Closing Still More Schools Possible

After years of slowly, reluctantly and painfully plucking one school at a time from its network of under-enrolled campuses--an average of one a year since 1980--the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District may be ready to close as many of its 13 remaining schools to resolve its financial problems.

The idea of a major effort to consolidate the system’s 10,000 students on fewer campuses will get its first test Monday night. Trustees will take up proposals for a series of public hearings that would culminate in a decision this year on how to bring the district’s physical facilities into line with a 40% loss of enrollment since 1974.

“I believe this board is ready to do whatever needs to be done,” said board President Sally Burrage. “We can’t go on making these annual cutbacks in programs and personnel and still maintain a quality education for our children.”

More Deficits Expected

Budget deficits have been in the million-dollar range in recent years, with about the same shortfall anticipated in next year’s $32-million spending plan unless cuts are made.

Burrage said the scope and direction of the consolidation will be determined by the board’s priorities. “If the first priorities are retaining the neighborhood school concept and limiting the travel distance for parents, then we won’t close many schools,” Burrage said. “If quality of education is at the top of the list, then I think we will be closing a lot of schools.”

The plan scheduled for board action Monday, at a 7:30 p.m. meeting in the district’s Valmonte headquarters, calls for the administration to prepare its recommendations by Sept. 2. After three public hearings in October, the board would decide on Nov. 2--the day before the election of two trustees--on how to accomplish the consolidation.

Minimize Controversy

If the board commits itself to a Nov. 2 decision, one apparent result would be to minimize the controversial issue of school closures in the election campaign. Several trustees said the early decision date also gives the administration enough time to prepare for an orderly consolidation at the beginning of the 1988-89 school year.

Trustee Martin C. Dodell, who has served for six years, has said that he will not seek another term. Board member Jack Bagdasar has filed papers for a second four-year term.

Burrage said board sentiment for a major overhaul of the schools--a move advocated by two citizens committees last year--firmed up after the failure of two efforts to increase revenues.

Last March, voters rejected a special school tax that proponents said would allow the district to make a gradual and less painful adjustment to its shrinking school population. And in June, the state Legislature turned down a Peninsula-sponsored bill that would have given extra funding to unified districts with declining enrollment and higher educational costs.

Future Interest Income

In several years, the district will begin to collect interest on an estimated $24 million from the pending sale of six surplus school sites--about $1.7 million a year. But the prospect of getting that money, Burrage said, does not lessen the need for consolidation. She said she agrees with the citizens committees, which maintained that more school closures are an essential part of any solution to the district’s long-term needs.

Past proposals for consolidating Peninsula schools have generally followed these outlines:

- Close one of the district’s three high schools--Palos Verdes, Rolling Hills or Miraleste--at a savings of $750,000 a year in operational costs. Possibly one or more of the remaining eight elementary schools would be closed at the same time for a savings of $175,000 each.

- Close both remaining middle schools--Ridgecrest and Malaga Cove--and send their seventh- and eighth-graders to the high schools. Sixth-graders would be dispersed to the elementary schools.

(Earlier this year, the board voted to close the Dapplegray Intermediate School and transfer its students this fall to Miraleste High and nearby elementary schools. The plan was aggressively promoted by Miraleste parents as a way to boost enrollment at their high school on the east side of the Peninsula and thus avert its closure.)

- Close one middle school, at a savings of $350,000, and send students in the sixth through eighth grades to the remaining campus--either Ridgecrest near the center of the Peninsula in Rancho Palos Verdes or Malaga Cove along the coast in Palos Verdes Estates.

- Abandon the concept that youngsters in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades should have separate campuses and reconfigure the elementary schools to accommodate the kindergarten-through-eighth grades. Result: closure of the two intermediate campuses.

District spokeswoman Nancy Mahr said enrollment reached a peak of 17,800 in 1974, then began a long slide to last year’s level of 10,140.

Seven Schools Closed

Five elementary and two intermediate schools have closed since 1980.

The decline in enrollment is attributed mostly to escalating property values, which tend to keep out younger families with school-age children. A high percentage of parents on the affluent Peninsula also send their children to private schools.

Mahr said the district’s decline appears to be leveling off, with enrollment expected to hold at about 9,800 for as far into the future as the planners can see.