Vista Unified to close Beaumont, Rancho Minerva, relocate VIDA

VISTA — The Vista Unified School District board accepted recommendations on June 23 to close Beaumont Elementary and Rancho Minerva Middle schools and relocate Vista Innovation and Design Academy to “right size” a district heavily impacted by declining enrollment and deteriorating facilities.

The recommendations were brought to the board on Thursday by the district’s asset management advisory committee following two months of meetings and community forums surrounding the need for school consolidation.

The nine-person committee, formed in April, was tasked with making recommendations for the future of four school sites most heavily affected by low enrollment and poor facility conditions. These included two elementary schools, Beaumont and Monte Vista, and two middle schools, Rancho Minerva and magnet school Vista Innovation and Design Academy, or VIDA.

Such committees are required under the state education code in districts considering school closures.

In a recently-published report, the committee recommended that Beaumont and Rancho Minerva be closed, Monte Vista Elementary be maximized for educational use, and the site becomes the new location of VIDA.

“These are not decisions that we’re making lightly or hastily. We’ve had the benefit of being in the room for hours — we’ve had over 20 meetings this year alone,” said Trustee Julie Kelly.

District leaders have assured community members that no schools will close in the upcoming 2023-24 school year. However, families and teachers at the affected schools are devastated by the decision and frustrated by the lack of logistical planning, such as where Beaumont and Rancho Minerva families will be redistributed.

Brook Virostko, Beaumont PTA president, said her own daughter is starting fourth grade at Beaumont in the fall, but it’s unclear whether she will have to go to a new school for fifth grade.

“It’s one thing to say, we’re gonna consolidate Beaumont, but you need to know what will happen next. You have a lot of kids here who have to walk to school. What’s gonna happen to these kids?” Virostko said.

Committee members themselves also shared concerns about how little information they were given to make such major decisions and claimed the equity considerations, which were supposed to be baked into the process, were not sufficiently discussed.

California School Employees Association representative Mario Bojorquez, one of the committee members, said they were prohibited from discussing how closures would impact students and told to make their decisions based solely on enrollment levels and the facility conditions.

“I don’t believe a single member was pleased with the difficult recommendations we had to make. Some of the reasons they were difficult was the very narrow set of guidelines, constrained time frame and the influence placed on the committee, which led to a predetermined outcome,” Bojorquez said. “I’m asking the board to give the committee more options, an expanded timeline and the option to incorporate impacts on students rather than just on facilities.”

Rancho Minerva PTA President Amanda Remmen, who served as committee chair, said they experienced a “sense of haste and lack of communication” and that they were being pushed toward making a specific decision.

“This committee is a state-mandated requirement, and it felt that way,” Remmen said. “The decision made by the committee felt predetermined beforehand and left little room for thinking of ideas outside of the box.”

Vista Unified COO Shawn Loescher, who oversaw the committee, said many of the topics that came up, like redrawing school boundaries, magnet schools and specific details about the number of classrooms needed at each site, will be discussed by other committees moving forward.

“[The committee] are to limit their conversations to property, and that’s difficult because we know whatever recommendations might be made impact people and students, and sometimes we want to know how, which can lead to a lot of theoreticals. ‘How’ would be a next step. This is the first step,” Loescher said.

‘We will lose the trust of our community’

For the middle schools, the committee balanced the deteriorating state of VIDA’s 60-year-old campus with Rancho Minerva’s low enrollment. VIDA is facing up to $59 million in renovation costs compared to $38 million at Rancho Minerva, built in 2006.

VIDA is currently at capacity with around 800 students, while Rancho Minerva’s current enrollment meets around half of its 1,000-student capacity. However, VIDA parents said moving the program would mean losing the pool, innovation labs and other facilities that offer students unique opportunities.

“Moving VIDA to the Rancho Minerva campus is not the right thing to do for so many reasons,” said VIDA parent Cindi Bess. “First of all, Rancho Minerva does not have a pool or a theater. This is what brings so many students to VIDA, and without those things, you are cutting the legs off of a well-run school that offers so much for students.”

District leaders said while Beaumont and Monte Vista are both old facilities, the overall restorations needed for Beaumont would total $54 million compared to $27 million at Monte Vista, making it more feasible to maximize it for educational use.

Among Beaumont’s long-documented problems are cracked surfaces and mold as a result of water intrusion from the surrounding sloped hills. District leaders said issues with the foundation and other geotechnical features make these problems difficult and expensive to fix.

“Beaumont is not safe for our children to continue to learn,” said Trustee Rosemary Smithfield, noting that community members have repeatedly raised concerns about the school’s condition.

Carol Boraks, a library media technician at Beaumont for the past 11 years, said she understands the school is old and needs repair. However, Boraks said they have tried to get the district to address these issues for years; just last year, district leaders started and then abandoned plans to fix portions of the campus using Measure LL bond funds.

“It just really hit a nerve for me when they kept using, ‘We’ve known for years now that it’s unsafe’ — they keep telling us that. If we kept telling you that, and you heard us, why didn’t you do anything then to make it safer?” Boraks said.

Since many Beaumont students already feed into Rancho Minerva for middle school, several community members, as well as board member Rena Marrocco, supported the idea of combining the two into a K-8 school.

“A lot of us at Beaumont were looking to go to Rancho Minerva. For many of our families, this is a double hit because they’re both going away,” Virostko said.

The board made its decisions in two separate motions — unanimously approving the committee’s recommendations regarding Beaumont and Monte Vista and approving recommendations to move VIDA to Rancho Minerva in a 4-1 vote, with Marrocco opposed.

Marrocco said the board should take more time to consider the impacts on both Rancho Minerva, which has an unduplicated population made up largely of English learners, as well as VIDA before making the decision.

“I understand that consolidations are hard, but to close two schools and displace another school … I’m very opposed to this,” Marrocco said. “We will never pass a bond again, and we will lose the trust of our community.”

Future uses

In their report, committee members recommended how the vacated VIDA and Beaumont sites could be repurposed.

Committee members recommended using the vacated VIDA site on Olive Avenue for workforce housing and a community center and using the Beaumont site for parks and recreation, centralized use, or another site for workforce housing.

Kelly also indicated that the district is seriously considering using Beaumont as a temporary relocation site for students at Bobier Elementary when the school undergoes reconstruction.

“If we delay the elementary school decision, it will start to impact our Bobier project, which already has a three-year timeline from now,” Kelly said.

The district now faces many logistical decisions related to the students currently enrolled at Beaumont and Rancho Minerva, including how students at Rancho Minerva and Beaumont will be distributed, ensuring proper transportation, and drawing new boundaries for magnet schools.

“We’re gonna need to talk about boundaries, transportation, programming, do we wanna keep the VIDA pool open for specific kinds of programming … So there’s a lot of things we can be talking about that that are all ‘ifs,’ and more information is required,” said Trustee Cipriano Vargas.