9 Schools in West Valley May Reopen Under Plan

Nine closed campuses in the West San Fernando Valley area would be reopened, busing would continue to grow and several Valley high schools could be among the first to go on a year-round schedule under a proposal to ease school crowding announced Monday by Los Angeles School Supt. Harry Handler.

The nine schools, which were among 22 closed in the West Valley from 1982 to 1984 as enrollment from surrounding areas dropped, are boarded up and available for use next year. They could provide classrooms for about 3,800 students, with a projected 2,100 youths coming from surrounding areas and 1,700 to be transferred from schools in South-Central Los Angeles and the East Valley, school officials said.

The schools under consideration for reopening are one junior high school, Hughes in Woodland Hills, and eight elementary schools: Highlander Road and Enadia Way in Canoga Park; Collier Street and Collins Street in Woodland Hills; Garden Grove in Reseda; Prairie Street in Northridge; Parthenia Street in Sepulveda and the Bellagio Road in Bel-Air, which is grouped with West Valley schools.

Handler also recommended loosening the district’s racial integration formula, a move that would ease pressure to bus minority students from the East Valley to schools in predominantly Anglo neighborhoods of the West Valley, according to Bill Rivera, assistant to the superintendent.

Plan Will Be Scrutinized

Spokesmen for the Los Angeles Unified School District cautioned that the Board of Education will scrutinize and probably revise Handler’s plan before approving it. They also said that, if the board approves portions of the crowding-relief program, which is designed to meet a projected increase of 70,000 students in the district by 1990, other parts of Handler’s proposal may not be necessary.

School district policy now requires that no school receiving students in the voluntary racial integration program may have an enrollment of more than 60% white or minority students, or less than 40% white or minority students. Handler wants schools with up to 70% Anglo or minority student bodies to be regarded as integrated.

Generally, schools in the East Valley are pressing the limits of the current “60/40” rule, while many West Valley schools are still able to accommodate more minority students without violating the integration ratio.

Thus, many East Valley students now are sent to West Valley schools in order to comply with the district’s integration plan, even though there are empty classrooms in the East Valley that could be used to alleviate crowding.

‘Should Never Have Closed’

Both school board members representing the Valley said on Monday that the district’s past closure of the schools was short-sighted and viewed reopening them as a prudent way to increase classroom space quickly and cheaply.

“Many of them never should have been closed in the first place. Much of the explosion in enrollment could be foreseen,” said West Valley school board member David Armor.

But Armor and East Valley school board representative Roberta Weintraub rejected Handler’s proposal to change integration rules, saying that the district should try to keep the current guidelines, despite the growing number of minority students.

A district survey estimated last year that 20% of the school system’s students are Anglo.

“It’s taken a long time to integrate the schools,” Weintraub said, expressing the fear that altering the integration policy could prompt legal challenges that would involve the district in court actions for years.

‘Diminish Whole Point’

“You diminish the whole point of a neighborhood-based school system,” Armor added.

But the president of the San Fernando Valley’s parent-teacher organization, Peggy Barber, struck a common chord with the superintendent, saying that the current policy is “trying to maintain something that doesn’t exist.”

“Central and East Valley have empty classrooms because of 60/40. Students are commuting past empty classrooms, and it doesn’t make sense,” Barber argued.

Handler also proposed putting Los Angeles schools on a year-round schedule--intended to increase the capacity of existing schools by 25% to 33%.

Ten high schools added this year to the district’s busing program to alleviate crowding may be the first to go on a year-round system, Rivera said. Seven of those high schools are in the Valley--Taft and El Camino Real in Woodland Hills, Birmingham in Van Nuys, Canoga Park, Chatsworth, Granada Hills and Reseda.

Weintraub called the concept of year-round schools “excellent,” but she and Armor said that they wanted to solicit public comment on the issue.

Barber of the parent-teacher group, however, worried that a year-round system might trigger severe scheduling problems, as students seek schedules that accommodate their extracurricular activities.

“What happens to kids that belong to those kinds of programs but aren’t on the same track?” she asked, such as football players, who would not want to be on vacation in the fall.

Weintraub stressed the need for air-conditioning year-round schools to allow students to attend class in the scorching Valley summers. “It would be very hard to do it without the air conditioning,” she said.

Handler estimated the cost of installing air conditioning in all schools in the district at $315 million. But Weintraub and Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, wondered whether the district could afford such an undertaking.

Instead, Johnson contended, it might be several years before the district could afford to air-condition Valley schools. “On a hot day in the Valley, it will be impossible” for students to learn, he said, and school would become “just an endurance contest.”