My daughter attends Northwood High and I’ve been an IUSD parent for 17 years. I’ve made no apologies for suggesting that Site A for Irvine’s 5th high school was a non-starter for me — and many others — due to its proximity to the Musick Jail and the toxins in the soil. My fear is 20 years form now, the school will have to be torn down because of high rates of illness for faculty, staff and students because of what’s in the soil and the current school board, who approved the site unanimously will have to live with this decision and millions of wasted taxpayer dollars. There wasn’t a lot of public support for Site A but considerable public backlash against it. The IUSD Board and administration did their best to paint site B, at the Great Park, to be some sort of environmental disaster, and its not.
No compromise choice when two sides can’t agree — which is very un-Irvine, but the district’s elected officials and paid administrative leaders clearly had made up their minds and were tone-deaf to criticism of their preferred site by members of the public. The same public that is asked to pay as much as possible to maintain great schools with multiple fundraisers due to the failure of state legislative leaders in the State Assembly or State Senate to improve Irvine’s per-student funding levels that are lower than Santa Ana or Anaheim’s.
But now that the site for High School #5 is all settled, the district is now actually asking for the public’s input in naming the new school. Color me skeptical. I think the name and mascot have already been selected and this input session is a complete farce. But let’s play along.
From the IUSD website, this story.
IUSD is asking community members to submit suggestions for what to call the new campus via this online input form. All entries received by the Sept. 26 deadline will be reviewed by Superintendent Terry Walker and his staff, which will then make a recommendation to the Board of Education.
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Enrollment projections indicate a new campus will be needed in 2016 to accommodate thousands of new homes in the area while preventing overcrowding at Irvine, Northwood, University and Woodbridge high schools. (ed note: and making Emile Hadded even richer).
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The Board of Education’s policy for naming campuses and facilities states that elementary schools should be named after an adjacent street, park, or village, and middle schools should reference significant landmarks in the community. As for high schools, the same policy says their names should be considered individually. It also suggests the process for naming sites should include community input where feasible.
So here’s your chance to brand a future Irvine landmark. To suggest a name for IUSD’s next high school, visit http://tinyurl.com/fifthhighschool.
The school board will vote on this matter October 7. And Superintendent Terry Walker will review each submission. Awesome. I’m going to urge readers to do what I did and submit the name “Haddad High School” in honor of the true beneficiary of the site, Five Point Community’s Emile Haddad (“you give me a billion in profits, I’ll give to $250 million for a so-so Park”). There’s no space for it, but I suggest the nickname “The Pentagrams” to represent Five Points which would make for a cool logo on the side of the football team’s helmet. I’m not sure if “Prison High Immates” makes for a good name or the “Toxic Avengers” of East Irvine High works well either. Let’s see what choice is pushed forward.
One thing for sure, we won’t be calling it Agran High School. Perhaps with a little luck after the Audit Report is in and if a criminal investigation then follows, your BFF Larry can spend some moments of reflection at the Musick Facility, he so dearly loves? Now that would be a real application of Karma wouldn’t it?
if it were called Agran High, you’d have a stroke. Forensic audits are supposed to take 3-6 months to complete Pat. This one took nearly a year and a half. No smoking gun. And Shea is the one who voted to expand Musick; Agran fought its expansion every step of the way
Dan, on Musick in case your memory is failing you, they had a deal cut with Mike Corona, the Sheriff limiting the expansion substantially and with a guarantee of no maximum security prisoners. It was Larry Agran who torpedoed the deal because he claimed he could get a better one. We now see how that grand Agran scheme worked out? But what’s new, because most of Agrans grand schemes have been zeros, example being The Great Park.
On the Audit. Could the delay have possibly been beause some of the people involved were not cooperating with the auditors? Oh, of course not, Forde & Moolrich have nothing to hide within all those tens of millions of dollars they reaped from their “No Bid” contracts. As they say, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings………wait, I can hear her tuning up in the wings and am sure it will be a great song.
I could care less, what they name the new high school. How about “Chmielewski High,” that has kind of a ring to it,
No, Larry wasn’t trying to get a better deal, he was trying to stop the expansion of the Jail period. Shea’s deal was to expand the jail size by a factor of 4. The auditor never contacted F&M or Ken Smith until a week before the first 3 month contract was set to expire. They never provided 30 day reporting updates that they were required to by contract. Its a taxpayer funded political witchhunt.
“There wasn’t a lot of public support for Site A…” This is a highly questionable assertion. Where did the Irvine PTA stand? How did the candidate who publically opposed Site A fare in the special election?
I believe the Irvine PTA (there are many) cannot take a position on a political issue. The candidate who supported Site A won the special election with less than half the vote on a poor turnout.
A reader sent me a link to a December Register story saying the presidents of all the IUSD PTAs voted for site A, but the story has this paragraph:
“In the report, the PTA council clarified that its members did not have the knowledge required to perform truly independent analysis (such as taking its own soil samples and conducting traffic pattern studies), so it used outside sources, including school district documents, to reach its conclusion.”
I’m actually surprised by this because back in the day when I was more active in the PTA, we were told not to get involved in any decisions that were political and the location of a new high school certainly is/was. I remember the tepid PTA support for Measure BB which brought millions to the schools was treated by the PTAs and they used the political angle as a rationale for that. I wonder how “rank and file” members of each PTA would have voted.
To clarify, public comment at the IUSD meetings had more support for Site B than Site A, plain and simple.
I disagree with the notion that the school site decision was inherently political and out of bounds for the PTA. Any political association was created by forces outside of the school district and its board. A special election for school board was forced on Irvine by what I would call obscure instigators, after collecting signatures from something short of 1% of Irvine’s population (talk about “low turnout”). While disclaiming involvement in this instigation, certain members of the city council nevertheless enthusiastically endorsed the election and the signature gathering as a healthy expression of democratic will. Later, certain members of the city council sought to place a non-binding referendum regarding the high school location on the same ballot as the school board special election. After that unsuccessful effort, a candidate for the school board special election began appearing in front of Irvine schools with a member of the city council to pass out her campaign literature. So any political nature of a school location decision was created by the political animals, not the school board. That said, I would not expect the PTA to have taken an official position on the special election itself. Of course, once the election results were in, tactics changed and a veteran’s cemetery became the cause du jour.
As for assessing the level of support for one site or the other based on public comments at school board meetings: it was obvious what the board’s intentions were. This motivates the opponents to make their voices heard. Plus, the ringleaders of the opposition could rely on the usual suspects to come out and enjoy the spotlight, while only looking out for the best interests of “the children”, no doubt. The collection of merry pranksters, gray panthers and perennial irritants may enjoy those opportunities for attention, but the rest of us may have other plans for our Tuesday evenings!
If the community supported Site A, they would have shown up at the meetings to defend it. Increasingly, it seems the only things the brass at IUSD wants to hear from parents about is how much money they plan to donate to IPSF. I’m on my third superintendent now; the first two were much more accessible.