Measure Awaits Approval : Budget Includes Valley Schools Science Center

The Los Angeles school board’s tentative $3.5-billion budget includes a new science resource center for elementary schools in the San Fernando Valley, school district officials said Tuesday.

The proposed budget also contains money for other district-wide programs that would affect Valley schools.

The $100,875 science center would supply elementary schools with laboratory materials--such as microscopes, slides and animal specimens--that individual schools now cannot afford, said Robert Reimann, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s director of instruction for the northern half of the Valley.

If the budget is given final approval by the school board Monday, the facility would be the second such science resource center in the Valley and the ninth in the school district.

West Valley Location

Because the existing Valley elementary science center is in North Hollywood, the proposed new center would probably be established somewhere in the West Valley, said Lorna Round, assistant superintendent of instruction.

“This particular allotment, I think, will be very beneficial to Valley students,” said school board member Julie Korenstein, who represents the West Valley.

“It would be a tremendous resource for them because now we have to borrow between schools,” Reimann said.

“We have a lot of materials housed here, there and everywhere. . . . To try to identify where the things are and get the things to the need quickly is pretty difficult.”

Korenstein pointed to several districtwide budget items, tentatively approved Monday, that she said would have an impact on the Valley:

The addition of 21 continuation school teachers at a cost of $673,823. Each of the school district’s 43 continuation schools, 17 of which are in the Valley, is staffed by two or three instructors. The schools that would receive an extra teacher have not been determined, but Korenstein expects some of them to be in the Valley.

The $341,184 addition of 11 music teachers. The district now has 66 “traveling” music teachers.

Anti-Gang Program

The development of a districtwide gang prevention curriculum, budgeted at $320,000. The gang curriculum would consist of 17 lessons about self-esteem and alternatives to gang membership, to be taught to children as early as fourth grade, Round said.

A $900,000 program of safety improvements in high school science labs, including some in the Valley. “They’re very, very old,” Korenstein said. “We really have to get into those labs and clean them up.”

The first phase of the district’s hiring of library aides for elementary school. The board tentatively approved spending $770,934 for aides at 103 schools, about a fourth of the district’s elementary schools, which currently have no library staff.