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Sahuarita Schools on the Grow: > District Will Try Again for Voters' OK of Override for Classroom Supplies <

Posted on: Thursday, 15 June 2006, 06:01 CDT

By Kimberly Matas, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson

Jun. 15--Sahuarita is growing, and the school district is keeping pace, building a new school, hiring more teachers and planning a capital override election.

Manny Valenzuela, assistant superintendent of the Sahuarita Unified School District, expects a 15 percent increase in the number of students for the 2006-07 school year, from a current enrollment of about 3,800 to nearly 4,400. Since last summer, the district has grown by 400 to 500 students, he said.

The district will add 18 teaching positions for the next school year, and it has reconfigured enrollment boundaries.

"We went through a whole process of studying the issues related to safety and growth projections and trying to create balanced boundaries," Valenzuela said.

"All of the children in the main campus area have gone to Sahuarita Primary School, Sahuarita Intermediate, Sahua-rita Middle School and Sahuarita High School," he said. "With the opening of the Anza Trail School, there's a need to designate attendance boundaries. We're going to have to assign students to different schools based on where they live."

The Anza Trail School, in the Rancho Sahuarita area, will open in January to 725 pupils in kindergarten through sixth grade. Seventh- and eighth-graders will likely begin attending Anza Trail in autumn 2007, when the final phase of the school is complete.

Valenzuela said the finished school will be able to accommodate 1,200 students. He expects Anza Trail to be filled to capacity by the 2007-08 school year.

District spokeswoman Kelly Bell said she thinks district officials' projections are low.

"Between August and January (2006-07), I think you're going to see a spike they're not really predicting," she said. "I think it's really going to boom."

Debbie Morales has three children in the Sahuarita school system, ranging from first grade to high school. She's happy to see the district expanding.

"I think the timing's right. It needs to happen," she said.

The Morales family has lived in Sahuarita for three years.

"When we moved here, we were blown away at how quick everything is taking off," she said. "We do definitely need more schools, more teachers."

The district also needs more money. That's why the Governing Board has decided to call for a capital override election, said Tom Murphy, clerk of the board.

If it passes, the $7 million override would allow the district to buy "soft capital" items such as textbooks, desks, chairs, computers and software.

"The schools are funded based upon the average daily attendance over the first 100 days of the school year for the following fiscal year," Valenzuela said. "Any student who arrived at our doorstep after January, we have to accommodate and educate. But we're not provided the resources to provide that -- students' textbooks, desk and things of this sort -- until the following year, because the kid would not be counted on the average of those first 100 days until the following year.

"It used to be -- when this was a relatively small district, which was not that long ago -- you could accommodate," Valenzuela continued. "You had an extra textbook lying around, or an extra desk and chair for the limited number of students. But with the current accelerated rate of growth, we don't have those hundreds of extra desks and books and chairs for those students."

Voters approved a $10 million capital bond measure last year, Murphy said. That money could be used only for construction and improvements. But the $7 million capital override to furnish classrooms and buy books and computers was voted down.

At that time, the town had a population of 13,000, and the override would have cost the average family about $10 a month, Murphy estimated. Because Sahuarita's population is expected to reach nearly 20,000 during this year, he said, each household would pay closer to $3 to $4 per month if the "soft capital" override passes this time around.

Cooperation is another route. Murphy said he is interested in teaming up with the town of Sahuarita to build a library next to the high school for use by both students and the public.

Preliminary financing is lined up and construction is expected to begin in 2008 on a new high school on a parcel of state land north of the Anza Trail School, Murphy said. The district is in preliminary talks with Carondelet Health Network for support if the Governing Board decides to make medical technology the focus of the school. Carondelet recently bought 20 acres in Sahuarita for the town's first hospital, expected to open in 2011.

"That's one of the exciting things we're trying to do is expand our partnerships," Murphy said. "What they (Carondelet officials) are looking to do -- and we are too -- is locally growing our own work force . . . to prepare our students and move them into a medical field."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Arizona Daily Star

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