Placentia Yorba Linda Unified School District

A last effort to conclude negotiations between the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District and the union representing its classified employees will take place Thursday when the two sides appear before a fact-finding panel. Discussions between the district and California School Employees Assn. Chapter 293 stalled last May when neither side would budge on salary and health-care benefits.

Ending years of debate in the Placentia Unified School District, the school board has voted to add Yorba Linda to the district's title. School board members on Tuesday voted 4 to 2 to change the name of the district to the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District. The decision came after parents' and residents' groups made several attempts to change the district's name.

Several schools in the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District will hold meetings in the next month to discuss potential budget cuts the district may make because of losses in the county investment pool. The district has not publicly announced how it will cope with those losses, but parents, school administrators and residents are continuing to meet to seek ways the district can save money.

A seven-year spending plan for the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District presented earlier this week includes provisions for a new elementary school in Yorba Linda and moving sixth-grade students to Kraemer Middle School. But the plans proposed expenditures of more than $27 million, far more than the estimated income of about $17 million from developer fees and redevelopment income.

The public will have a chance to comment next month on still-undisclosed proposals for changing school attendance boundaries, but district officials say most major changes will probably not go into effect until after the 1993-94 school year. The Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District is looking for ways to handle population shifts in the district and, at the same time, to make better use of its facilities, cut down on transportation costs and promote ethnic balance in the schools.

After spending more than $169,000 this school year to obliterate graffiti on campuses, the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District plans to adopt a hard-line approach to the problem. A district task force on graffiti presented a list of suggestions to the Board of Trustees this week that includes pushing for a ban on marking pens and highlighter pens, as well as suspending the ability to obtain a driver's license for teens convicted of vandalism.

Faced with another bleak year of state funding for education, a Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District trustee has proposed placing a property tax assessment on the June ballot to raise about $5 million for the district's 1992-93 budget. In a preliminary outline of the proposal by Trustee Bill Kielty, every single-family home or townhouse in the school district would be assessed an additional $100 in property tax.

More than 700 Yorba Linda students who are bused to Troy High School in Fullerton could have the option of attending a high school in their own district if an eleventh-hour amendment to a school-choice bill is passed before the Legislature adjourns Friday. The amended bill has rekindled a longstanding controversy over where students from western Yorba Linda may go to public school once they reach the ninth grade.

Parents and other residents in the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District have become increasingly impatient with school administrators for failing to disclose how they plan to cope with potential losses from the county's bankruptcy. The district has a particularly acute problem because it was one of five Orange County school agencies that borrowed extra money to invest in the county's now-failed investment pool.