Center’s Use of Building Goes to Vote

A battle over a Lawndale school building appears headed for a conclusion Tuesday at a meeting of Centinela Valley Union High School District trustees.

Supporters of the Youth and Family Center, a nonprofit agency that has used the 7,000-square-foot district building since 1981 to provide services to South Bay teen parents, are expected to make a final appeal for a one-year extension on the center’s lease.

Supt. McKinley Nash is expected to remain firm in his position that the district must reclaim the building--on Larch Avenue at the edge of the Leuzinger High School campus--for “desperately” needed classroom space.

The board will be asked to vote on a Nash plan that calls for using the disputed building for an array of special classes aimed at various groups served by the district.

Nash also said the district is prepared to provide programs for its teen parents. “Many harsh things have been said about us,” he said. “People have been given an emotional and distorted picture of the real situation.”

As the showdown neared, both sides mounted public relations campaigns in an effort to win support. Teen parents and their backers, who have besieged the district several times in recent months, gathered again Thursday to voice emotional appeals against closing the center.

Nash and his staff, armed with piles of reports and other documents, called two press conferences to explain the district’s side.

Figures flew out from both camps, generally leaving a confusing picture of who was doing what. But at least one point appeared clear:

The state-funded project over which much of the dispute has raged is no more. The program, which took care of 18 toddlers so their parents could attend school, got $78,000 in a state grant last year, but both sides agreed that no more money is coming. The center blames the district, which administered the grant, for not applying for more state money; Nash said the district tried but failed to work out disagreements with the center.

In any case, that program was only a “minor component of the center’s total package of services” for adolescent parents and pregnant teen mothers, said Tony Lewis, the center’s deputy director.

Nash said he was puzzled by “how hard the center fought us over that program, if it is only a small part of whatever they’re doing over there.”

The programs that remain at the center, Lewis said, involved 258 teens last year in a variety of parenting classes and counseling provided by a staff of 42 on a center budget of nearly $1 million. Of the 258 teens, he said, 158 live in the Centinela Valley district.

Lewis said he hopes the school board will reverse its June decision not to renew the center’s lease, which expires at the end of this month. “If we have to move, we have a place in Inglewood where we could go on short notice,” he said. “But that would destroy our basic model and deprive these communities of much-needed services.”

Another year would give the center enough time to “replicate” itself in another permanent location, he said. Meanwhile, the center is negotiating for a new home in either the Inglewood or Los Angeles school districts.

Nash, in response, said he doesn’t know what to make of Lewis’ claim that 158 Centinela Valley residents are involved in the center’s programs. “But so far as we know, we have very few, if any, of them in our high schools.”

‘District’s Mission’

What’s clear to him, Nash said, is that the center is “not educationally connected with the district, and the district’s mission is to educate kids.”

Nash said the district is not being “cold-hearted” about the plight of teen mothers, but believes that it also has a responsibility to other “high-risk” groups--students who need extra help to make it successfully to graduation, increasing numbers of immigrants, youths with drug and alcohol problems, gang members, amnesty applicants seeking citizenship instruction and others.

He said the plan for facilities to be voted on Tuesday is aimed at some of those needs.

“We didn’t dream this up to justify ourselves,” Nash said. “These plans have been in the works for three years.”

To accommodate teen parents, Nash said, the district will expand its existing child-care programs, which have served adult students for 25 years, and provide a variety of educational programs to help see teen parents through to graduation.

But, Nash added, the programs will be open only to teen parents who reside in the district and who remain “active students in good standing”--and child care will be provided only for toddlers at least 2 years of age.

“We always try to cooperate with other districts in programs of mutual interest,” Nash said. “But our resources are too meager to foot the bill for students outside our district.”

Nash said discord between the district and the Youth and Family Center began about two years ago, when school officials rejected a different proposal from the center and a Lawndale city official.

The proposal, he said, was to establish a health facility on the Leuzinger High School campus in Lawndale that would dispense contraceptives and provide instruction in human sexuality.

Nash said he, and later all five trustees, turned down the proposal, mainly because they believed the communities would not approve.

The Youth and Family Center operated under the auspices of the Centinela Valley YMCA until last year, when it broke away and established itself as a nonprofit organization with its own board of directors.