A small private school in a commercial center on Encinitas Boulevard now has the ability to expand its student population by 40 percent.
Pacific Academy Encinitas, which has sister campuses in Costa Mesa and Irvine, won permit approval from the Encinitas Planning Commission Thursday night allowing it to add 50 more students to its 75-student population.
And, that’s plenty big, Principal Mario Gonzalez told the commissioners.
“We don’t want to expand any further than that, ever,” he said.
The non-denominational, college preparatory school is known for its small class sizes and individualized student instruction, which grants young people the flexibility to pursue competitive sports at a national level or upgrade academic skills that might have faltered at other educational facilities, testimonials on the academy’s web site indicate.
Founded in 1997, Pacific Academy serves kindergarten through 12th-grade students, locally and internationally. Tuition ranges from $17,5000 for kindergarten-through-fifth-grade students to $37,800 for international, seventh-through-12th-grade students, the web site states.
Located at 679 Encinitas Blvd., the commercial center that the school sits in is just east of the Westlake Street intersection. Fellow center occupants include The Soul of Yoga and Chin’s Szechwan restaurant.
To increase the student body, school officials are proposing to expand into two adjacent, vacant office spaces within the center, a city staff report produced for Thursday’s meeting states. The expansion will add 3,012 square feet to the school, while the teaching staff will increase from 17 to 19.
The commission’s approval of a major use permit modification and a coastal development permit are final, unless appealed. The permit requests do not require City Council approval, the city staff report notes.
In 2016, Pacific Academy won city approval for a plan to increase its student population from 45 to 75. At that time, school officials changed the student drop-off and pickup systems, creating a special lane to counter any potential traffic troubles, the staff report states.
Noting that Encinitas Boulevard’s intersection with Westlake Street already has significant traffic congestion and more housing development is planned in the area, Planning Commissioner Robert Prendergast asked Thursday night whether the school would be required to rework its student drop-off/pickup system, which uses Westlake Street for part of the route.
“I find it hard to believe that intersection can handle any more (traffic),” he said.
City planning department employees and the school principal said the school’s increased enrollment is likely to have little or no effect on traffic, given that the school’s drop-off and pickup times are staggered — the younger students start their school day slightly earlier than the older kids.
“I feel we are barely … a speck in the traffic,” Gonzalez, the principal, told commissioners.
