Transfer Students Shown the Door

Parents of transfer students expressed surprise and dismay Tuesday after learning that their children will have to leave a Buena Park campus at the end of the school year. The Buena Park school board decided the night before to turn away more than 100 of them from Gordon H. Beatty Elementary School.

In another effort to cope with overcrowding, the board voted to end the lease of a private day-care center at the same school.

The change means a wrenching disruption for single father Jim Vandermost and his two children, second- and fifth-graders at the school.

The children attended ABC Academic Preschool and Day-care Center on the Beatty campus as preschoolers and have attended the public school ever since, even after their parents’ divorce and Vandermost’s move to Stanton. His daughter, Melissa, the fifth-grader, will finish elementary school on an unfamiliar campus.

“This is just another thing for me to worry about,” Vandermost said Tuesday. “The stability factor was the main reason I kept them there and that the day care was on-site. Honestly, I thought there were laws passed allowing children to go where they want, and, from what I understood, after the third grade it wasn’t much of an issue because of the class-size ratio.”

But the law allowing students to attend classes outside their neighborhood boundaries makes such transfers contingent on the schools’ ability to accommodate them. And the Beatty campus has been chronically overcrowded.

Based on a review of projected school enrollment for the coming school year and new guidelines for retaining students, a report shows that the school would need about three more classrooms and one additional restroom by September to accommodate new enrollment as well as students who would be retained under the state’s new rules barring social promotion.

The day-care facility has been leasing four modular classrooms and one modular restroom on the campus since 1989. Its lease would have been up for renewal in August 2001, but the board invoked a clause to give the center 60 days to move.

Dan Nelson, owner of the day-care center which provides care for about 220 children, said he will try to persuade the board to reverse its decision but also will start looking for a new location. However, he fears that 60 days is not enough time to explore other options.

During the tense Monday night meeting, many of the attending 125 parents were in tears over losing their child care.

Amendment Added to Preschool Closure

After the option to bring in more modular classrooms was turned down by the board, a motion was made to cancel the preschool’s lease. After it was seconded, Trustee Elizabeth Swift, who favored keeping the preschool at the site, added an amendment returning all Beatty transfer students to their neighborhood schools. With both items locked into one motion, three of the five board members approved it; Swift and Trustee Lloyd G. Davis voted against it.

Board President Bob Niccum said he only wanted to cancel the child-care facility’s lease, not turn away transfer students. “I’m dismayed that I was forced into that,” he said Tuesday. “I didn’t want to do that. Both board members managed to tie that into a condition and then they voted against it anyway.”

Niccum said the parents of the 105 transfer students were most likely not at the meeting Monday because they probably thought it would just be a preschool issue, even though one of the options the district was considering involved turning away the transfer students.

“It didn’t need to be done. It’s kind of like a spoilsport: ‘OK, we’re losing our issue so I’m going to poison the well by making it distasteful for somebody else.’ ”

Swift defended her actions Tuesday and said she could not vote for the amended version she had initiated because she was still against canceling the preschool’s contract.

Two years ago, she said, the board set a cap of 1,115 students at Beatty. The number has risen by almost 100 students without the consent of the board.

“If they’ve got too many people there, the transfers have to go back,” she said. “If a school is overcrowded, then the kids that live in the neighborhood should get first choice. I felt like I needed to make a point.”

Supt. Carol Riley said the board made the right decision but said that sending back transfer students was not part of her recommendation.