School Board Approves Building of High School : Facility Planned for Southeast Corona Will Be District’s Third; Cost Estimated at $11 Million : CORONA NORCO

The Corona-Norco Board of Education voted Tuesday night to build a new high school, the district’s third, in southeast Corona at an estimated cost of $11 million.

The district’s two high schools are already 641 students over capacity. School officials project that even when the new high school opens its doors in 1988, with room for 1,800 students, the growing district will have at least 523 more high-school students than desks.

Part of that overcrowding will come because the board has already decided to move ninth-grade classes from junior high to high schools, a plan the new building finally will make possible, Supt. Don Helms explained.

But additional students will come from families moving into new homes in the area, and the district’s projection of their numbers is probably too conservative, Helms said in an interview Tuesday, because it is based only on houses already under construction or granted final approval for development. “We know that as soon as we open schools, they’ll be filled,” Helms said. “There is no way of avoiding that.”

Land Already Owned

The district cannot build a larger school, he said, because “we have to justify (new construction) to the state, even though we expect that it is a conservative estimate.”

The new high school will be built on 40 acres of land the district already owns on Fullerton Street in Corona. The property is now being used by the city for soccer fields.

The site “is fairly appropriate in terms of where the population growth is occurring and will occur,” Helms said.

The estimated $11 million in design and construction costs for the new high school, which has yet to be named, will come primarily from school-building funds the district already has raised from selling bonds and assessing development fees to mitigate the effects of new housing development on the school district.

‘Will Have Plenty of Money’

“Long before we are ready to build this high school, we will have plenty of money in the kitty,” Helms said.

But the district faces overcrowding in the lower grades as well, Helms said, and will need to build more elementary and intermediate schools in the next 10 years.

“I believe that within a year or so . . . we will have to initiate at least two new elementary schools,” Helms said.

So the school board also voted Tuesday night to buy 16 “relocatables”--temporary classrooms to be used at existing elementary school campuses, at Corona High School and at a youth home in the district.

The prefabricated, relocatable classrooms take only three or four months to construct, Helms said, at a cost of about $80,000 each. The district already uses 14 such classrooms.