Stairway to School Worries Parents

It didn’t take long for Janet and Greg Armstrong to name the steep flight of steps that their 11-year-old son must climb each day to get to class.

The Laguna Niguel couple have dubbed it “the death staircase” and are praying that it will not live up to the name.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m hoping for the worst,” Janet Armstrong said Friday. “But it’s an accident waiting to happen.”

Capistrano Unified School District officials, faced with a burgeoning student population, recently placed 12 portable classrooms on a narrow hilltop that overlooks Niguel Hills Junior High on Paseo Escuela, near Street of the Golden Lantern. The stairway is the only access to the elementary classrooms.

The buildings, which opened Thursday, were ordered moved onto the site by the school board earlier this year to accommodate 300 fifth- and sixth-graders who are awaiting the opening of George L. White Elementary School, district spokeswoman Jacqueline Cerra said.

Classes at the new school will begin sometime in January, school officials said, and the students will be transferred there from the portable classrooms.

But in the meantime, angry parents say, their children must walk up and down what they consider a hazardous stairway an average of four times a day.

Already having placed calls to several administrators to make their fears known, the parents have vowed to organize to persuade school district officials to rip out the cement stairs and install a sloping trail up the 40-foot cliff.

“For us, it’s an issue of safety,” parent Greg Armstrong said. “We believe that the staircase is inadequate, unsafe, and (that) our child is at risk (along with) the children of other parents.”

The 68 steps have not been properly “roughed” for good footing during rainy days, parents contend. And they fear that in an emergency such as a fire, children hastening down the stairs could be trampled.

School district administrators disagree that the stairs are unsafe, and say that they have devised a system to monitor the children going up and down. The children must walk in pairs, each pair four feet apart, and must hold on to guardrails, Niguel Hills Principal Jean Trygstad said. As many as six teachers watch them, she added.

“We had no problems the first day,” said fifth-grade teacher Laurie Allen, who stood in front of Niguel Hills Junior High on Thursday morning to greet elementary students and escort them to the stairway.

“I don’t see (the stairs) as a hazard,” she said, but added: “We do have to be really careful.”

William F. Dawson, a district assistant superintendent, said that the stairway, which was completed last week, “meets or exceeds” all city and state Department of Education building regulations.

“I feel it’s very safe for those kids,” Dawson said. While acknowledging that the stairway is considered substandard by district building inspectors, the inadequacies are all superficial, such as uneven steps, he noted.

“That staircase is structurally sound and safe for use,” Dawson said. “We even tested it with hoses. It didn’t get slippery.” He confirmed, however, that there is an ongoing dispute with the contractor who built the stairway for failing to put a rough surface on the steps, among other things.

He said that the district is withholding payment to the contractor until the staircase is refinished.

There are also plans for building a ramp beside the stairway, Dawson said. The ramp, however, will be designed for use by maintenance and janitorial workers.

“I don’t think the kids will take the time to use the ramp,” Dawson said. “It’s going to be a long trail.”

Dawson said that he is surprised to hear that parents began complaining about the stairway one day after school started. “I was at the orientation (Wednesday night), and parents didn’t know who I was. And I didn’t overhear one complaint.”

But several parents who attended orientation night said that they were shocked to see the staircase.

“I stood at the top and got dizzy,” Janet Armstrong said. “It’s quite a trip up those stairs. You could have a heart attack.”