Lake Forest will no longer pursue the creation of an elementary school in the new Meadows Residential Community — and may opt for additional housing instead.
Alongside a residential track, the initial Meadows project proposed a new elementary school to be built in the middle of the neighborhood. The preliminary plans said the school would accommodate up to 1,000 students from kindergarten to sixth grade across multiple buildings with outside sports courts, fields and parking lots.
But during its Sept. 5 meeting, the City Council decided against creating a new school in the area after Saddleback Valley Unified School District denied its proposal.
“Because the district denied the proposal, there would be no logical reason to move forward with this school site,” said Councilmember Robert Pequeño.
Without funding support from Saddleback Valley Unified, Lake Forest could make the elementary school a private institution, but of that, Councilmember Benjamin Yu said “it’s a barrier we do not want to face.”
The Meadows school was first approved in January 2020 during a City Council meeting that green-lit the plans for the construction of the entire neighborhood. Although the school was ratified by the city, it still needed approval from Saddleback Valley Unified.
But in March — only a couple of months after the residential community was completed — Saddleback Valley Unified denied the school’s proposal.
District trustees, according to a City Council staff report, were concerned about projected enrollment numbers and said the school would not “accommodate the area properly.” Other nearby schools in the district are well below enrollment capacity, the staff report said, and enrollment is expected to continue to decline, and the cost of building a new school in Lake Forest would be both “prohibitive and unjustifiable.”
The district has an enrollment of 24,356 students, an almost 20% decrease since 2013 when the district’s enrollment was…
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