Manuscript Page 53

in the school district before I became Assistant Superintendent. On the contrary, a new Junior High School was under construction and an elementary school was out for bid when I came in the office. The architect on these two projects was G. Stanley Wilson who had designed the Mission Inn in Riverside and who had a "Continuing Contract" with the school district. This meant that he would do all the architectural work for the district. Mr. Wilson did not have a good reputation as a school architect. His designs were far too ostentatious for schools and after the Board had called for our special election, it became apparent that our chances of success would be far greater if we did not use him. It fell my lot to terminate Mr. Wilson and I did it immediately. The two of us worked out a settlement for work he had already done and he was most understanding of our problem.

I knew that we would have to explain to the voters all the ballot propositions but I was not sure just how to go about it. I discussed the matter with the high school Journalism teacher and he informed me that his classes were going to take over the local paper in celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of Corona High School. This event would take place about two weeks before the bond and tax election. The students were to sell advertising, furnish pictures and provide all the copy for two issues of the local paper. I provided the students with full information about the bond and tax propositions and they did a most enthusiastic job of writing news stories about them. There were plenty of graphs, charts and pictures. Merchants who bought advertising in the paper to congratulate the high school on its fiftieth anniversary appeared to be endorsing the tax and bond issues because those issues were the main theme of the paper. We had full community support for all the ballot measures and expected all of them to receive the required two thirds approval necessary to carry.

Meanwhile, I had been reading the California School Code which is the "Legal Bible" for all public school districts. I found a section of the law that involved "Unification of Districts." The section said that, "When the boundaries of an elementary district and a high school district are coterminous except for a small elementary district and when the school building in that small elementary district is three miles or less from the nearest elementary school in the adjoining district, the County Board of Supervisors may, on the recommendation of the County Superintendent of Schools, declare that a Unified District exists and may combine the districts." In the case of Corona, the elementary and high school districts were coterminous except for Eastvale Elementary which was in the high school district but not in the elementary. An employee and I took a surveyors chain and measured the distance from Norco School to Eastvale School and found it to be forty five feet less than three miles.

I went immediately to the County Superintendent of Schools and told him of the situation. He wanted to get rid of Eastvale because they had given him a lot of trouble in the past and it was difficult to keep teachers there. We both came to the conclusion that Corona would be helped and that Eastvale would receive more