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Neighbors oppose site for new high school
By BARBARA BEHRENDT, Times Staff Writer BEVERLY HILLS -- Bounded by a public library and a community of retirement villas, the 73-acre site at Roosevelt and Forest Ridge boulevards is now a rolling, wild expanse of trees, ponds and meadows. To some school district officials, it's also a viable location for a new high school to serve the growing school-age population of the county's central ridge. A group of Beverly Hills residents, however, is trying to convince the district to look elsewhere. They fear that a high school in their neighborhood will bring a crush of traffic, noise and hundreds of teenagers who will disrupt the community's quiet. If the district's Site Selection Committee drops the site when it meets this month, it will leave a very short list of properties from which to choose. There are four sites under consideration, some with problems of their own. A site near Holder Park, for instance, has a power line crossing it. There are access and space concerns, and building a high school there would require a complex joint-use arrangement with the county, school officials have said. The other two sites on the list are an 80- to 100-acre site on U.S. 41 northwest of Hernando and a 95-acre parcel just south of Hernando. If both the Holder and Beverly Hills sites are dropped, superintendent David Hickey said, the district will have to keep looking, noting that large parcels of open land in the central ridge area are in short supply. The district has no immediate plans to build a high school, but officials coping with overcrowding at the county's three high schools say it is only a matter of time before a new high school will be needed. The district plans to begin saving for the $35-million construction project, and the proposed budget sets aside $1.2-million to buy a parcel in the next year. Earlier this summer, Hickey and James Hughes, executive director of support services, met with representatives of various Beverly Hills civic and community organizations to outline the district's process for selecting a high school site and talk about the system's high school space needs. While some concerns were voiced by the community at the time, the opposition to a high school in Beverly Hills has since grown. Dick Schnably, president of the Beverly Hills Civic Association, said this week that he has received numerous calls from residents saying that a high school would not fit into the community. School officials met again in late July with the board of the Civic Association, and members raised other problems, said Mike Colbert, a member of the association board. The intersection near the site is busy, and residents have pushed for a traffic light to be installed there. Colbert noted that Forest Ridge is the main diagonal connection between north and south Beverly Hills, and that it is already congested several hours a day because of traffic in and out of Forest Ridge Elementary School. Adding another school would only exacerbate the traffic problem, Colbert said. The site is also landlocked, because it is surrounded by the library, a wastewater treatment facility, a county park and a lakeside retirement area. A high school would mean athletic fields, and athletic fields would mean bands, teenagers, games and floodlights at least once a week during football season. "That would add just the touch of excitement these retired folks are looking for," Colbert said. He also said the district would be looking at a greater expense for the Beverly Hills site and that the site work to prepare the hilly location would also be a problem. "This community began its life as a retirement village," Colbert said. "It just seems to a lot of us that with so much land around here, they couldn't have possibly found a place that would impact more people than that one will." Colbert also noted that the Beverly Hills property was once promised as a site for future home construction. If a school went there instead, "that would forever take away from this community the impact fees and property taxes that would have been generated from the residential development previously envisioned there." It appears that the residents have carried the day with the district. "The committee has heard what the community has said, and they have said that they don't want us there," said School Board member Patience Nave, who sits on the Site Selection Committee. "And they have legitimate reasons. . . . I think that this site will not be discussed further." Nave said she and others on the committee are hopeful that at least one other site will become available for consideration before formal ranking of the sites begins this fall. -- Barbara Behrendt can be reached at behrendt@sptimes.com or 564-3621.
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