Surplus Windfall : Class Acts: New Uses for Old Schools

Polytechnic High School loomed over the city’s funky Haight-Ashbury district for years, an abandoned hulk of a building overrun by young transients with Mohawk haircuts who frightened nearby homeowners to no end.

After being confronted by angry residents, city officials promised to evict the squatters and turn the 70-year-old schoolhouse into subsidized housing for the poor and elderly.

In Seattle, school officials have refitted a dusty, empty old elementary school as smart shops and apartments. And in West Hartford, Conn., an empty junior high school has been recycled into the corporate headquarters for one of the nation’s biggest toy makers.

Officials’ Dilemma

Indeed, as shifting demographics and declining enrollments have confronted public school districts from Boston to Berkeley, educators have been fretting over what to do with the resulting classroom surplus--ideally before vandals leave their marks.

Many are simply selling or leasing their empty but often attractively situated schoolhouses as prime real estate, thus turning an expensive bother into what one school official described as a “steady, endless income stream.”

“It’s a good program,” said John J. Richmond, real estate manager for the Seattle School District, which has been earning more than $1 million a year by leasing or selling more than 70 of its schools. “The properties are being returned to active use . . . while also earning full value for the schools.”

A remarkable part of the trend is the uses found for old schools: A police station in Tulsa, a robotics factory in Iowa, a dance academy in Baldwin, Pa.--even a synagogue in Denver and a Chinese Bible school in Burlingame, Calif.

Assorted Other Uses

Others have been used for everything from condominiums and nursing homes to community centers and artists’ studios.

A 71-year-old elementary school in Thomasville, Ga., is being restored as a municipal cultural center with the help of actress Joanne Woodward, a former student there and the daughter of a former principal.

“There are a lot of examples of really good, constructive thinking,” said Paul Abramson of Educational Facilities Laboratory, a Larchmont, N.Y., company that advises educators on the recycling of schools.

Some districts, such as Ogden, Utah, have even leased their excess schools to competing private and parochial schools, while districts in Minneapolis and other areas specifically forbid such transactions.

The creative reuse of surplus schools often helps ease what Denver schools spokesman Robert Gould described as the “wailing and gnashing of teeth” that accompanies most school closures.

“When the district starting closing schools . . . many citizens feared an era in which neglected and vacant school buildings would dot the city’s landscape. This has not happened,” the Seattle School District reported recently.

“Instead, needed development and affordable rental spaces have become available . . . (and surplus schools) have been positive contributions to the overall quality of life in Seattle’s neighborhoods.”

They also have been positive contributions to school districts’ budgets. In San Francisco, for example, the district expects to earn $2 million this year from surplus property, said property manager Larry Jacobson.

A Financial Benefit

“We’ve had real good luck in finding people to lease them, and the income has been very significant,” said Ken Bays, associate superintendent of Tulsa Public Schools. “We have actually managed to do pretty well (financially) on some of these schools.”

Recycling surplus schools also can save districts the estimated $50,000 to $100,000 annual cost of mothballing each old school.

Leases are preferred by many districts because they provide a steady income and can avoid laws requiring that surplus property be offered first to local cities and other public agencies, usually at below-market rates.

Surplus schools began appearing around the country in large numbers in the late 1970s, when the youngest members of the post-World War II baby boom were finishing their educations. U.S. Department of Education statistics show that enrollment in the nation’s public schools fell 11.6% between 1974 and 1984.

“The handwriting really was on the wall in the mid- to late-1970s: We had to do something with our (excess) buildings,” said Jacobson, whose own office was carved out of the old San Francisco High School of Commerce.

Cutbacks in San Francisco

San Francisco lost about one-quarter of its enrollment during that period, Jacobson said, although the drop for the entire state was a more modest 6.8%. Some states, such as Utah, actually showed an increase between 1974 and 1984, the latest period for which complete statistics are available.

But in many more states, the declines were sharper. Minnesota lost 23.1% of its total public school enrollment between 1974 and 1984; Missouri lost 25.8%; Pennsylvania was down 28.1%; Maryland dropped 31.3%.

Such drops translate into school closures. In Massachusetts, public school enrollment dropped 29% between 1974 and 1984--and 265 schools were closed in 1981 alone. “We really had our backs to the wall,” said Terry Zoulas, a spokesman for the Boston district, which is selling the schools for housing.

Elementary schools by far account for most of the old schools being closed, due to the removal of young families to more affordable housing.

“Children aren’t in the same places they were 10 or 20 years ago,” said Abramson. “Parents of the baby boom period are staying in their houses, which their children couldn’t afford now anyway. So the new schools are being built further out, in the suburbs, where the new families are.”

Reasons for Concern

Concerns over the declining quality of public education and the prospect of busing for desegregation hastened the effects of this demographics juggernaut for many suburban districts in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

But while falling enrollments and empty schools are seen in “middle-aged” suburbs, school districts in newer suburbs often are overcrowded, as are some inner-city districts with large immigrant populations.

Santa Ana Unified School District, for example, serves a growing community of Southeast Asian immigrants and has not had any surplus schools for several years. “If only we did!” said a district spokeswoman. “We are looking for new properties (to buy) all the time.”

California’s largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, currently leases four surplus schools, all of them to private-school operators, and last month it closed escrow on the sale of a Canoga Park elementary school.

Plans to lease or sell more school property in the seasoned suburbs of the San Fernando Valley--home of 19 of the district’s 22 surplus schools--were nixed in February by projections of large districtwide enrollment increases.

A Question of Cost

The district plans to bring students from crowded central city schools to the reopened Valley sites. It could not afford new schools in the central city even if the surplus schools were sold, said real estate chief Bob Niccum.

“It doesn’t pencil out,” he said. “That (money from the sale of one old school) doesn’t even begin to pay for the land--not even one-half of the land--of a new school. And that is before you even begin to put two sticks on top of each other to actually build the buildings.”

The Orange Unified School District in Orange County has closed four schools since 1984. An old elementary school is now the district’s vocational-training center; two others are leased to churches. An old junior high remains empty.

Newport-Mesa Unified School District leases its 16 surplus schools for such things as Costa Mesa city community centers and classrooms and offices for the Coastline Community College and local private schools and nonprofit agencies. Lessees cannot remodel the buildings--in case the district needs them back.

While administrators like the recycling of schools, the idea is not without drawbacks. There already have been fights over what activities are appropriate for old schools, which are usually found in residential areas.

Source of Protest

“A little elementary school that is converted into a treatment center for narcotics addicts does not work out well usually,” Abramson noted.

Nor do homeless shelters seem to be welcome. Senior-citizen housing may win approval easily, but “it’s less easy when you suggest poor people” move into an old school, he said. That is especially true in well-to-do neighborhoods.

“The more affluent an area is, the more difficult it is to put a school to use as anything else,” said Linda Riley, property manager for Prince Georges County, Md., a wealthy Washington suburb with 65 surplus schools.

Berkeley voters were so irritated by the city’s efforts to turn old schools into low-income housing that they changed the way the City Council is elected. An initiative rescinding the conversions will appear on the November ballot.

Other problems popped up last March in San Diego, where the sale of surplus school sites to developers was blocked by the city, which says state law gives it the right of first refusal on all such property. The city also had land-use problems with the project.

Some Signs of Regret

To block the development, the city Planning Commission recently invented an “institutional overlay zone” for all school sites; city and school officials are now negotiating over the implementation of the new law.

Elsewhere, the recycling of surplus schools has caused a form of “seller’s regret” that haunts administrators who sell or lease schools just a few years before young families with children rediscover the surrounding neighborhoods.

“To this day,” said Abramson, describing the situation in one Connecticut school district, “when they (administrators) drive past that old high school, they sigh, ‘We wish we had that one back.’ ”

Nine Providence, R.I., schools closed between 1976 and 1981, but two had to be reopened last fall to handle a wave of immigrant children. Fortunately, the city had been able to lease out only two shuttered schools to developers; the rest remain vacant and have either been boarded up or burned down by vandals.

St. Louis administrators have reopened 10 of 18 schools closed in 1980, but the change was not due to poor planning. Instead, the schools were reopened to cut the district’s student-teacher ratio to 20-1 from 35-1. The rest have been sold to developers or reused by public agencies.

Showing Their Age

Recycling advocates generally contend that the schools being sold or leased have outlived their usefulness as educational facilities--particularly in the East, where schools now considered surplus date back to the 1920s or earlier.

“The question we ask is, if kids are going to come back, should they come back to schools built in 1910 or 1920 for their grandparents?” Abramson said. “If they built a new school for me as a kid, why not for my kids?”

Abramson argues that older, multistory schools, with asbestos-lined boiler rooms and other antiquated fixtures, may not meet modern standards for health, earthquake safety and handicap access.

However, some schools are noted historical and architectural landmarks that are protected from demolition and may qualify for a 25% federal rehabilitation tax credit. More than 200 such buildings have applied for that tax break, said Jane Redicker of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington.

Southwestern Bell Telephone Co., for example, qualified for the credit when it spent $9.6 million to make a new corporate headquarters inside the shell of Oklahoma City’s Central High--the state’s first high school when it was built in 1909, and a five-story, Beaux Arts and Gothic landmark ever since.

“We have quite a few alumni now passing through,” said Dennis Krost, the staff manager and architect for Southwestern Bell. “The community was really pleased to see the old school fixed up.”

Times editorial researcher Norma Kaufman contributed to this story.