District seeks old standard

Corona del Mar parents met with Newport-Mesa officials Friday to discuss possible changes to the district’s elementary and middle schools that are up for approval at the Feb. 12 school board meeting.

School officials have proposed converting all elementary schools to encompass kindergarten through sixth grade and middle schools to encompass seventh and eighth grades. As such, schools teaching only fourth through sixth grades would adopt the kindergarten- through sixth-grade format.

In the mid-1990s, laws mandating class-size reduction shifted student populations to schools with more rooms and fewer students, jumbling up the grade levels at district schools.

District officials in December explained Newport-Mesa has been looking to regain the uniformity it once had.

Every school in the Corona del Mar High School attendance zone already fits the proposed standard.

That leaves little for Corona del Mar parents to adjust to, so Deputy Supt. Paul Reed hedged his bets and looked at alternatives just in case.

Lincoln Elementary School was once a middle school, he said. So he presented parents the financial cost if the district changed Lincoln back to one. His scenario was from what he calls, “a 30,000-foot view.”

District members charted out Lincoln Elementary as a sixth- through eighth-grade school. The rest of Corona del Mar’s elementary schools would go up to fifth grade. According to district estimates, it would cost the district more than $2 million just to accommodate all the students at Lincoln. Parents could only laugh at the exorbitant total when compared to the district’s recommended alternative.

Reed said the district did not look into converting Lincoln into a seventh- and eighth-grade school simply because that was not the question raised four years ago by parents.

Parents seemed more concerned with how Corona del Mar’s seventh- and eighth-graders are treated on the high school campus. The district is waiting to create an “enclave,” or school within a school on the high school campus, Reed said.

The district is just waiting on a bond measure. Reed estimates it would be between $50 million and $70 million in 2010.

The bond, originally expected in 2009, could be pushed back even more if the U.S. economy continued to slow, he said.

A similar enclave would be created at Costa Mesa High School for their seventh- and eighth-graders, he said.

Reduced enrollment trends allow the schools to standardize without sacrificing class size, officials said.

JOSEPH SERNA may be reached at (714) 966-4619 or at joseph.serna@latimes.com.