250 MacMurray St. About 300 students will be bused to the campus from the city’s populous southeastern section.

The district is spending more than $400,000 to buy five new school buses and is hiring drivers for them.

District spokesman Alan Trudell said 33 portable classrooms will be added, 28 of which will be devoted to class-size reduction. That program also required expanding the teaching staff.

“Across California, it is becoming a challenge to find qualified teachers,” Trudell said. “But we are finding them, and all our positions will be filled when school starts.”

Students in kindergarten through third grades will begin studying this year from a new language arts program called the Young Scholars series.

The program cost the district about $1.6 million, Trudell said, for textbooks and teacher training.

Another priority will be continued expansion of the district’s wide-area network, a sophisticated computer network. This year, 19 sites will be added to the 25 already online.