Board Votes to Dispose of 6 Closed School Sites

After more than a year of heated discussion, the Los Angeles school board voted Monday to sell, lease or develop six closed schools in the San Fernando Valley.

The board voted to sell Collier Street School in Woodland Hills and to offer for lease three West Valley elementary schools closed last year: Collins Street School in Woodland Hills, Garden Grove Avenue School in Reseda and Enadia Way School in Canoga Park.

The board decided to offer the Parthenia Street School site in Sepulveda for joint development with another public agency or a private developer.

The board placed another campus on the lease list, the Prairie Street School in Northridge, but left open the possibility that it might be removed from the list if a pending report on school crowding shows a need to reopen it within five years. Parents in the area have campaigned for several years to keep the school open.

Declining Enrollments

The schools are among 19 West Valley campuses the board has closed in the last three years in response to declining suburban enrollments.

The decisions to lease or develop the closed campuses were unanimous. Only one board member, East Valley representative Roberta Weintraub, opposed the selling of Collier.

Weintraub has been one of the board’s strongest opponents of selling school property, arguing that the school district may need to reopen schools if enrollment increases substantially.

Collier is only the second campus the district has offered for sale. The first was Oakdale Avenue School in Canoga Park, which was sold last month to an Armenian cultural group for $2.6 million.

The board requested a study to determine if residential subdivision of the Collier property would enhance its value.

Although West Valley board member David Armor supported the leasing of Prairie, he predicted that a report from the superintendent, due in September, will indicate a need to reopen the campus within three years.

“I fully expect the superintendent to tell us he’s going to need Prairie before the five-year period these leases go for,” he said.

The West Valley representative said his own projections, based on birthrates, indicate that the three elementary schools now serving the Prairie area--Topeka Drive, Dearborn Street and Calahan Street--will exceed their enrollment capacities by 1987. “We’ll need it in two to three years,” he said of Prairie, which is on the campus of California State University, Northridge.

County Interested in Leasing

Under state law, the school district must offer a closed campus for lease or sale to public agencies first. If no public agency wishes to buy or lease the property, the district may then offer it to private interests.

The only public agency that has expressed interest in leasing one of the campuses is the county Department of Children’s Services, which operates MacLaren Children’s Center, the county’s only emergency housing facility for abused and neglected children. Earlier this year, county officials indicated some interest in using a closed campus to relieve crowding at MacLaren, although no specific site was mentioned.

Four closed campuses are leased by private schools and several others are being used by the district.

The board had never before offered a school site for joint development with a government agency or private developer. Anticipating an enrollment increase, however, the board specified that any development include a school on the site.