SOUNDING OFF:

Over the past several months our community has been engaged in a discussion about how best to utilize the closed school sites of the Huntington Beach City School District — sites that have been closed and are no longer used for district schools.

All of these sites (as well as most of the nine sites that are still used for district schools) have been used for a long time for community recreation — especially youth sports. The city has the primary responsibility to provide recreation spaces for its citizens, but it does not have enough space to do so unless it uses the spaces on the school sites.

The primary responsibility of the school district is educating our children, including having adequate facilities for doing so. The overwhelming majority of funds for the school district come from the state government, which is suffering almost unbearable budget woes. In order for the district board of trustees to exercise their proper stewardship over the schools, they need to consider how the closed sites can be best utilized to enhance the inadequate (and belated) funds the state provides. The district has leased two of the sites to private schools and the use of a third is as yet undetermined.

But the bottom line is that the city has less space than it needs and the district has more space than it needs. The ideal solution is for the city to purchase space from the district, preserve the recreational space and provide much needed funding to the district. And this is precisely what the district has proposed to do.

The board of trustees should be congratulated for seeking creative and responsible ways to enhance its capital funds while respecting the needs of the city and the community for recreational space. The city (with a budget many times larger than that of the district and a plausible reserve) needs only to make an attractive offer to the district to complete a winning strategy for all parties.

Kudos to the board of trustees for their careful and forward-looking work.

BILL WALLACE is a former trustee for the Huntington Beach City School District.