NEWPORT BEACH : Victoria School’s Reopening Delayed

Newport-Mesa Unified School District trustees agreed this week to postpone the reopening of Victoria School this fall and plan to shuffle students from overcrowded classrooms to less cramped schools.

However, the board Tuesday also pledged to open Victoria during the 1992-93 school year and agreed to start soliciting bids for remodeling work on the school, which was shut down a few years ago due to low enrollment.

Although dozens of parents have been banking on the school’s planned reopening in September, they said at the meeting that they were mostly pleased with the board’s decision. They said they will continue to work with the district to try to secure a January, 1993, reopening.

“We are in favor of the board’s action; however, we must express our displeasure with the interim” plan, said parent Doug Jamieson, speaking for the Victoria School Neighborhood Parents Assn., a group which has been dubbed a PTA without a school.

The interim plan calls for continuing to shuffle students who one day will attend Victoria to other schools in the area, such as Adams, California, Pomona, Whittier and Wilson.

For some children such as Jamieson’s daughter, that means attending as many as three different schools in three years. The parents’ group asked the board to consider assigning a principal to the closed school to work with the parents group until the school opens as a further measure of the board’s commitment to opening the school.

The board hopes by May to approve its five-year plan for schools in that area, which will include boundary lines for Victoria School. That vote may include a naming a principal to be the nominal head of Victoria and keep parents abreast of opening plans, said board President Forrest K. Werner.

The district’s plans for Victoria needed to be postponed because of delays in receiving $2 million expected from the Mesa Consolidated Water District.

The water district plans to lease another closed school site from the district to build a reservoir, with the lease payments from that transaction needed to fund the Victoria School project.