By Charly SHELTON

The Sagebrush territory transfer from Glendale Unified School District to the La Cañada Unified School District has been approved preliminarily, and the kinks are being ironed out to make sure the transition will be what’s best for all parties involved, as well as resolving the legal requirements to make it happen. As the situation currently stands, nothing is happening in the immediate future; everything is at a standstill until January’s regularly scheduled meeting of the board governing decisions like this, the Los Angeles County Committee On School District Organization (LACCSDO). Before the changes are made, CV Weekly takes a look back at the history of the proposed transfer.

Since 2013, the Sagebrush territory transfer issue has been in the news but the debate actually stretches back to the 1960s when the transfer was first proposed. Since then, four petitions have been submitted and two legislative proposals have been submitted to try and make the area transfer a reality, but none has been successful until now.

The area in question is the far west side of La Cañada Flintridge, west of Rosebank Drive to Pickens Canyon. This is known as the Sagebrush area because “years ago, it was a patch of sagebrush, which parents on both sides did not want their children to walk through,” said Jeannie Roeper, former LCUSD school board member and former petitioner, at one of the public forums held to discuss the issue.

Sagebrush shares the La Cañada zip code and town name, but falls within the school district boundaries of Glendale. As of August 2016, when the last petition filing took place, there were about 356 students living in the Sagebrush area who attended GUSD schools. The hope of UniteLCF, the pro-transfer movement, is to have Sagebrush transferred into LCUSD officially so the families of that area can send their children to La Cañada schools.

A coalition of LCF residents formed UniteLCF in 2013 to begin working on a territory transfer from GUSD to La Cañada Unified School District. This involved several negotiations between the two districts that included the rate at which students would be transferred if the transfer were approved and compensation to Glendale Unified for loss of students and parcel tax. A vote with GUSD had been scheduled in 2014; however, it was postponed as more discussion was needed to fine-tune the issues presented by the transfer.

In 2016, UniteLCF backed a petition and gathered 724 verified signatures to transfer the Sagebrush territory to LCUSD, and submitted the petition to The Los Angeles County Office of Education’s specialty committee formed to handle these types of cases – The Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization, an 11-member committee whose purview is specifically to decide which tracts of homes are assigned to which school district. The petition was accepted and, in 2017, the transfer was approved despite the vote in favor of the transfer being against the Committee’s staff recommendation.

There are still some issues to work out, among them LCUSD having to find room to accommodate the 350-plus students who will transition into its schools from GUSD. The approval of the transfer in 2017 was preliminary, and the next step would be to complete an Environmental Impact Report as required under the California Environmental Quality Act.

According to GUSD enrollment data in its Sagebrush FAQ packet, from 2012 to 2017, 147 Sagebrush students have been released by GUSD to attend LCUSD in an effort to “mitigate the upheaval of a forced transfer for the families in the Sagebrush territory who choose to continue attending GUSD schools.” This is in addition to the 356 who still attend GUSD.

In 2017 alone, LCUSD enrollment was 4,137. Permitted students, those living outside of La Cañada, comprise just over 17% (or 733) of that enrollment figure, said Wendy Sinnette, LCUSD superintendent, at a LCUSD meeting in 2017. Of those permits, 70% (513) are permitted through the Allen Bill, 14% (106) are students living within the Sagebrush district, 16% (114) are children of LCUSD employees.

As of 2018, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA)-required Environmental Impact Report (EIR) Initial Study (IS) was completed and was published with a Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND). According to the findings of the IS, “although the proposed project could have a significant effect on the environment, there will not be a significant effect in this case because revisions in the project have been made by or agreed to by the project proponent.” (The report can be read in full on our website: https://www.crescentavalleyweekly.com/news/01/08/2019/file-initial-study-environmental-impact-report-sagebrush-territory-transfer/.)

Until the IS is taken into account by the LACCSDO at its January meeting and a final vote is tallied, the project hangs in limbo. Each side is getting its respective ducks into respective rows, and preparing for what may come.

Next week, we’ll take a look at the situation as it stands now in an interview with Glendale Unified School District Superintendent Winfred Roberson Jr.

  Charly Shelton