Vista School District OKs Extensive Magnet Program : Education: Enrollment will start from scratch at Santa Fe/California Elementary, where trustees will limit attendance to balance the ethnic makeup.

Ending a longstanding struggle to balance the ethnic makeup of its schools, the Vista Unified School District board of trustees voted unanimously Thursday night to adopt a far-reaching magnet school program.

The plan, one of the most extensive of its kind in North County, aims to integrate Santa Fe/California Elementary School, which has become increasingly segregated in the past 10 years.

“I’m very pleased that the board took action, and I think the committees came up with a very reasonable solution,” Supt. Rene Townsend said after the board adopted the integration plan, over which it had been struggling for five years.

Many parents expressed concern over the program’s cost and the number of students who will have to change schools.

“I do not want to see our children at our regular schools suffer in order to support the magnet school,” said Diana Hayworth, whose child attends Grapevine Elementary.

District officials could not give a precise cost of the program because, among other things, it is still unclear how many students will be bused, they said.

Several parents, some members of ethnic minorities, asked the board to adopt the proposal.

“If money is a problem, then maybe the commitment to solving the ethnic balance problem is not as strong as we thought,” said Diane Durant, a mother of five students.

Rich Beadle, a member of the committee that drew up the proposal, said the real cause of the problem is “uncontrolled growth” in the city.

“This is not about busing; we’re discussing changes and choices, and that’s what this is about. You should be down at City Hall talking to them, instead of here talking to the school board,” Beadle said.

The plan, one of six considered, called for a dramatic redrawing of district boundaries and creates a districtwide magnet school that gives trustees tight control over the school’s ethnic makeup.

The plan, to be implemented beginning next July 1, will evacuate the students from Santa Fe/California, which has an ethnic-minority enrollment of 72%. The school will essentially be considered brand-new and without attendance boundaries. The students who now attend Santa Fe/California will be redistributed to neighboring schools.

Students from throughout the district will be eligible to apply to Santa Fe/California, and the district will control the ethnic makeup by limiting attendance.

The program differs from other magnet schools in North County, which start with an ethnically unbalanced enrollment and institute programming to attract other students. Under the Vista plan, Santa Fe/California will start with a population of zero.

The other five proposals to decrease segregation, which received modest consideration, offered weaker variations of magnet programs and included the redrawing of attendance boundaries.

Vista Unified, like most North County school districts facing tremendous growth, has long had a problem in achieving ethnic balance in its 11 elementary schools.

While schools in the center of the city last year had ethnic-minority enrollments of 72%, 58% and 57%, others at the edge of town, where single-family homes have sprung up, had minority enrollments of 19%, 21% and 25%.

Students at Santa Fe/California, who are primarily Latino, will be most affected by the plan because they will be bused to other parts of the district.

Three previous integration proposals would have kept significant numbers of white students from attending neighborhood schools, but large groups of primarily white parents protested the changes and the school board backed down from the plans.

However, district officials say many Latino parents see integration as an important goal and were willing to accept the latest proposal even though it means busing their children.