Editor:

I don’t know if the Preuss School Classic Cars for Classic Kids fundraiser (Nov. 6, 2003) was successful, but I know that any transportation plan for the school, regardless of the size of the budget, will fail. Enrollment at Samuel Gompers Secondary School will expand to over 2,000 students by sometime in 2005; nearby Lincoln High School has temporarily closed. Located just south of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Freeway off 47th Street, buses may operate efficiently to bring Gompers’ students to the local campus ‹ and to take them home.

But a school with 700 students in La Jolla can’t provide efficient transportation for all the students who live south of Interstate 8. Only a small percentage of the current Preuss students actually ride the two big buses from the ten elementary schools nearest their homes anyway. Those elementary schools all feed into Gompers. The closest line on the San Diego public bus leads directly to San Diego State University along 47th Street. Gompers’ teachers are among the best in the world. Unless the Preuss principal could actually hire Mrs. Richardson to teach music, a gap will always exist. Meanwhile, the founding dean of UCSD’s new School of Management plans to raise $115 million and recruit 100 world-class faculty by 2010. So far, donations total about $23 million.

How will UCSD expand? Will the La Jolla Country Day School campus be sold to the Regents? ‹ That’s what happened to the Anna Head School two blocks from UC Berkeley (which relocated to Oakland in 1964). Gompers has no baseball diamond, no basketball gymnasium, no hockey ring, and no football stadium.

The Gompers students could be bussed to and fro once a week, if the UCSD swimming pool and some of the nautilus equipment were to be reserved for their exclusive use.

– Richard Thompson

UCSD alumnus