Parents petition the district

Michael Miller

More than 100 Eastbluff Elementary parents, citing a lack of student

enrollment, have signed a petition asking the Newport-Mesa Unified

School District to assign more neighborhoods to their attendance

zone.

Eastbluff Parent Teacher Assn. president Lauren Young and vice

president Carol Crane delivered the petition during Tuesday’s school

board meeting. The document, which Young and Crane passed around late

last week, supports Newport-Mesa’s proposal to redraw attendance

boundaries in the Corona del Mar zone.

“Eastbluff is absolutely, hugely behind this,” Young said, noting

that she had collected more signatures since turning in the petition.

The support from Eastbluff parents comes after months of

contention over the rezoning plan, which Newport-Mesa proposed last

fall to curb uneven student enrollment in the Corona del Mar zone

schools. According to the district’s demographic study group, Newport

Coast Elementary will fill beyond capacity over the next 10 years,

while Eastbluff and Harbor View Elementary will decline in

population.

To prevent the overflow at Newport Coast, the study group proposed

shifting two neighborhoods in the school’s attendance zone to

Lincoln, and reassigning a number of Lincoln neighborhoods to

Eastbluff and Harbor View. Many parents at Newport Coast and Lincoln

have complained about the rezoning, saying that it would split up

their neighborhoods.

The Eastbluff petitioners, however, welcomed the prospect of

gaining additional students at their school.

Julie McCormick, the former principal of Pomona Elementary and a

mother of four Eastbluff students, said increasing Eastbluff’s

enrollment would benefit the district as a whole.

“I like a small school, but it’s always nice to have a school

filled to capacity,” McCormick said. “Any school under 300 students

is expensive to run from a fiscal point of view.”

Eastbluff, the smallest school in the Corona del Mar zone, is

currently 30 students under capacity and saw its enrollment decrease

last fall. The campus, which reopened in 1999 to help Newport-Mesa

accommodate the Bonita Canyon housing development, has only 24

kindergarteners this year.

Twenty-four students are enough to fill just one classroom,

according to Eastbluff principal Charlene Metoyer. Eastbluff, which

has capacity for 367 students, employs no more than three teachers

per grade level and features a number of combination classes.

Although Metoyer said she would welcome more students at the school,

she did not predict enrollment to decrease to the point of

eliminating staff.

“I don’t see it as a problem,” Metoyer said. “It is what it is.”

She noted, however, that this year’s incoming class of 24 students

was the smallest the school had ever had.

If Newport-Mesa goes through with its rezoning proposal, Eastbluff

would likely see its enrollment rise beyond 400 students by 2012.

Susan Astarita, the district’s assistant superintendent of elementary

education, has said that Eastbluff could handle the influx by moving

its special education classes, which contain fewer students per

teacher, to another site.

Under the rezoning plan, Eastbluff and Harbor View -- which is

presently more than 200 students under capacity -- would increase

enrollment over the next decade, while Newport Coast and Lincoln

would remain roughly the same. Young said she was in favor of

shifting neighborhoods to Eastbluff as long as Lincoln’s population

did not taper off.

“I don’t want to see Lincoln suffer, so I’m in favor of those

Newport Coast neighborhoods moving to Lincoln if they need to,” she

explained.

Many Lincoln parents, though, have suggested moving students

straight from Newport Coast to Eastbluff and leaving their site

alone. On June 8, a group of Lincoln PTA members delivered a letter

to Board of Education President Serene Stokes decrying the plan to

rearrange their attendance area.

“Lincoln does not need to be redistricted to solve Newport Coast’s

overcrowding or Eastbluff’s low enrollment,” the letter reads in

part. “The extra students from Newport Coast can easily be

accommodated at Eastbluff, thereby solving the zone’s demographic

problems without disrupting the other schools in the zone.”

Newport Coast, however, is closer to Lincoln than to Eastbluff, a

fact that Astarita has cited in defending the study group’s proposal.

Young, a PTA member at Eastbluff since 1999, enrolled one of her

children at Lincoln before the new school reopened. She noted,

acknowledging the recent protests, that she did not want the rezoning

to cause animosity among neighbors.

“All these kids feed into Corona del Mar [High School] together,”

Young said. “We’re part of the Lincoln community. We come from the

Lincoln community.”