Minority Influx Strains Schools in East Valley

Coping with a fast-growing, diverse minority population in the East San Fernando Valley has become a bewildering policy problem for Los Angeles school district officials.

On some East Valley campuses, the influx of minority students has caused serious problems of overcrowding. Even at schools where overcrowding is not yet a problem, administrators complain that they have neither the money nor the staff to provide needed language and remedial programs for their growing number of economically and educationally disadvantaged minority students.

At the same time, some other schools whose surrounding neighborhoods also now have more minority students are actually experiencing a decline in student population, resulting in teacher cutbacks and reduced course offerings. The reason for the decline is that there is little need now to bus in minority students from other areas to desegregate East Valley schools under court-approved guidelines.

Need Recognized

District officials say they recognize that East Valley schools need help. But until the schools send up distress signals--eroding test scores, high teacher turnover or predominantly minority student populations--there is little help that the district can offer.

“We don’t want our test scores to go down. We don’t want a lot of staff turnover, but that’s what it appears it takes for the district to pay attention to our problems,” said Patricia Joyce, principal of Reed Junior High, where the Latino enrollment this year climbed to 40% from 18% five years ago.

“In a way, we are penalized for doing a good job,” she continued, adding that East Valley junior high schools such as “Reed, Mulholland, Van Nuys, Madison and Portola are perceived to be able to continue providing top educational programs without any help.”

Roberta Weintraub, the East Valley representative on the school board, said the problem “really comes down to schools in transition.”

“Some of these schools will . . . go on a downhill slide in the sense where they become more poor, with more kids who don’t speak English. . . . When that happens, the district will be able to deal with the situation in a different way.

“But before the school hits the point where it gets the extra money and extra resources, there’s little we can do to solve its problems,” Weintraub added.

Problems Will Increase

The problems in the East Valley will become more acute, principals say, as enrollments continue to climb. Crowded conditions already have forced 13 East Valley elementary schools to adopt a year-round schedule and four others to bus students to other Valley schools.

More than 69,000 youngsters now attend public schools in the East Valley region. District demographers predict an additional 13,300 students will enroll in the region’s 97 schools by 1990. For every 100 Valley students who enter public schools in the next five years, 77 will come from the East Valley.

These students are expected to come from a variety of backgrounds, district officials said. They said the children of white, post-World War II baby boomers who have settled in the affluent areas surrounding Ventura Boulevard will attend schools in Sherman Oaks and Studio City. The children of blacks and Latinos who are new to the middle class will attend schools near homes their parents are buying on the outer edges of Sylmar, Lake View Terrace and the Sunland Tujunga area.

But the largest group of newcomers will be children of immigrants from Asia, Mexico and Central America, who will attend schools in North Hollywood and Van Nuys.

Even though district officials say they know that more schools in the region are going to hit capacity in the next year or two, they add that there is little they can do to create more classroom space in the face of even more pressing problems elsewhere.

“We don’t have the ability, the flexibility or the luxury to get to a situation ahead of time,” said Byron Kimball, director of the facility services division, the department that provides portable classrooms to crowded campuses.

Each East Valley campus has a unique story on how it is faring through the growth and the population changes of the area. But three schools--North Hollywood High, Reed Junior High in North Hollywood and Millikan Junior High in Sherman Oaks--are good examples of the kinds of problems that many schools in the area are grappling with.

North Hollywood High

For the second year in a row, North Hollywood High School finds itself holding classes in the cafeteria.

Last spring, when Principal Wilbert Whitaker realized that his school would once again run out of classroom space, he went to district headquarters and asked for more temporary bungalows. His request was refused.

District building officials agreed that North Hollywood needed more classrooms. But, they said, the available bungalows were designated for West Valley high schools, even though the large numbers of students anticipated there didn’t materialize at the opening of school. District officials said they believe more students will trickle into the West Valley schools through the remainder of the school year.

“There are priorities and we just didn’t rank high enough on the district’s list,” Whitaker said. “We still need additional classrooms, but I don’t know when--or if--we will ever get them.”

With slightly more than 2,700 students on a campus with a capacity of 2,486, North Hollywood is always short of desks and classroom space. Many school officials believe that it will be the first Valley high school to go on a year-round calendar as a way to ease the overcrowding.

“Our parents haven’t fully embraced the concept yet,” Whitaker said. “But if we keep growing at the same rate, we may have to take a serious look at going year-round.”

No New Schools Planned

Although several East Valley schools probably will reach capacity levels soon, the district has no plans to build any new schools in the area.

The reason: The East Valley does not qualify for state school construction funds because its schools do not meet state definitions of crowded schools.

Because district guidelines call for building schools only in those areas where it is certain that the state will either fund the construction or reimburse the district for construction, no new schools are scheduled in the East Valley.

“It is kind of difficult for us to justify concentrating all our efforts in just one project,” Kimball said. He estimated the cost of building an elementary school at $10 million.

Spread Money Around

“So instead of spending $10 million on just one area, the board has been inclined to spread the money around. This means we might spend $2 million on a two-story building for one school and $8 million for portable buildings for other schools. That way you might be able to help five schools instead of just one,” he said.

Kimball said he believes that the North Hollywood complex of schools--which includes the high school, four junior highs and 11 elementary schools in the Van Nuys and North Hollywood areas--will probably be crowded enough in two or three years to qualify for state construction funds.

Until then, the only solutions for solving the crowding problem will be placing more bungalows on school grounds, busing new students to other Valley schools and, finally, going to a year-round schedule, district officials said.

“If a high school has 200 over capacity it can survive,” Kimball said. “There will be more traveling teachers, classes will be held in more non-typical environments, but they can survive better than a school with 400-500 students over capacity.”

Reed Junior High

Mention North Hollywood’s Reed Junior High School to anyone familiar with schools in the Los Angeles district and they probably will describe a pastoral campus, a top-flight staff and a curriculum that features college-level work for students that one national magazine called “academic superstars.”

But that isn’t the whole picture.

Yes, there are 150 students in Reed’s Individualized Honors Program, but they are only a small part of the 1,856-member student body.

In the past four years, the number of Latino students has grown dramatically to about 40% of the school’s population. Many of these students need special English and remedial programs. The addition of these classes, Reed administrators and counselors say, is crowding out many electives from the curriculum.

But even with its large number of Latino students, Reed doesn’t qualify for funds that would pay for instructors who could teach special language and remedial classes or counselors who could focus their attention on educationally disadvantaged students.

Aware of Changes

“I think the board is increasingly aware of the changes in our schools,” Reed Principal Patricia Joyce said. “But every year it is becoming increasingly difficult to cope.”

Leslie Schilo, a counselor at Reed, said she believes the school won’t get help until people start to change preconceived ideas of what life is like in East Valley schools.

“When people hear where you teach in the Valley, they think, ‘Oh, a Valley school. Valley girls in the golden ghetto.’ They don’t know about the growing North Hollywood barrio. They don’t know that we average 35 kids per class. They don’t know that we aren’t given anything extra,” Schilo said.

Millikan Junior High

Last fall, Millikan Junior High School had an enrollment of slightly more than 1,700, one of the district’s premiere junior-high music programs and a special outreach program to welcome students from the central city neighborhood assigned to the Sherman Oaks school under the court-approved integration program.

A year later, a lot has changed at Millikan. Because there are more minority students coming to the schools from the surrounding neighborhoods, there was no need to bus as many students from other areas of the city to achieve a balance between white and minority students.

The result: About 500 fewer students enrolled at Millikan in September. That meant fewer teachers, the elimination of some elective classes and a reduction in the school’s music program.

“Millikan was one of the schools that was hardest hit by the reassignments, but that’s what happens when you have to deal with absolute ratios,” said Peggy Barber, president of the 31st District Parents, Teachers and Students Assn.

Some Students Rerouted

One-third of the 34 East Valley schools that have minority students bused to their campuses had many of their students rerouted to other schools this fall, district spokesman Bill Rivera said.

When parents at Millikan realized what the loss of 500 students would mean to the school, they started canvassing friends with children in private schools to get them to consider sending their children to Millikan.

Principal Gladi Adams also began lobbying district staff to increase the number of students who would attend Millikan through the voluntary integration program. She said she also wants to attract more students by expanding the school’s curriculum for gifted students.

A few private-school students did enroll in Millikan this fall, but it was not enough to reinstate the 12 teachers that Adams had to cut from her teaching staff.

The district is still considering proposals to increase the number of voluntary-integration students who attend Millikan and to expand the school’s curriculum for the gifted.

Meanwhile, Adams said, she is trying to come up with other alternatives that attract more students to Millikan.

“We may get more students in the distant future, but when you look at the small sixth grades at our feeder schools, you realize that the problem will get worse before it gets better,” Adams said.

EAST VALLEY STUDENT CRUNCH

Students currently enrolled: 69,000 Schools Elementary 66 Junior highs 10 Highs 7 Magnets 14 Total 97 The Crunch Projected 1990 enrollment 78,000 Current capacity 73,000 No. of students in 1990 without seats 5,000

District plans for new construction or expansion: None