4 High Schools May Rent Space From Colleges

About 200 students at Grant High School in Van Nuys may start attending high school classes on the campus of neighboring Valley College this month, officials of the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Los Angeles Community College District said Wednesday.

The pilot program, being negotiated by the two districts, would link four crowded Los Angeles district high schools with four under-used Los Angeles Community College campuses. It is part of a comprehensive plan approved in principle by the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education to cope with crowded campuses. The district expects an additional 82,000 students to enroll by 1990.

Although enrollment in the Los Angeles school district has increased the past few years, enrollment in the community college district has declined. In 1982, the nine-campus community college system had 136,000 students. Last fall, 93,026 students registered for classes.

Leasing Classrooms

Leasing classroom space from the community college district is part of the school district’s plan to provide for its growing enrollment. Last week, the school board approved the most controversial part of that plan when it gave the go-ahead to increase the number of schools that operate on a year-round schedule.

Currently, 93 Los Angeles district schools hold classes on a 12-month schedule. In 1987, 19 schools will be added to the program.

The other high schools involved in the leasing proposal are Jefferson, South Gate and Belmont. Students from Jefferson and South Gate would attend classes at East Los Angeles College. Belmont students would be rerouted to Los Angeles City College; Grant students would spend part of the day on the Valley College campus.

“This program has not been approved by the school board and we are still involved in exploratory meetings with the community college district,” said Paul Possemato, director of the school district’s policy-implementation division.

Initial Trouble-Shooting

If the pilot program is approved by the districts, Possemato said, a priority for administrators will be to work out any problems that might arise, such as transportation, student conduct, food service and the time it takes for students to travel between classrooms.

“We would want to make sure we have answers to how the system works before we start a full-scale effort,” Possemato said.

Linking Grant and Valley may be easy because the two Van Nuys schools are neighbors. Grant students could walk to the Valley campus for morning classes and return to the high school for lunch and afternoon classes. Another group of students would then head to the Valley campus for afternoon classes.

A recent poll of the Grant faculty revealed that the teachers favored the experiment and would not mind spending part of the day on the college campus. However, the poll found that few Grant teachers wanted to spend the entire day away from the high school.

Likely Choices

According to a school district administrator close to the negotiations, Grant classes most likely to be held at Valley are math, English, social studies and health. The administrator said students being considered for the pilot program are “primarily seniors who don’t have a lot of discipline problems.”

Grant has a capacity of 3,137 students. According to school district records, the school had 3,134 students in the fall.

A spokesman for Valley College said Grant officials would like to use seven or eight classrooms. The rooms to be used by the high school students probably would be scattered throughout the college campus, the Valley spokesman said, but specific plans have not been developed.

Officials said the cost of leasing classrooms at the college has not been determined by the school district or the community colleges.