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Pleas for Noise Relief Still Unanswered : State Deaf to First School by Freeway

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Times Staff Writer

When Solano Avenue Elementary School was built it 1925, there was no idea that someday, slicing through the green hills just 15 feet away, would be the Los Angeles area’s first freeway, the Pasadena.

Students and teachers at Solano therefore had the dubious honor of also being a first: first in the Los Angeles school district to try to deal with the problems of freeway noise.

But, because of a series of delays, the school will be among the last to get relief under an 11-year-old state-financed program to air-condition schools next to freeways so that they can shut their windows to the steady rumble of cars and trucks.

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“There are no excuses why it has taken so long,” said Byron Kimball, building and maintenance director for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Teachers at Solano, situated between Elysian Park and Dodger Stadium, say that, on hot days, they must open windows for the afternoon breeze, which brings with it traffic noise so loud that students sitting in the back of classrooms can’t hear them.

This year, about $200,000 from the California Department of Transportation has been promised to air-condition five of the school’s nine classrooms. Preliminary plans have been drawn up by the school district, and Caltrans officials say the work will likely be completed by next fall.

But school officials say noise levels in the remaining classrooms, all on the first floor, are only slightly less.

‘You Can’t Win’

“At times we just have to close the windows because the noise distracts second-graders, who already have a short attention span,” said Solano Avenue teacher Wanda Jung, who has a first-floor classroom.

“You can’t win, it’s either noise or the heat,” she said.

During the last 10 years, the school has been given a high priority by the state for air conditioning. But other needy schools have come first, and, in the meantime, funds dwindled.

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A Los Angeles district school board subcommittee met last week and decided it could not afford to provide air conditioning for all of the classrooms at the 230-student elementary school. An additional $111,700 in district funds needed to complete the four classrooms on the first floor must wait until all of the district’s year-round schools have been air-conditioned, agreed Building Committee board members Larry Gonzalez, Jackie Goldberg and Roberta Weintraub.

Goldberg, whose district includes the Solano Avenue school, said the din at the school “was absolutely deafening.” But Goldberg said she would stick with the board policy of air-conditioning year-round schools first.

The Solano Avenue school has long been a community center and source of identity in the small, isolated neighborhood of older, frame houses, said Alicia Brown, a member of the school’s Parent Advisory Council and chairman of the Solano Community Improvement Organization. The working-class area that rises from a small valley to nearby hillsides has managed to survive the intrusion of Los Angeles’s first freeway, opened in 1939, as well as the traffic and congestion from Dodger Stadium.

But the delays in sound-proofing Solano have been a source of frustration for area residents.

“Whatever they say, we just don’t believe them anymore,” Brown said. “We have gotten reassurances, but we are tired of words.”

In 1974, a year after the state Legislature initiated the noise-reduction program for schools effected by freeways, the Solano Avenue school was placed on a waiting list for funding. When Caltrans measured noise levels in individual classrooms in 1975, the entire school qualified for the air conditioning funds, said Bob Wallin, a Caltrans division engineer.

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But, over the next five years, other schools with worse noise problems received funding ahead of the Solano Avenue school, Wallin said.

When former Solano Avenue principal Jim Messrah joined the school in 1976, he was told that it was still on a priority list for the state money.

“But funds dried up and the list dried up,” Messrah said. “It was frustrating because all these years we have been sitting next to a freeway. We really felt that we had been waiting long enough.”

Caltrans engineers returned to Solano Avenue school in 1980 to measure the noise inside classrooms. Freeway noise in second-story classrooms exceeded 55 decibels, whereas noise on the first floor was 52 to 55 decibels; a level between 55 and 58 decibels is equivalent to the noise generated by an auto repair shop, according to a sound engineers manual.

At the time the school noise was measured in 1980, levels over 50 decibels qualified schools for the state funds.

But a couple of months later, the agency notified the district that, because of a lack of money, the project would have to be indefinitely postponed, Wallin said.

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In 1983, school parents contacted state Assemblyman Richard Alatorre (D-Los Angeles), whose district includes parts of Pasadena and East Los Angeles as well as the Elysian Park area. Inquiries from Alatorre’s office prompted the return of the Solano Avenue school to the Caltrans funding list, Wallin said.

That year, however, the Legislature raised noise standards to 55 decibels or above. When Caltrans returned in January, 1984, to measure noise inside of classrooms, only the rooms on the second floor qualified for state money.

It took another year before the district completed a preliminary proposal on the Solano Avenue school, again delaying the project, Wallin said.

School board Building Committee members asked Caltrans last week to again measure noise on the school’s first floor to determine whether or not classrooms there qualify for funds under the new guidelines. The noise measurements will be taken next Wednesday, Wallin said.

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