Coto de Caza Residents Say No to School Within Gates

Coto de Caza residents Wednesday struck down plans to erect a public elementary school within their gated community, a proposal that opponents argued would have threatened neighborhood safety and privacy by allowing the public inside the gates.

After an extensive community election, final ballots counted Wednesday showed that 84% of the 1,700 households that voted opposed the kindergarten through third-grade school, which would have been the first California public school inside private security gates.

The initiative was defeated by mainly older residents who make up roughly 80% of the community and do not have school-age children, contended John Zarian, president of the homeowners association, which helped spearhead the school proposal.

“It’s very discouraging for me,” he said. “I hoped people would look at this proposal with an open mind. But the votes seemed to fall so close on party lines, if you will.”

But resident Karen Rose, who has three children attending public schools, said she objected to the school proposal because it would be located within the gates, and that community leaders had failed to include residents in the planning.

“I really agree that we need a school but that was just a really bad location, a poorly written lease, and everything about it was just not right,” Rose said.

Like Rose, many longtime residents worried that having a school inside the community would mean security guards admitting outsiders to the neighborhood to visit the public school. They also questioned whether it was legal to have the public facility in a private community.

The school initiative began last May when the homeowners association brokered a deal with the Coto de Caza developer, Lennar Homes. That agreement gained the association a parcel of land where a 400-student school would be built. That campus was to relieve crowding at Wagon Wheel Elementary School, a 1 1/2-year-old school just outside the Coto gates that had too many students for its capacity the day it opened.

In turn, the school district would lease the land for $1 a year for 20 years. Lennar Homes would spend about $500,000 in building parking lots and ball fields at the site, providing recreational facilities for the community.

But now that residents rejected the plan, the developer will not cover those costs. While the homeowners association gets to keep the property, Zarian said it is uncertain whether there is funding for the recreational facilities for the community.

Coto resident and school backer LeAnn Ricks called the initiative’s failure a setback for the community.

“It’s a hollow victory,” she said. “The crowding problem still exists at our schools.”

Election inspectors estimated that 71% of 2,513 eligible homeowners voted on the matter over the past two weeks. Then, like an electoral college, 34 neighborhood delegates cast ballots Wednesday based on previous residential votes.

Pleased with the results, Rose added that the next phase for the community is to work with the district on where and how to build a school.

“I’m not going to drop the ball here,” she said. “We need a new school and we’re going to work on where it will be.”