Santa Ana District Won’t Bus Kids to Greenville Campus

A suggestion to bus students to a highly regarded Santa Ana elementary school from a nearby campus will not be pursued, school board members said Tuesday.

“There is no busing issue,” John Palacio, Santa Ana Unified School District president, said in an interview before the meeting. “It was just an idea, not a proposal even. We were looking at every possible solution, many of which were seen as not plausible.”

Parents of students at Greenville Fundamental School raised an outcry earlier this month when they learned that busing students from nearby Fremont Elementary was among ideas offered to ease overcrowding in the district, where playgrounds, libraries, cafeterias and even parking lots have been converted into classrooms.

But Palacio said Tuesday, “There is a consensus that anyone attending a fundamental school will provide their own transportation and come off a waiting list.”

Greenville is one of the district’s four fundamental schools, which enforce stringent grade and dress standards and teach an all-English curriculum that emphasizes reading, writing and math. The program has been highly popular with parents. Greenville, for example, with an enrollment of 930, has a waiting list of more than 700.

About 300 parents of students at Greenville and other Santa Ana Unified schools packed the board meeting Tuesday and spilled out into another room, where a TV monitor was set up for them. Their concern has been that busing would dilute the fundamental schools’ rigid academic policies and rules.

“The school is very strict,” said Diane Calderon, whose daughter attends Greenville. “The test scores are high. Why take that away?”

School officials outlined other proposals, including more portable classrooms and redrawing attendance boundaries.

“None of this is what we really want to do, but we’ve got to deal with overcrowding,” Supt. Al Mijares said. “People complain we have no long-term solution. Our long-term solution is to build more schools. This is our short-term solution.”

Mijares and other officials said they have to consider what is best for all students. “Right now we’re just trying to balance the needs of the overall district,” Mijares said. “We have to be fair. . . . We’re still collecting information right now.”