Opinion: Home sweet school

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Because the news out of South L.A. often is of crime and poverty, it’s easy for those who don’t live there to forget that these are neighborhoods, and often beloved neighborhoods. Nothing brings that home faster or more painfully than seeing residents pleading not to have a new school built at a certain location because, through eminent domain, it would displace so many of them. That was the scene at part of Tuesday’s school board meeting for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The message, delivered by a parade of older African American residents with strong ties to the neighborhood, was unwavering: We love schools, we support schools, but many of these people are elderly, we are all friends, we are connected, please don’t disrupt our lives. The story of one 72-year-old woman, especially, made listeners wince with sympathy. She had been a longtime teacher in LAUSD and had lived in her home for 30 years. Her community was there. Her friends were there. Everyone she interacted with on a day-to-day basis was there.

The change confronting this community was made all the more obvious by the sole speaker in favor of the school — a young Latino woman, holding a preschooler and speaking through an interpreter. The school was necessary, she said. Nearby elementaries couldn’t follow normal two-semester schedules because of overcrowding.

There wasn’t much the board could do for the first group. It already had delayed its decision to see if there were options. There were no options; no one had been able to locate another suitable piece of land in the neighborhood. If overcrowding weren’t reason enough, the district is under a consent decree to restore normal academic calendars to all its schools. The school would be built.

Neighborhoods of older, settled people give way to the future. But then there’s that 72-year-old woman. She was probably certain that at this point in her life, after having given years of service to young people in the city, she was settled down to quiet golden years in her neighborhood, with everyone familiar. Chances are it won’t be that way, and it’s not easy to chase away imagined images of her in a disorienting new setting, searching for familiar faces.