The Castaic Shuffle

Castaic residents are being shuffled around again as their new high school has been delayed until at least 2010.

Previously Castaic high school students attended Valencia High, and currently they are attending West Ranch High. Several proposals are on the table for handling the Castaic high school students, and only the proposal to send them to Golden Valley High has been completely rejected at this point.

One of the options on the table requires having incoming 9th grade students attend Valencia High for the next two years, and then West Ranch High for the following two years. Once students are assigned to a high school, they would remain there for the full four-year term. Families would be kept together in this plan, but friends would not if there is an older sibling already at one of the schools.

Another option is to redraw the boundaries in the Stevenson Ranch and Southern Oaks area so the students living south of Pico Canyon Road would be sent to Hart High instead of West Ranch High. **CRASH** That's the sound of real estate values falling in this area if these children are re-routed back to Hart High.

They could also just let all the Castaic high schoolers stay at West Ranch High by adding more temporary buildings there, but officials claim that this is too costly and would take too much time to implement.

Each of these choices has its pitfalls... hopefully the Hart School Board will make this as painless as possible for everyone involved.

Castaic parents seem to favor adding temporary buildings to West Ranch High so their children can have some level of continuity until their own high school is built.

However, Stevenson Ranch parents are starting to make noise that they don't want their higher property taxes (including Mello Roos assessments) paying for out of area children attending their high school. Nor do they want their children playing the high school shuffle by being redirected to Hart High while the Castaic students take up space in their local school.

And of course there's the issue of City of Santa Clarita areas vs unincorporated areas. Valencia High is within the City of Santa Clarita, where all areas west of Interstate 5, including Castaic, are not.

So we have a NIMBY campaign already starting here at the same time that the West Side (including Stevenson Ranch, Westridge and Southern Oaks) is contemplating marrying the Castaic area in the formation of a new city. Seems to be a rocky marriage already, huh?