Enrollment Rise Is Cue for School Reopenings : Education: After years of decline, the Torrance district faces a mini baby boom that will return students to two former middle school campuses.

Torrance school board member David Sargent is a veteran of the school-closure wars that dominated education politics in the suburbs in the 1970s and ‘80s.

As a parent, he joined his neighbors in an effort to keep the board from closing his daughter’s school because of declining enrollment. A few years later, as a school board member, he was on the other side--facing a horde of angry parents who were trying to stop the closure of two middle schools.

“It was the sort of event you don’t forget,” Sargent said. “They didn’t like the disturbance in their lives . . . We didn’t like having to make that difficult decision.”

By last month, Sargent had come full circle. Now serving his third term on the school board, he voted to move students back into the two middle schools--Newton and Jefferson--next fall to accommodate an increase in enrollment that officials say began in 1989, after 21 years of decline.

Next fall, the Torrance Unified School District will send more than 300 sixth-graders to the Newton and Jefferson campuses--now being used as adult learning centers--to alleviate overcrowded conditions at other middle schools.

Similar pressures are being felt in other South Bay school districts, where mini baby booms are forcing educators to consider reopening classrooms they mothballed a decade or more ago.

“Our projections were off about 50 students,” said Hermosa Beach school Principal Deborah Frick, explaining why she had to add a fourth kindergarten class, a fourth first grade and a combination fourth- and fifth-grade class last fall at Hermosa Valley School.

Enrollment had fallen so low that Frick’s district, Hermosa Beach City School District, was down to only one campus. Next fall, however, the district will reopen a school, Hermosa View, which has been closed since 1987.

In Manhattan Beach, administrators are conducting a demographic study to see if they will need to reopen a school soon. “We’ve been growing since 1987-88,” said Scott J. Smith, assistant superintendent in charge of business and finance at the Manhattan Beach City School District. “That was the turnaround.”

Enrollment in the elementary school district this year is 2,615, up from a low of around 2,150 in the mid-’80s, Smith said.

In Redondo Beach, elementary schools started a growth spurt about the same time, said Thomas J. Cox, assistant superintendent of the Redondo Beach City School District. “Back in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, this district was about 10,000 students,” Cox said. “In 1987 we (had) dropped down to 3,675.”

This year, the district is up to 4,454 regular students and 302 special education students, many of whom come from surrounding districts that do not themselves have special education programs. For the time being, however, Redondo needs no new campuses, officials say.

“We can accommodate future growth over the next few years without opening any more schools,” Cox said.

Redondo, unlike other districts that sold most of their unused properties, kept all six of its vacant school sites in anticipation that enrollment would someday rise again. Most educators in upper middle-class districts say they do not believe they will ever be teaching the hordes of youngsters they did 20 to 30 years ago, however.

Torrance, in its peak year of 1967, had 34,196 students in kindergarten through high school. Currently, there are 20,672, up from a low in 1988 of 18,963.

For years, as enrollment declined, the Torrance school board and residents fought over whether to sell, lease or mothball the district’s more than one dozen vacant school sites.

The reasons behind rising enrollment are unclear, educators say. The rise in Hermosa Beach, for instance, has occurred in all grades, not just the kindergarten level, said Supt. Gwen Gross.

“We’ve gotten some data that shows . . . a rise in owner-occupied houses as opposed to rentals,” Gross said. “It’s slight, but we feel as though that may be some indication of new, young families.”

In Torrance, some of the enrollment increase may be attributed to new development--aided indirectly by the school district. Ten surplus school sites sold by the district were bought by developers, who built housing tracts on them.

Census data shows that the number of children under age 5 rose in several communities during the ‘80s. In 1980, Torrance had 6,273 schoolchildren under 5. That jumped to 7,940 in the 1990 census. The same happened in Hermosa Beach, where the 1990 census showed 762 youngsters under 5, up from the 1980 figure of 552.

Still, it is unclear whether the enrollment rise will continue, said J. Richard Ducar, the Torrance administrator in charge of enrollment projections.

Already, said Ducar, the rate of increase slowed this year compared to previous years. And it is anybody’s guess, educators agree, whether hard economic times in cities dependent on the troubled aerospace industry will drive families out or allow new, younger families to move in as housing prices and interest rates fall.

With education budgets tight, districts with rising enrollments have had to develop strategies to avoid opening whole schools so they can keep down operating costs. By using only some of the classrooms at Newton and Jefferson, Torrance avoids having to staff an independent middle school complex, which would entail new principals and other employees.

The two campuses will instead be considered satellites of other middle schools.

The Hermosa district will do the same. It plans to reopen the Hermosa View campus next year and put its kindergartners and first-graders there, eventually adding second-graders. The campus, however, will be considered part of the only other school in the district--Hermosa Valley.

Enrollment Rebound

Student enrollment over a 25-year period in the Torrance Unified School District has changed. After years of decline, the tide is beginning to turn.

YEAR ELEMENTARY HIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT TOTAL 1967 23,996 10,200 34,196 1972 20,325 11,227 31,552 1977 15,880 10,194 26,074 1982 12,274 8,194 20,468 1987 11,732 7,361 19,093 1992 13,907 6,765 20,672