Keep Talega Students in San Clemente High School

Please consider using one of the Attendance Boundary options that the San Clemente Regional Committee recommended, or any of the options that keep San Clemente residents attending San Clemente High School. Every Regional Committee recommendation included Vista del Mar in San Clemente High Schools boundaries. Please listen to the Regional Committees!

As residents of San Clemente, we enjoy the unique sense of community that our town provides. We participate in town events, sports, and activities that serve to bring our community closer together. This lifestyle was one of the most important reasons we decided to move here. It is a common occurrence to see our teachers, principals, coaches, pastors, and city council members out and about. We have always planned on attending San Clemente High School. Attending San Juan Hills High School will divide our city and place us out of the San Clemente Family of Schools that we are so glad to be a part of.

Of major concern is the route we would have to use if we were to attend San Juan Hills High School. The students would need to be bussed approximately 13-18 miles one way, traveling past San Clemente High and using the freeway. Travel time could be as much as an hour one way which would limit our children's participation in after school activities.

This presents a huge safety issue for us and it simply makes no sense. The current practice of charging parents for bussing would require us to pay. We already pay a lot in the form of taxes, which we are glad to do especially considering that we now have schools that we can easily get to. Paying for a bus when our kids can ride their bikes to the local school is not the type of expenditure we expected when we bought a home in this new community. We were expecting to see new ball fields and improvements, such as those at SCHS.

Proximity to San Juan Hills HS is a moot point until La Pata goes through. The Sun Post News stated that if budgets were approved today, La Pata would still not be opened until 2011. The possibility of longer delays and the potentiality of it never connecting to our neighborhood is a real one. Until then, the time and cost of bussing our children to a high school outside our neighborhood when an excellent one is minutes away from our home is absolutely a waste of our time and money.

A critical time for developing lasting friendships is the middle school years. With the current plan, Vista del Mar Middle School would be split into two groups, with our group representing 34\% of the total population. Many of our childrens friends would go on to San Clemente H.S., while our children would have to forge new friendships at the new school. And please consider this; the students at the new school would be totally unfamiliar. They have not played in the same parks, on the same teams, or attended the same middle school functions as our children. San Clemente provides many opportunities for social interaction among middle school students so that when they get to high school friendships have already been established. This opportunity would be lost for our children if they were forced to attend San Juan Hills H.S.

When considering San Clemente High School, you must remember that it is actually two campuses. This changes the density dramatically. The high school can handle more students because there is more space, thanks largely in part to the millions of dollars Talega developers have contributed. Are the thousands of dollars Talega residents individually pay in Mello-Roos to benefit the children living in Dana Point but not our own?