District meets on grade concerns

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District has begun holding meetings with parents in the Costa Mesa Zone to determine whether to realign grade levels in the upcoming school year.

In March, a group of the parents brought a petition to the school board, asking the district to consider rearranging grade levels so that children could stay at the same schools for a longer period of time. Over the next month, assistant superintendent of elementary education Susan Astarita plans to hold eight meetings at the zone’s elementary schools to hear parent input.

On Wednesday evening, Astarita hosted the first session at Sonora Elementary School, with about a dozen parents and several administrators present. The next meeting is scheduled for today at College Park Elementary School.

By December, the district plans to make a recommendation to the school board, with a decision expected early next year.

“The constant in education is that something is always changing,” Astarita told the parents at Sonora. “So we have to be flexible with that.”

The Costa Mesa Zone, located in the central area of the city, contains five elementary schools as well as Costa Mesa High School, which covers the seventh through 12th grades. Three of the elementary sites — Sonora, College Park and Paularino — end after the third grade, with students moving on to Davis Elementary School. Only Killybrooke Elementary School goes all the way from kindergarten through the sixth grade.

When parents petitioned the district in March, they claimed that many of their children felt disoriented by changing schools so rapidly. More than 100 parents, led by Sonora parent Brian Valles, signed the statement.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Astarita offered the parents three possible scenarios for realigning schools. In two of them, Davis Elementary School would become exclusively a middle school and Costa Mesa High School would start at the ninth grade. The first scenario had the zone’s elementary schools ending after the fifth grade, while the second had them going through the sixth.

In the third arrangement, Sonora, Paularino, Killybrooke and College Park would be kindergarten through sixth-grade campuses, while Davis would serve kindergarten through the eighth grade and accept children from all attendance boundaries. Parents, Astarita said, could choose to send students to the larger site.

“Specifically, they would want their kids to be in one campus” for kindergarten through eighth grade, she said. “We would look at developing some kind of specialty, a visual or performing arts focus or something. We would have to work with the community to develop that interest.”

After the Sonora meeting, a number of parents said they felt the district was on the right track. Valles said he liked Astarita’s third scenario, particularly because of the idea for the specialty school.

“It’s a new concept, and it builds on what I, as a parent, see as the district doing right,” he said.

Fellow Sonora parent Jennifer Solano said she favored extending all the elementary schools to the sixth grade.

“I just feel that the longer time we can shelter kids in an elementary school environment, the better,” she said. “My concern as a parent is that I feel kids grow up too fast, and I want to put the reins on that.”