Parents: Davis as magnet is OK

The vast majority of parents who have kids in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District would be interested in having a magnet school in Costa Mesa, according to survey results presented to the School Board on Tuesday.

Of a sample of more than 400 area parents, 93% expressed at least some interest in developing a magnet school on the campus of Davis Elementary School.

Costa Mesa doesn’t have a magnet school for elementary school students. Magnet schools are designed to give kids an early chance to focus on a particular subject matter in-depth, such as music or technology.

“A magnet school is one of those concepts that is highly visible and highly desired. I think parents would like a school of focus, something different than the routine type of school,” said district spokeswoman Laura Boss.

When asked to choose between several different types of magnet schools, parents showed the most interest in creating a school that focuses on science.

The school board has been considering the idea of creating a magnet school for a while, and members were happy to get a validation of their efforts from the survey results. Regardless of what type of magnet the district ends up choosing, it’s helpful to know that people want a magnet school, said board member Michael Collier.

“We’re excited about having a magnet school. Lots of times you only get the basic fundamentals at school, but magnet schools give students the fundamentals as well as a specialty that they can concentrate on,” Collier said.

Davis is distinct in that it serves only fourth, fifth and sixth grades, and doesn’t really belong to any neighborhood in particular. Located between the Orange County Fair and Events Center and TeWinkle Park, the school has been fed students from surrounding schools that stopped at third grade.

But the district has been gradually reconfiguring the elementary schools in the area to offer all grades from kindergarten through sixth grade, making Davis all but obsolete.

This prompted the school board to study making it into a magnet elementary school starting fall of next year.

Another thing the survey revealed was that parents really want to see teachers with special training and expertise in the fields they will be teaching at the magnet school.

Budgets are tight, though, so one of the next steps in the process should be to survey the roughly 1,300 teachers already in the district to determine what skills and expertise they have and what the possibilities are for retraining them, said Kimberly Claytor, the president of the Newport-Mesa teachers’ union.

“I doubt we’ll be hiring any new teachers,” Claytor said. “If we’re going to do it, we need to grow it from the resources we already have.”

A principal will also have to be hired for the new magnet school, according to Boss. The school would be open to all students in the district, and the consultants who did the survey also investigated how parents felt about enrollment being competitive and what driving distances they were willing to travel to take their kids to school.

The board will have a second study session at 5 p.m. Tuesday at the district office at 2985 Bear St. to discuss the next steps in the process.

ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at [email protected].