San Juan Group Vows It Will Block High School

Bulldozers began clearing thistle from rolling hills this week to make way for what will be San Juan Capistrano’s only public high school.

But a residents group is vowing to halt the construction, saying it flouts the will of local voters who rejected development in the hills on the city’s east end.

Going ahead, critics say, teaches students a poor lesson about democracy.

The referendum involved the 175-home Whispering Hills project, which included the high school.

The Capistrano Unified School District, however, used its state-mandated right to override local zoning for San Juan Hills High School, set to open by 2005. District officials say that, without a new school by then, the population at each of their four other high schools -- all outside the city -- will exceed 3,000 students. There has been no public high school in the city for four decades.

The officials say voters opposed the housing, not the school.

When two-thirds of the city’s voters agreed in 1999 to tax themselves to build a new high school, they demonstrated approval enough to the district, said David Doomey, Capistrano’s associate superintendent of facilities planning.

“The state Constitution gives us authority to build facilities because there will always be a vocal minority tainted by this ‘not-in-my-backyard’ approach,” he said Friday during a visit to the site as he watched bulldozers at work.

Traffic was the main concern of those who opposed the November referendum.

The school is a mile from a landfill, which will force student drivers to travel the two-lane roads along with trash-hauling trucks. This worries San Juan Mayor John Gelff. What bothers him more is that the district would carry on construction before reducing such worries.

Gelf said he is concerned that the school district “overrode the wishes of the people. I think it sends a negative message to children that, no matter what, government can always supersede the democratic process.”

Mark Nielsen, who was cochairman of the citizens group that opposed the development, said officials should look to the most recent vote to gauge what residents want, instead of making assumptions.

“Just because we vote to tax ourselves for new schools doesn’t mean we give the district blanket approval to build schools wherever they want,” Nielsen said.

The group has asked the city attorney to seek a temporary restraining order against the project and is looking for another lawyer to help if that fails.District officials said no amount of opposition will stop the school from being built.

“We’re not going to hold students’ education hostage to a small group of people who can’t be reasonable,” said a spokesman, David Smollar.

The school will draw about 1,600 students from San Juan Capistrano and 400 from the nearby communities of Talega and Ladera Ranch. Building San Juan Hills High will cost about $100 million, Doomey said. Half of that will go to buy about 50 acres from developer Dennis Gage.

Once the high school is built, students living in San Juan Capistrano will go to one school. They are now scattered among four high schools.

Erin Kutnick’s daughter is a sophomore at Capistrano Valley High. Her friends in other parts of the city attend either Dana Hills, San Clemente or Aliso Niguel. She called the opposition group’s efforts “very, very selfish.”

“A new high school will bring some long-overdue cohesiveness to our city,” she said. “What the school district is telling children by going forward is that they and their education are of utmost importance.”