Bond Defeat Spells Delay for New Schools

City and school leaders celebrated the opening of a road to a proposed new high school Wednesday while acknowledging the campus may not be built for another decade.

Golden Valley High School was to be one of four new schools funded by a $52-million bond issue and matching state funds. But for the second time since November, a small fraction of the city’s voters have blocked the William S. Hart Union High School District from passing the bond package.

In a special election Tuesday, the bond fell 90 votes shy of the two-thirds majority it needed for passage, despite a strategy of recruiting elementary school parents to make up the 125-vote gap in the November election.

While supporters and opponents agreed overcrowding at Santa Clarita’s high schools has reached a critical point, they part on who should pay to fix it. School board President Dennis King said without bond money, the district can build only one new junior high school and will have to abandon plans for three other new schools.

“The bond would have allowed us to build in the next four to five years,” King said. “Now, it will take us 10 to 12 years. By then, we’ll be so far behind we will never be able to catch up.”

At Valencia High School on Wednesday, the graduating class of 500 students posed for a group portrait. Two years ago there were about 400 students in the senior class. Next year’s class is expected to have 650 students and the following year rise to 800. Students on the top riser could see new commercial and residential developments being built on every horizon above the portable buildings on campus.

Until new schools are built, King said, the district will be forced to adopt a year-round schedule and may hold two sessions of school each day, one in the morning and one in the late afternoon.

“It is amazing to me,” King said. “How could that many people turn out to choke on a $34 property tax that is a tax write-off anyway? It would have cost them maybe $25 a year--pennies. It is not a matter of whether we will have to build new schools, it is a matter of when.”

To Cam Noltemeyer of the Committee for Safe Schools and Fair Taxation, it is a matter of how the district will pay for new schools.

The committee is composed of a small band of voters who drafted a highly critical opposition statement printed in Santa Clarita election materials, and successfully defended their claims in court.

The group will not support a bond attempt until the district uses all other available funds first, Noltemeyer said.

“We are not a poor district,” she said, adding that developers have turned over $99 million in property to the district in lieu of state-mandated fees. “There is money the district has right now that it can use for state matching funds.”

District Business Manager Bill Maddigan said the land could be used for matching grants, but said the state funds alone would not be enough to build new schools. Under a state program, the California Department of Education matches the local contribution for new construction.

“The bond would supply the cash part we need,” Maddigan said. “We have land, but no cash to build on it. Sometimes people will stretch and build 80% of a new school and leave a little undone until more money comes in. I don’t think we’re going to do that.”

Another opponent of the bond, Gary Schamber, said he questioned the financial dealings between the school district and a nonprofit organization developing the proposed Golden Valley High School site.

Santa Clarita Facilities Foundation, with Hart Supt. Robert Lee and a former trustee on its board of directors, bought a 50-acre site for $650,000 in 1998, using lease funds from the schools to make the purchase.

The city of Santa Clarita and the school district cooperated to grade and build a road to the hilly site. Foundation President Rick Patterson said after more preparation the value of the acreage could rocket to $25 million.

“We will sell the land to the school district at market value,” Patterson said, “and donate the money back to the district.”

Schamber, a Stevenson Ranch Town Council member and former member of the committee against the bond, said the district should have told voters of its crossover arrangement with the Facilities Foundation, and perhaps should not have included cost estimates for buying the Golden Valley site in the bond package if the property will be donated.

“I have mixed feelings because I know we need new schools,” Schamber said. “At the same time, I don’t think the district is being forward with us. They don’t say they have other money available because they think they wouldn’t look as needy.”

As Schamber’s fifth-grade son enters the Hart district schools, the two-time opponent of the bond has grown softer in his opposition.

“I get tired of the same old, emotional ‘It’s-all-about-the-children’ pitch,” Schamber said. “But it is wearing me down. I guess at some point, I’m going to have to say, ‘OK, if you can’t get it any other way, pass the bond and build the schools.’ ”

King, the school board president, said he does not expect the bond to go back to voters again this year. King said he hopes state Proposition 26 will pass in November, allowing school bonds to be approved by a 55% majority vote. That proposition failed in March.