Supervisors to Decide : School Plan Spurs Fight in Calabasas

A dispute over construction of a $15-million private school that has pitted neighbor against neighbor in affluent sections of Calabasas and Woodland Hills is scheduled to be refereed Thursday by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

The supervisors will decide whether to allow operators of the North Hollywood Oakwood School to build a 17 1/2-acre campus near the border of exclusive Calabasas Park and next-door to Woodland Hills.

The school, whose enrollment includes the children of many celebrities, charges up to $6,500 a year for tuition.

It is now housed on two crowded sites several blocks apart in North Hollywood and wants to move to the new location. Its proposed site in Calabasas is the community’s last wild pumpkin patch. Calabasas is Spanish for pumpkin.

Supporters of the project say it will provide a much-needed private alternative school on the southwestern edge of the San Fernando Valley without harming the area’s hilly environment.

Opponents say the school will join six other campuses in the immediate area that already clog residential streets with traffic. They add that it will further erode the neighborhood’s fast-disappearing rural character.

The Neighbors United for Oakwood School and the rival Calabasas Coalition for Fair Land Use each claim about 500 families on their side. Each has resorted to slick campaigns to win the county’s support.

Neighbors United has opened a Calabasas Park office and has flooded Calabasas, Hidden Hills and Woodland Hills with mailers promising that the Oakwood campus would be “a superb educational alternative” that “preserves the natural environment.”

Calabasas Coalition has opened a Woodland Hills office and has produced its own sophisticated, color-illustrated environmental impact report and a traffic study that suggests the school would cause traffic problems, possible flooding, noise and lowered property values.

On Tuesday, the two sides were taking final potshots at each other.

Susan Barnett, a Woodland Hills resident who is a member of Neighbors United, said foes of the school are shortsighted. She said the school’s open space and landscaping would be superior to condominiums that might be built there instead.

“It’s a fabulous school,” Barnett said. “It would be an asset to the community. I have a 7-month-old boy who I hope can go there.”

School supporter Bonnie Bricklin, co-chairman of Neighbors United and a Calabasas resident, agreed: “We’re concerned about how that piece of property is developed. We don’t want to see any more high-density development out here. Oakwood would be an excellent neighbor.”

Not so, said Rosemary Lichtman, a leader of the Calabasas Coalition.

“It’s an inappropriate land use,” Lichtman said at a news conference that her group called at the site. “The county general plan calls for this land to be a residential community of 16 single-family homes. It’s inappropriate to bring 700 schoolchildren and all the problems they’d bring.”

Lichtman, a Calabasas resident, said foes of the project decided it was impossible to compromise on the school issue after their studies predicted major adverse effects. She said the county has not required an environmental impact report of the project.

“There’s no school facility that can be built here that isn’t just awful for us,” said Debbie Brenner, an 11-year resident of Calabasas and another Calabasas Coalition member.

A privately commissioned traffic study done for the Calabasas Coalition concluded that 1,755 cars a day would come and go from Oakwood if the campus is built on the site next to Old Topanga Canyon Road.

By contrast, an Oakwood-commissioned study concluded that 855 cars a day will visit the campus. That traffic report has been approved by county officials.

“We’re very disturbed at their report,” Oakwood headmaster James Alan Astman said Tuesday of the opponents’ traffic study. “Our report shows that the project will have no significant impact on the area.”

Astman said school planners have sought to compromise with opponents by promising to omit outside bells and loudspeakers and eliminate all outside nighttime school events.