Garden Grove Reopening Schools to Handle Surging Enrollment

Anticipating a flood of new students, Garden Grove school officials have voted to reopen campuses, change attendance boundaries and add portable classrooms.

“Our district is bursting at the seams, so it was an easy issue to open those schools,” said Terri Pitsenberger, a parent who served on the committee that came up with the plan for the 50,000-student Garden Grove Unified School District.

“We tried to make it as least-disruptive as possible,” she said. “People don’t like change in general, but from what I’ve heard, most of the community seems real supportive.”

A wave of immigrants to the district and the razing of some single-family homes to build large apartment buildings have caused enrollment in the district to rise rapidly, district spokesman Alan Trudell said.

At the same time, new programs such as computer labs and state-mandated smaller class sizes in the primary grades have increased demand for classroom space.

Unlike many Orange County districts that have grown steadily, Garden Grove saw its enrollment peak in the 1960s at 53,000 students, then gradually decline. Now, officials say they expect enrollment to increase with the city’s population, reaching 51,000 pupils over the next few years.

Trustees voted Tuesday to reopen Garden Park Elementary, now being operated by the nonpublic Rossier Elementary School for children who cannot attend regular classes for a variety of reasons. Garden Park will revert to a district school this fall. Rossier, which has used the site for four years, will move, probably outside Garden Grove, said the school’s executive director, Barbara Casey.

A closed campus, Edgar School, will reopen for districtwide educational programs, possibly with a staff training center, after-school programs and a preschool for special education students.

Board members also voted to alter attendance boundaries for Loyal H. Barker and Enders elementary schools, sending some students from them to Garden Park.

To relieve crowding on the growing eastern end of the district, trustees decided to expand O.A. Peters Elementary School by adding 17 portable classrooms plus an administration office, multipurpose room, cafeteria, library and restrooms.

To relieve crowding at Woodbury Elementary, about 340 students in the Gifted and Talented Education program there will move to Peters. Fifty-five special education students at Peters, meanwhile, will move to Woodbury. The two schools are about a mile apart.

Boundary changes have been divisive in some Orange County school districts. In Capistrano Unified, parents complained that the district was ripping the community apart by separating children who had been classmates since kindergarten. That dispute was resolved by modifying some changes in school boundaries.

But officials in Garden Grove said parents welcome the changes. No one objected when the issue was raised in Tuesday’s meeting of the school board, Trudell said.