‘Good Reasons’ Shut Out Santa Ana Kids

Nobody ever means to discriminate against the students of Santa Ana’s overcrowded school district.

Not the residents who a few years ago fiercely opposed construction of a sorely needed intermediate school at 17th and Bristol streets. No, they were just concerned about keeping their local shopping center from becoming a teen hangout.

Not the environmentalists who object to construction of a proposed high school in Centennial Park. No, they just want to preserve precious urban open space.

And certainly not the fine citizens of nearby Tustin who have fought tooth and nail to deny Santa Ana’s claim to a slice of land on the old Marine Corps Air Station, some of which falls within the boundaries of the Santa Ana Unified School District. No, Tustin is just concerned about making sure its base redevelopment project remains economically viable.

No, nobody ever means to shut out Santa Ana kids. But somehow, there’s always some good, nonracial reason to slam the door in their faces.

You may not have been keeping up with the latest struggle over land at the old Tustin helicopter base, a 1,700-acre island of earth in an otherwise densely developed urban area. Tustin has big plans for the land--from housing for the homeless and abused children to high-tech industries and luxury homes with a golf course.

Five new schools are already part of the project, but they’ll serve Tustin and Irvine, as well as the South County Community College district. Santa Ana gets nada. That’s discrimination, de facto, its lawyers argue.

“Maybe you don’t have the intent [to discriminate], but your decisions have an impact and that’s all that’s required,” said attorney Ruben Smith, who represents the district.

Required? To file suit, of course.

Federal law clearly prohibits Tustin from giving free federal land to one predominantly white district while denying it to another predominantly Latino district that has a greater need, warned another Santa Ana attorney, Edmond M. Connor, in a blistering letter to the U.S. Navy released Tuesday.

After what he calls Tustin’s “bloodletting session” last month, Connor urges the Navy, which still owns the base, to intervene to “restore professionalism and fair play” to the reuse process. He’s referring to the Jan. 16 City Council meeting at which Tustin blessed a base development plan that excludes a site for Santa Ana, later releasing details of its confidential dealings with school officials.

His letter is Santa Ana’s declaration of war, if one were still needed.

“We can’t afford to lose, because the impact is going to be there for decades,” district spokeswoman Lucy Araujo-Cook said. “If we have to lie in front of bulldozers, we may. As long as we win in the end for the kids.”

The stakes are high for Tustin too.

“If we blow [the project], this city’s going to have a financial disaster on its hands five or 10 years from now,” Tustin City Manager William Huston told me Thursday.

Huston had just emerged from hours of renewed talks with Santa Ana officials that ran through lunch. Despite public acrimony, Huston said an agreement is near.

“We’re not some Anglo, Republican, rich and greedy community, contrary to some stereotypes,” he said. “The reality is, [the region’s] problems affect all of us. To the extent that Santa Ana resolves its educational needs, we all benefit.”

But Huston also admitted that Tustin would probably not be negotiating if it weren’t for political pressure brought to bear last year by Santa Ana’s powerful allies in Sacramento.

Frustrated by Tustin’s intransigence, Assemblyman Lou Correa (D-Anaheim) and state Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana) pushed for a bill that would have forced Tustin to turn over land for a unique project between Santa Ana Unified and the Rancho Santiago Community College District, which also was denied a bid for base land within its boundaries.

The bill had enough votes to pass as backers raced to beat the clock in the closing minutes of last year’s session. But a last-minute filibuster by state Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine) ran out the clock.

The bill died at the stroke of midnight, with Johnson hemming and hawing in a drawl to stall.

“I’m glad that it’s not going to succeed,” he declared, calling the battle on behalf of Santa Ana “politics at its worst.”

The defeat made Dunn weep. He delivered a sobbing reproach on the Senate floor to those who turned their backs on Santa Ana’s children.

“We don’t need sympathy anymore,” said Dunn, visibly distraught. “We need action. Today, we said wait. And that’s wrong.”

Tustin may have won that legislative skirmish, but it lost the public relations battle, conceded Huston. Tustin emerged as the bad city that’s mean to poor children.

“We got the snot kicked out of us,” said Huston, who had gone to the state Capitol to help kill the bill.

The good news: Political pressure got both sides talking.

With congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) also breathing down Tustin’s neck, even Washington started pressing the city to accommodate its neighbors, the city manager said. The Navy helped free future revenue that allowed the city to make its $20-million cash offer to Santa Ana, a confidential deal that Tustin officials abruptly made public last month, prompting Santa Ana’s leaders to charge betrayal.

Santa Ana Can’t Just Give Up

And the war rages on. The first shot was fired in 1996 when the local base reuse task force shot down Santa Ana’s bid for 75 acres for a new high school. Santa Ana couldn’t afford just to give up and go away. Not with 60,000 students, about 40% of whom are housed in portables, and almost no place left to build for the future.

Space is so precious that Santa Ana has built one school underground and another with its parking lot on top of buildings. Next week, the district will dedicate its newest campus, a hard-fought intermediate school carved out of a shopping center, with parking for shoppers underneath the classrooms.

That’s the so-called space-saver school, the controversial project opposed in the early 1990s by primarily white residents who live north of 17th Street. They claimed the school would bring graffiti and vandalism and deprive them of a chunk of precious mall space.

That fight got ugly. It split Santa Ana’s school board and City Council. Racial hostility was palpable at public meetings. Opponents rushed around looking for other places to put the proposed campus, with a not-in-my-backyard vehemence usually reserved for proposed prisons and garbage dumps.

The anti-school forces lost. At 10 a.m. Wednesday, the district will celebrate the grand opening of the Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School, named after parents who pioneered the 1940s fight against segregated Mexican schools in Orange County.

Tustin, beware. Such fights have hardened Santa Ana’s resolve.

Last month, racial passions erupted once again with Tustin’s approval of its base plan. Santa Ana advocates suggested Tustin was trying to keep Latino kids west of the Costa Mesa Freeway. And Tustin Mayor Tracy Wills Worley publicly expressed dismay that Santa Ana was playing the “race card.”

What a sorry comeback. As if Santa Ana were just playing some cheap poker game with the future of its children.

When it comes to social disparities, Santa Ana isn’t playing with just a single bad card. It’s been dealt a mean racial hand. Heck, the whole darn deck is stacked.

Santa Ana has schools that are completely segregated by race: Enrollment is 96% minority, 70% are English-learners and 75% are poor enough to qualify for free or low-cost meals.

How’s that for a bad hand?

Nobody even thinks about school segregation anymore. All the poor Mexicans are crammed into one city, and who cares?

The only time we check on their progress is when test scores appear in the newspaper. Then neighboring cities get to gloat about how well their students perform by comparison and editorial writers get to rant about accountability, shaking their heads about those low-achieving Santa Ana kids.

But when it comes to possibly helping relieve the problems and improve achievement, everybody starts drawing border lines around Santa Ana.

Shamefully, Tustin City Councilman Tony Kawashima ran last year in a campaign, financed heavily by real estate interests, that smacked of the bitter old antibusing days. He called for Tustin to “stand firm against Santa Ana’s attempt to bus over 4,000 students” into his city.

You don’t hear Tustin officials calling for an end to the busing of Santa Ana parents into their city every workday. No, because then who would clean the homes, take care of the kids and cook the meals? And where do you think the gardeners for the new planned golf course will live?

The message: Send us your workers, but keep your kids home.

Now that’s politics at its worst.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.

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School Site Battle

When the Tustin City Council approved a $200 million redevelopment plant for the 1,700 acre former Tustin air base, it escalated a battle with Santa Ana over a piece of the property. Santa Ana Unified School District officials want to keep a kindergarten-through-college campus on about 100 acres that is in their district.

Source: City of Tustin