Fitting Legacy

SANTA ANA — Felicitas Mendez used a golden shovel Wednesday to turn over not one but two scoops of earth at a ceremony to mark the start of construction for California’s first space-saver school.

Seated in a wheelchair, the 82-year-old Mendez wielded the shovel once for herself and then for her late husband, Gonzalo Mendez, who successfully sued Santa Ana, Westminster and other local school districts in 1945 to end the segregation of Latino students in Orange County.

Acknowledging that achievement, trustees of Santa Ana Unified School District this year voted to name a new campus the Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School. It will be the first school in the district to be named for two people and the first to be named for a living individual.

At Wednesday’s two-hour ceremony, which featured mariachi music and a dozen speeches by local officials, Mendez talked briefly about her family’s commitment to equal public schooling for all children, not just Latinos.

“Everybody comes to this country looking for something better,” she told the crowd of about 250. “Now we can give it to them.”

Commenting on the irony of being honored by a district that her family once sued, she said: “It makes me feel good.”

Johanna Mendez-Sandoval, who attended Wednesday’s ceremony, first proposed that the new campus be named for her grandparents. She and others then gathered more than 1,700 signatures on petitions supporting the idea.

City Councilman Robert L. Richardson, speaking at the ground-breaking, commended the Mendez family for its activism and said many problems in education have yet to be addressed. The people who find solutions could well be among the children who attend the new school, he said.

“I don’t know who is going to be the next Gonzalo Mendez or Felicitas Mendez,” he said. “Maybe that person is in the audience. Maybe that person will be a young person who goes to the Mendez Intermediate School.”

The new campus has been dubbed the space-saver school because it will be next to a commercial development and have three stories of classroom, office and parking space. Also, it will be built without condemning and land or relocating residents.

The space-saver concept was created by the state for urban areas where large plots of vacant land are scarce. Santa Ana Unified is the first district to take advantage of money set aside for space-saver schools.

Construction on the 12-acre site is expected to be completed by November 1999. The state will pick up the $42-million tab for construction and land acquisition.

District officials have said they expect to enroll 1,300 students in the school, which has the “fundamental” designation because it will offer a back-to-basics curriculum.

Much of Wednesday’s ceremony was praise for the Mendez family and the school, which is being build despite some initial local opposition.

Some city officials and residents opposed the plan because of the high cost of land in a commercial area (the site was purchased for $18.5 million) and because they believed that having a school in the midst of businesses would be disruptive.