CARLSBAD - A school that teaches people how to adjust golf clubs to fit someone's swing style, how to manage a golf course and how to organize a big-stakes golf tournament is planning to relocate to Carlsbad.

San Diego Golf Academy, which currently occupies a series of storefronts in a Vista shopping center, wants to set up its school in an office building on Camino Vida Roble near Palomar Airport Road.

The proposal will go before the City Council at its 6 p.m. meeting today at City Hall, 1200 Carlsbd Village Drive. It needs the council's approval because the zoning of airport region doesn't allow schools unless they have special permission.

Schools must obtain conditional use permits to operate in Carlsbad's business park region for two main reasons, assistant planner Daniel Halverson said. First, Carlsbad tries to limit children in the area because of airplane safety concerns. Second, the region's zoning aims to encourage the development of private industry, not educational institutions, he said.

However, the city's Planning Department is recommending that the council approve the academy's proposal because the academy's students are adults and the graduates often take jobs with some of the big golf manufacturing companies, Halverson said.

That's of interest to Carlsbad officials because the city is considered something of a golf industry capital. It is home to TaylorMade and Callaway, among other companies.

School Director Richard Iorio said his campus has 152 students this month, with 19 about to graduate in two weeks. A hundred more students are expected to enroll this fall, he added.

As he gave a tour of the campus Friday, Iorio had to move from storefront to storefront throughout the shopping center. The school office is in one spot, while the classrooms and club repair area are scattered in other locations.

"As the campus has grown, we've had to pick up space as it was available," he said, adding that its operators want the Carlsbad location to have the feel of a "university environment" rather than the part-of-a-shopping center look.

In the new 20,000-square-foot location, the school would have double the space it does now, he said. It could have five classrooms instead of the current four, and two computer labs instead of one. There also would be space for a library and an indoor, high-tech lab with three-dimensional motion analysis and golf game simulators, he said.

If the council approves the permit, the school would relocate in November, he said. It has been in Vista since the mid-1990s, first near the city's Wal-Mart store along Highway 78 and later in its current location on Shadowridge Drive.

Halverson said that so far the city has not heard from anyone who opposes the academy's plans. Several people who own businesses near the new location did call the city about the project, but they simply wanted to know what kind of school was proposed, he added. The city's Planning Commission approved the permit request unanimously July 18.

The company that runs the San Diego Golf Academy operates four other campuses - Honolulu, Myrtle Beach and Orlando, Fla., and Phoenix, Ariz. Its local students book nearly 20,000 rounds of golf a year on local courses and purchase more than 40,000 buckets of balls at practice facilities, company paperwork indicates.

School courses include everything from the rules of golf and the history of golf to tournament administration and clubhouse food service management. There's even a class in calligraphy so students can make tournament scoreboards look fancy.

Tuition, books and lab fees for the 16-month program cost a total of $21,514, school paperwork indicates.

The school's website is http://www.sdga.edu.

- Contact staff writer Barbara Henry at (760) 901-4072 or bhenry@nctimes.com.