CONSULTANT PROJECTS HART DISTRICT ENROLLMENT : ENROLLMENT DATA SHOW NEED FOR NEW SCHOOLS.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

By 2003, enrollment in the William S. Hart Union School District is expected to grow 58.7 percent - meaning there could be 20,775 students in the seventh through 12th grades.

The enrollment projections, released this month to the Board of Education, illustrate the need for a fifth high school and a fifth junior high in the district, where enrollment stands at 13,085, according to the report by Michael von Buelow, assistant superintendent of personnel.

To predict how many high school and junior high students will enroll in the Hart district in the next six years, a Hart district consultant analyzed enrollment figures from the 28 ``feeder'' schools across the Santa Clarita Valley.

Corona-based Davis Demographics and Planning also looked at the number of residential developments under construction and in the planning stages on land within the Hart school district.

Von Buelow said district growth had progressed at a pretty consistent rate of about 3 percent annually. ``In the last couple of years, we've seen a phenomenon where we've had 7 (percent) to 8 percent growth,'' he said.

``That's why we're so concerned about getting land for new schools, and for the state (providing) funds for school construction,'' von Buelow added.

The projections state that Arroyo Seco, La Mesa, Placerita and Sierra Vista junior high schools will have a combined enrollment of 7,128 when the 2003-04 school year begins. Their collective student body now numbers 4,348.

As for the high schools, the forecast says Canyon, Hart, Saugus and Valencia will have a combined enrollment of 13,647. As it stands now, those four campuses have 8,737 students.

David Kaitz, an analyst with Davis Demographics, said the firm checked county assessor's records and county zoning maps to determine how many residential units there are - and how many there ultimately could be - within the Hart district boundaries. The number of future homes can be gauged based on the density limits for residential land within the city limits and in unincorporated territory controlled by the county, he said.

The amount of new homes built, developers told Davis Demographics, always depends on the stability of the economy. During the recession of the early '90s, new housing construction lagged.

Developers had long paid either $1.84 or $2.84 per square foot in fees to the school district when building a project within Hart district boundaries. Earlier this year, the school board adopted a new developer fee schedule: $2,100 per dwelling unit for condominiums, townhomes and apartments, and $5,600 per dwelling unit for single-family detached homes, said Bill Maddigan, director of business for the Hart district.

The school district has several potential sites in mind to build new high schools and junior highs: one of each in the Stevenson Ranch area, one of each in the proposed Newhall Ranch development, another The Newhall Land and Farming Company parcel near Valencia High School, where a junior high could be built, and another junior high site in the proposed Tesoro del Valle development in the San Francisquito Canyon area of Saugus.

Land acquisition and construction are lengthy procedures, subject to approval by the office of the state architect. ``Right now there are geological studies being done on the Stevenson Ranch property, and we're having appraisals done on that land now,'' Maddigan said.

The district will obtain both school sites in a swap arrangement. ``We're receiving the land in lieu of developer fees from (the) Stevenson Ranch (developers),'' Maddigan said.

The best-case scenario is that construction could begin in two years on the junior high and high school, Maddigan said. The sites are west of the Golden State Freeway.

Administrators also use enrollment projections to plan how many textbooks to buy and how many employees to hire.

Von Buelow said the district needs about 45 acres to build a high school and about 25 acres to build a junior high, and open land is scarce in older parts of the district. ``We have a real critical need for another junior high school and we have a need for another high school on the east end,'' he said. ``We could use one tomorrow, but I would say three years down the road here, our need would be acute,'' von Buelow added.