Seventh and eighth graders at Home Gardens Academy will no longer walk to their neighborhood campus starting in the 2027-28 school year. The Corona-Norco Unified School District board voted 4-1 to relocate those students to Auburndale Intermediate School, more than five miles away, as part of a districtwide effort to address shrinking enrollment.
A 4-1 Vote With One Dissenter
Trustee Christopher Raahauge cast the lone vote against the move, according to The Press-Enterprise. Home Gardens Academy, a K-8 school at 13550 Tolton Ave. in an unincorporated stretch of Riverside County between Riverside and Corona, added seventh and eighth graders more than a decade ago; now those grades are being phased out. Students in the school's dual language immersion program will move to Auburndale Intermediate before eventually feeding into Corona High School, while students outside that program will attend Centennial High School in Corona, per the same account.
Home Gardens sits south of the 91 Freeway, while Auburndale Intermediate is located north of the freeway and west of the 15 Freeway in Corona — a driving distance of a little over five miles. Community members reported the commute could take at least 30 minutes with traffic, and the Press-Enterprise notes most Home Gardens students currently walk to school.
Enrollment Decline Drives the Shift
The move is rooted in a sustained enrollment slide across the district. Corona-Norco Unified staff reported in September that intermediate school enrollment was down about 1,058 students, according to Citizen Portal. Home Gardens Academy serves students in grades TK-8.
District officials presented enrollment stabilization options at a September 22 school board study session, the Press-Enterprise reported. Beyond the Home Gardens move, the board also changed school attendance boundaries, shifted feeder paths for several campuses, expanded the International Baccalaureate program at Raney and Corona Fundamental intermediate schools, and ended a program pathway at Lincoln Fundamental Elementary. Franklin Elementary students will move to Raney Intermediate beginning next school year, and El Cerrito Middle School sixth graders can transfer to Raney only if they live inside the feeder boundary.
A Broken Bond Promise, Parents Say
Not everyone in Home Gardens is upset about the change. Stacy Nicola said many Home Gardens parents supported the plan, the Press-Enterprise reported, but others see it differently. Jacqueline Aguilar opposed the move, arguing it would harm what she described as Home Gardens' close-knit, mostly Latino community — many families, she said, lack reliable transportation or may need to change work schedules to manage the new commute.
Parent Analiese Alfonsi said Home Gardens Academy had been promised a two-story building for seventh and eighth graders that was never built, and argued Corona High School would have been the more logical destination for Home Gardens students. The unfulfilled promise echoes the scope of Measure GG, the $396 million local school facilities bond Corona-Norco voters passed in November 2014, which designated 63% of total bond revenue for projects in Corona and surrounding unincorporated areas like Home Gardens, according to a district oversight report. Home Gardens is an unincorporated census-designated community where 73.7% of residents identified as Hispanic or Latino in 2010, according to data cited by Kiddle.
Transportation and Capacity Concerns Linger
Board members were concerned about providing enough transportation to and from school, as well as buses for Home Gardens' after-school programs, the Press-Enterprise reported. Cesar Chavez Academy, another CNUSD K-8 campus in Corona that enrolled 1,017 students in 2025-26, saw parents mobilize alongside Home Gardens families in September to defend neighborhood seventh- and eighth-grade options, according to Citizen Portal. District spokesperson Nicholas Hamre said in an email that Cesar Chavez Academy was not included in Tuesday's proposal, though board members ultimately exempted the campus from immediate middle-school grade relocation. Doug Wong, a parent of three students at Cesar Chavez Academy, said he worries about what the decision could mean for his own children or future students there.
The Home Gardens realignment fits into a broader pattern across the roughly 48,485-student district, the largest in Riverside County and eighth largest in California. The change comes amid other school and attendance changes across the district. Corona-Norco Unified says its enrollment decline follows state and national trends at non-charter public schools — a pattern borne out statewide, where California public school enrollment dropped by nearly 75,000 students in 2025-26 to 5,731,260, according to the California Department of Education. Raahauge, who represents Trustee Area 2 and was first elected to the board in December 2022, faced a re-election challenge on the November ballot, according to Ballotpedia.
