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Planning and Building Agency <br />www.santa-ana.org/cm <br />Item # 21 <br />City of Santa Ana <br />20 Civic Center Plaza, Santa Ana, CA 92701 <br /> Staff Report <br />November 2, 2021 <br />TOPIC: Status of Santa Ana Unified School District Facilities Use for Neighborhood <br />Meetings <br />AGENDA TITLE: <br />Status and Future Option for Neighborhoods to Access School Facilities at Santa Ana <br />Unified School District Schools for Neighborhood Association/Community Meetings <br />RECOMMENDED ACTION <br />Receive and file. <br />DISCUSSION <br />For decades, the Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) has supported and <br />sponsored Santa Ana’s neighborhood associations and groups by allowing them to use <br />their campus facilities for neighborhood and community meetings free of charge. This has <br />been a long-standing practice of SAUSD that benefits the constituents served by the City <br />and the SAUSD. These school venues have served as an important, safe, and nearby <br />location to convene residents to discuss and organize themselves on quality-of-life <br />issues. <br />Although the City of Santa Ana identifies 64 unique neighborhoods in Santa Ana, <br />approximately 20 of those neighborhoods regularly use SAUSD facilities for their <br />meetings. Of the remaining neighborhoods, some use their own space (i.e., a resident’s <br />home), reserve space at a City of Santa Ana-owned facility (such as a park or community <br />center), or do not convene meetings at all because those neighborhoods have not or do <br />not self-organize into an active neighborhood. The Neighborhood Initiatives Division <br />works to provide auxiliary support to Santa Ana’s various neighborhoods, which all <br />operate independently and are independent of the City of Santa Ana and SAUSD. These <br />constituents are not mutually exclusive to either one of these local government <br />organizations. Based on past practice, there has been a strong desire to support the <br />constituents outside the City’s and SAUSD traditional role of serving the community. <br />One of the ways in which the Neighborhood Initiatives Division works to support <br />neighborhood groups is to facilitate facility use reservations between the neighborhood