Moratorium on ‘School Availability’ Letters : San Diego School Board Acts to Slow Building

Continuing their struggle with the effects of surging population growth, San Diego city school trustees Tuesday voted to stop issuing the “letters of school availability” customarily given to developers and rejected parents’ requests to change the double-session kindergarten schedule at Miramar Ranch Elementary School.

By a unanimous vote, the board agreed to a moratorium on the letters of availability, normally issued routinely when a developer agrees to pay the fees that the San Diego Unified School District uses for school construction. The letters are a precondition for city approval of a project.

The moratorium is designed to slow the rapid growth--particularly in Mira Mesa and Scripps Ranch--that has caused severe overcrowding in some schools while the district completes proposals for a long-range plan that will detail where new schools should be built and how their construction should be paid for. That report is due Jan. 1.

The moratorium will end on that date, if state legislation revoking school boards’ power to issue the letters takes effect. That measure will become law only if California voters approve an $800-million school construction bond issue in November.

The moratorium will hold up building in seven developments where 952 single-family units and 6,320 multiple-family units are to be built. Five of the developments are in Mira Mesa, one is in north University City and one is in Tierrasanta.

Technically, the moratorium applies to the city’s six urbanizing zones: Mira Mesa, Scripps Ranch, North University City, North Miramar Ranch, Tierrasanta and South Bay Terraces.

The trustees agreed, however, to issue a letter of availability to one development--the 137-unit Sunland Sorrento project in Mira Mesa--because it had been scheduled to receive it Tuesday.

The board turned down a request for an exemption for Genstar Southwest Development, made by representative James Delhamer. Delhamer’s firm wants to proceed with the development of 448 apartments and 207 single-family houses between Black Mountain Road and Interstate 15.

Trustee Kay Davis said exemptions should not be issued, “because if we keep adding one more and one more and one more, then we have lost the purpose of the” moratorium.

Delhamer said that the biggest problem the moratorium will cause will be a delay in the construction of Mercy Road, a link to Interstate 15 from the Mira Mesa and Rancho Penasquitos areas.

“A three-month delay is not the end of the world, but . . . it’s another three months of traffic hassles,” he said.

The trustees also declined to rescind a decision they made last week that establishes two morning and one afternoon kindergarten sessions at Miramar Ranch Elementary School, which has been severely overcrowded this fall.

About 30 parents brought their children to the trustees’ meeting at district headquarters on Normal Street. Several complained that they had only five days’ notice to change day care and work arrangements.

Ginger Jansen, who sobbed as she addressed the school board, said she was forced to quit her job because of the schedule change. Her husband, a sailor who is at sea, does not yet know of the new plan, she said.

Other parents argued that the need for an afternoon session could be eliminated if the school’s two kindergarten classrooms could be divided into three.

Eloiza Cisneros, assistant superintendent for the region that includes Mira Mesa and Scripps Ranch, told the parents that the number of new homes being sold and occupied indicates that Miramar Ranch could receive 100 to 200 more pupils by December.

Although it is difficult to predict how many would be kindergartners, it would be less disruptive to institute double sessions now, she said.