Campus investment might not pay off

By: JIM TRAGESER - Staff Writer | Wednesday, December 7, 2005 8:26 PM PST ∞

A little more than a year ago, I was back home in Ohio for my 25th high school reunion. Beyond the shock of seeing so many old farts at my high school reunion, the biggest change in my hometown was the fact that two of the three elementary schools I attended as a kid are now closed.

Growing up in Dayton and its suburb of Kettering in the 1960s, it seemed that every year a new elementary school, or two, was opening. New housing developments were springing up everywhere, and if the baby boom was coming to a close, nobody had bothered to tell all the young couples in Dayton.

Kettering, a city of roughly 57,000 people today, was perhaps a little bigger when I was a kid. Surely it was younger ---- much like Escondido today. Kettering built a second high school in the early 1970s and had four junior highs plus a dozen or so elementary schools.

Today, Oak Creek Elementary is a retirement home. Croftshire, built in the late 1960s to take some of the pressure off Oak Creek, is also closed. JFK Junior High is now an elementary school taking in all the territory that formerly sent its kids to Oak Creek and Croftshire. And the second high school is now one of only two middle schools.

In other words, the Kettering City School District spent millions of dollars building schools that were no longer needed within a couple of decades.

Is Escondido about to travel down the same path?

The folks at the Escondido Union High School District are engaged in the politically volatile activity of searching for a campus site large enough for a new comprehensive four-year high school.

As most of the city is now built out, the search is taking in parcels where the district would have to use eminent domain to take adjacent homes.

But even the one undeveloped site large enough to hold a new high school without destroying any homes is stirring up fierce opposition from neighbors worried about traffic.

Looking at what's happened in my hometown, I'm left wondering if large, permanent infrastructure is really the district's best investment. Yes, San Diego County remains relatively young demographically, but who's to say that will last? The kind of population boom that drives new school construction is most closely aligned with new housing development where young families tend to cluster. As Escondido is nearly built out, and all variations to the city's general plan must be approved by voters, it may be that we're already on the tail end of a booming school-age population.

Perhaps not, of course; it may be that I'm completely wrong on this.

But before spending millions of dollars, and before using eminent domain to take local families' homesteads, maybe we could at least consider options short of building another massive high school campus along the lines of San Pasqual, Escondido or Orange Glen.

Palomar College has done a nice job of converting a strip mall into an adjunct campus here in Escondido; should enrollment fall, the college won't be stuck with a white elephant.

It's a lesson the high school district might want to learn from.

Contact staff writer Jim Trageser at (760) 740-5424 or jtrageser@nctimes.com.

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