High Desert Schools Fear Student Flood

Though his Lancaster office is miles from the coast, Larry Freise is obsessed with what he calls the “tsunami” threatening the High Desert.

The tidal wave he’s worried about is made up of students. Freise, the attendance coordinator for Antelope Valley Union High School District, has been keeping an eye on a recent increase in elementary and middle school students--a statistical swell that is moving toward the high schools with disaster-movie certainty.

The 19,000-student high school district, which grew by about 450 students this school year, will grow by 1,200 next fall and many thousands more over the next five years, he projects.

The wave, Freise said, “is about to crash right on our district.”

These are the baby boomers’ children, part of a nationwide population bulge statisticians call the “boomer echo.”

Officials in the Antelope Valley district--which already teaches more than a third of its students in trailers--are expecting to be hit especially hard. While a tax-weary electorate rejected a $91-million school construction bond in 1999, a new crop of young families was moving to the desert in the late 1990s as the region rebounded from a period of recession and foreclosure. According to 2000 census figures, the three fastest-growing cities in Los Angeles County in the 1990s--Palmdale, Lake Los Angeles and Acton--were in the Antelope Valley.

The desert transplants, who came for the wide-open spaces and affordable four-bedroom houses, are finding that the public high schools are already packed tight, and facing a crisis.

Amanda Petryshyn is a junior at Highland High School. Until she began an independent-study program, she was one of 3,000 students on a campus built for 2,100. Amanda said the crush of bodies at the beginning of the school year caused so many scheduling problems that she and others spent up to three weeks with gaping holes in their school days. After a week, Amanda’s mother intervened and she finally filled in two missing classes on her schedule.

“There were just too many students at the beginning of the year,” Amanda said.

On March 5, residents voted on a $103-million bond measure, which would provide funds for at least one new 3,000-student high school and a number of smaller campuses. Whether Measure V passed remains unclear.

Bond supporters are claiming victory, albeit somewhat tentatively.

The current vote count gives the “Yes” side about 57%; passage requires 55%. But an unknown number of absentee ballots are still uncounted, and the registrar’s official certification of the tally is not expected until April 2.

A similar measure failed in 1999 with 63% voting in favor. But that package required a two-thirds majority. The threshold was lowered when Proposition 39 passed two years ago.

Early on, there was concern about the school board’s decision to name two of the proposed schools after R. Rex Parris, a local lawyer and Republican activist, and state Sen. William J. “Pete” Knight, who has drawn criticism from gay and Latino groups for actions they have deemed homophobic and racist.

But the protests never surfaced. Eventually, more concern was generated by revelations that a school board member, Darrel Brown, was dating the district spokeswoman while he voted on her promotion. Though the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office found that Brown had violated no laws, he resigned in January, and critics howled that the district couldn’t be trusted with its finances.

Many bond supporters said they held their noses while voting yes.

“We needed it, I guess,” said Mary Spiva, a Palmdale resident. “We definitely needed those schools.”

At the very least, the bond--which would add $29 each tax year per $100,000 of residents’ assessed home value--will pay for the 3,000-student Pete Knight High School and the Parris Continuation School, both in Palmdale, as well as two small schools for expelled students, and modernization work at a number of campuses, Freise said.

District officials also are hoping a proposed multibillion-dollar statewide school bond package will make it to the ballot in November, providing matching funds and allowing them to build an eighth full-size high school.

That would take care of some of the crowding problems, Freise said, but not the tsunami.

“This whole time we’ve got [thousands] more students coming,” he said.

Amanda Petryshyn’s mother, Claudia, said the schools were fine when she moved to the area 13 years ago. Freise estimates there were about 30 trailer classrooms then. Today, the district has about 300 temporary classrooms, with 100 more planned for the next two years.

Freise figures the Antelope Valley’s chief lure--affordable housing--helped prospective parents overlook the squeeze on campuses.

“If the schools are a little crowded, they can put up with it,” he said. “They don’t care. They still have a big house.”