The Test: Fixing the Class Crunch

By NICK ANDERSON

Jan. 22, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ANAHEIM —

To learn about the school crowding crisis in California, you could have gone to the forum held here Wednesday by three members of Congress at Loara Elementary School.

Or you could have heard it straight from Heather Miller. She is the first- and second-grade teacher at Loara who was shuttling between Room 22 and Room 18 because the campus is too full to allow her a room of her own.

When the weather is warm and dry, Miller sits outside with her students at a picnic bench, as she did Wednesday morning for a science lesson on pumpkins. When it’s not, she has to share a room with another teacher.

“It’s hard to be in the classroom with 30 kids and two teachers without distracting each other,” Miller said. “They’re shuffling papers, getting up, asking questions. The noise level. . . .”

“It’s unbearable,” said her teaching partner, Marge Huhta. It’s so bad that Huhta even keeps the air conditioner off when kids are in the room. Too noisy.

Things are no easier at the other 21 campuses in the Anaheim City School District, one of the most crowded in Orange County. Here, the 6% annual rate of enrollment growth is more than double the state average. Here, every school runs on a year-round schedule, and soon students could have a split schedule, with some attending school in the morning and the rest in the afternoon. Here, class-size reduction means adding teachers but not adding space.

Parents in the 20,000-student elementary district are so fed up that they are trying what has been almost unthinkable in Orange County in recent years: a school bond issue. Measure Y, which would raise $48 million for school construction, is scheduled for a vote April 14. A two-thirds majority is required for passage.

Leaders of the campaign--whose no-nonsense slogan is “Yes for Children”--acknowledge the long odds. No school bond measure has passed in fiscally conservative Orange County in eight years.

But they hope that events such as Wednesday’s forum with Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) will draw attention to the plight of public schools at a time of heavy student population growth.

So many new students are enrolling in California that the state estimates it would have to add 327 schools over the next three years just to keep pace with projected growth--without relieving today’s crowding.

And there is almost no money to do that.

Henry Heydt, the state’s assistant director for school facilities planning, said there is a backlog of $7 billion in requests for construction money, which is almost as much as the $8 billion that Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed in statewide school bond measures over four elections. “Best-case scenario, it’s the next century before anyone sees a dime of that,” Heydt said.

On Wednesday, Sanchez was accompanied by House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Carson) and a gaggle of radio and TV reporters. About 150 people, many of them parents and educators, also came.

Sanchez, a first-term congresswoman who sits on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, seized the opportunity to promote her own school-building legislation. The bill, H.R. 2695, would create a two-year bond program to provide school districts with interest-free construction loans, supported by federal tax credits.

“We are experiencing overcrowding at such a severe rate that it is affecting our teachers’ quality of instruction and our students’ ability to concentrate and learn,” Sanchez said. “And when our children are hurting, we are all hurting.”

Among those who testified was teacher Mary Alice Madden, who told of long lines at libraries, cafeterias and computer labs at Lathrop Intermediate School in Santa Ana.

Principal Judy Magsaysay of Pio Pico Elementary School in Santa Ana said bungalows are already sprouting on her 2-year-old, 3.5-acre campus. “It’s hurtful to see the playground, which had just been seeded last year, now being filled with portables,” she said.

Another expert panelist was sixth-grader Carmen Cruz from Loara Elementary. She said her ideal school would have “a bigger playground and bigger classrooms, so if it rains we would have more room to play.” But asked whether bigger rooms mean better students, Carmen said: “It doesn’t matter what type of classroom you’re in; it’s the type of teacher you have.”

Still, Anaheim school boosters said it’s hard to teach if, like Heather Miller, you don’t have a room.

“We need classrooms, period,” said Sue Preus, a trustee of the district. “They don’t need to be pretty, they don’t need to be high-tech. We just need space. That’s the bottom line.”

What makes growth in Anaheim and Santa Ana more difficult to handle than growth in South County is the shortage of land.

By and large, the influx of students in central Orange County is not the result of new housing projects--which usually are accompanied by new schools, or plans for new schools, negotiated with developers.

Rather, the enrollment growth here is simply the result of changing demographics in some of the county’s poorest urban areas. Immigrant families, young families and extended families are moving rapidly into apartments, condominiums, duplexes and single-family homes.

Loara Principal Bob Gardner said he has 939 students, up from 767 the year before. A faculty of 41 teachers works in 29 classrooms.

In July, the 109-year-old school moved for the first time to a year-round schedule. Gardner said he could accommodate an additional 60 students but no more. “We’ve been able to handle it with stop-gap means,” he said, pointing to a half-dozen portable classrooms and a freshly paved parking lot on the 8-acre campus. “But if the trend continues, we’re out of space.”

Jacinth Cisneros, an Anaheim mother of two, is leading the campaign for the school bond. She said the annual cost of the proposed bond would be $22 for each $100,000 of assessed property value--about the price of a fast-food meal for a family of four. To skeptical taxpayers, she argues that better schools mean higher property values.

Even with Anaheim’s well-documented troubles, the pro-bond campaign must be considered an underdog. The last time school bond proponents overcame the two-thirds voter majority requirement in Orange County was a Los Alamitos election in April 1990.

“All we can do is try,” Cisneros said. “We’ve just got to go for it and give it our best shot.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Big Squeeze

Enrollment increases in Anaheim, Orange County and California schools have aggravated classroom shortages. A look at the growth:

Anaheim City School District

Enrollment

1996-97 19,471

Increase: 19%

Orange County

Enrollment

1996-97 442,927

Increase: 12%