Mountain community residents fight closure
By J. Harry Jones
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
April 7, 2006
PALOMAR MOUNTAIN - It's the last one-room schoolhouse in the county, and the "mountain people" want to keep it just as it is.
Faced with a $500,000 budget shortfall, the Valley Center-Pauma Unified School District is considering closing Palomar Mountain School next year.
Only five or six students probably will be enrolled then, down from 11 this year, and closing the school could save the district nearly $100,000.
In continuous use since 1950, the school isn't just a place of learning for those in kindergarten through eighth grade, residents say, but also a vital part of the mountain community, which has a year-round population of about 250.
In June, for example, nearly 100 people showed up for the graduation ceremony for Sara Kardel, even though she was the school's only eighth-grade student.
School officials say the school's demise isn't a certainty.
"We don't know where we are," district Superintendent Lou Obermeyer said Wednesday. "We're still exploring our options."
A final decision isn't expected for a couple of months. The first real public discussion will be at the May 11 school board meeting, Obermeyer said.
She said several options are possible, though mountain residents contend that only three are being seriously considered: keeping the school open, closing it or keeping it open but in a limited capacity. Only the first is acceptable to them.
Residents say that if the school is closed, children will have to be bused "down the mountain" to Valley Center, as local high school students are now. That would mean an hour or more on a bus each way for young children, and a school day that could be as long as 9½ hours.
"That shouldn't be for an elementary-age child," Pam Thompson, the mother of a sixth-grader, said at a community meeting Wednesday night.
Hard financial figures haven't been calculated. Tom Cunningham, a mountain resident who organized Wednesday night's meeting, said he believes it could cost the district as much as $43,000 annually to bus students.
Cunningham said the community and the school district are cooperating. "We feel that Lou Obermeyer and her staff want to work with us to come up with a solution that will work for the kids, because that's what it's all about," he said.
J. Harry Jones
Jharry.jones@uniontrib.com