Capistrano Unified Weighs K-8 Proposal

A Capistrano Unified School District proposal to convert three elementary schools to kindergarten-through-eighth-grade campuses, which educators say will improve academic achievement, is roiling some parents who say it will perpetuate “segregation” between Latinos and non-Latino whites.

A public hearing on the proposal will begin at 7 tonight at Newhart Middle School in Mission Viejo. Capistrano Unified trustees are expected to decide at their Aug. 18 meeting.

If the plan is approved, one grade per year would be added to the schools starting in the 2004-05 school year, district officials said. Parents would have the choice of keeping their children at the K-8 campus or sending them in the sixth grade to more ethnically diverse middle schools.

The proposed conversion of two San Juan Capistrano schools is causing most of the contention. They are Harold Ambuehl Elementary, where 16% of the students are Latino, and San Juan Elementary, where 98% are.

Currently, students from those campuses come together starting in sixth grade at Marco Forster Middle School.

The third proposed K-8 campus is Arroyo Vista in Rancho Santa Margarita, a predominantly non-Latino elementary school whose students feed into a mostly non-Latino white middle school.

Driving the proposal are the district’s overcrowded middle schools -- Marco Forster has a projected enrollment next year of nearly 1,600 -- and a desire to provide parents a choice in what kind of campus their children attend, said Supt. James A. Fleming.

The concept of K-8 schools is growing nationwide for educational and fiscal reasons.

About 660 of the country’s 3,070 K-8 campuses are in California, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Eventually, Fleming said, he wants at least seven more district schools to be converted to K-8, although some will never be, both out of practicality and because the district wants to maintain both options for parents.

The schools proposed for the first phase of the conversion were selected because they have facilities that lend themselves well to serving a larger range of ages, district officials said. Ambuehl would use an adjacent, closed child-care center for additional classrooms; San Juan opened as a K-8 school three decades ago.

Studies have shown K-8 schools help children academically by eliminating the tough transition between elementary and middle school, Fleming said. “I’m not going to sacrifice the academic development of children to achieve some social objective,” he said.

To promote diversity, a dual-immersion program, in which children start in kindergarten learning in Spanish and English with the aim of making them fluent by fifth grade, will be created at San Juan to draw native English speakers from elsewhere in the city. Children from San Juan and Ambuehl would also mix at assemblies, on sports teams and in after-school programs.

But the intermittent integration of students causes concern for some.

“If our school were mixed, I’d be so for this plan,” said San Juan Elementary first-grade teacher Vanessa Martin. “How our school is right now, though, I feel like I’d be supporting segregation.”

Julia Saldana, who has two children at San Juan, fears the proposal would reduce their social opportunities because if not enough non-Latino families send their children to Marco Forster, ethnic isolation will get worse there as well.

“The kids need to have the choice of who to hang out with and when,” Saldana said in Spanish. “I may not have that choice all the time because I don’t speak English very well, but I don’t want my children to be denied that chance.”

A principal’s poll of San Juan parents showed 76% would put their children in a K-8 program.

Ambuehl parent Diane Sage has studied the proposal and visited a K-8 school in Irvine. By attending a K-8 school, children such as her third-grader could develop more self-confidence and have more opportunities for developing leadership, she said.

Still, it concerns her that some parents and community members believe that implementing the program would increase ethnic isolation. Although she doesn’t believe that is the district’s intent, it mollifies her that parents would have the choice of sending their children to Marco Forster or keep them at neighborhood schools.