Grand Central Station : Nearly 900 Pupils Catch the Bus at Grant Elementary for Ride to Other Schools

Most students in the Los Angeles school district began a new year last week at schools within walking distance of their homes. But for almost 900 children living near Grant Elementary School in Hollywood, Tuesday was the start of a year of getting to Grant about 7 a.m., only to board buses that go as far as the San Fernando Valley.

In the gray, cool dawn, the sidewalk along Harold Way near Wilton Place was packed with parents, searching for the correct bus in the 40-bus fleet and telling their children--some as young as 6--in Armenian, Spanish and English to behave. Signs on utility poles listed the destination schools--Sherman Oaks, Coliseum, Paseo Del Rey, Woodland Hills, 19 schools in all--with route numbers and times.

Melissa Campos Amaya, 6, sobbed as school aides, sounding like conductors, called out destinations: “Anybody else for Dorris Place?”

Nineth Amaya lifted her red-eyed daughter onto the bus steps and watched mournfully as the bus pulled out, headed for Dorris Place School near Elysian Park.

“She’s not used to . . . the bus,” Nineth Amaya said. “It’s her first time--she’s nervous. I’m nervous, too.”

Nervousness and confusion, in fact, were the order of the day. For Heline Keshishyan and her son, sixth-grader Oganes Kostikyan, finding the 7:45 a.m. Valley View School bus was a substantial challenge, considering that they had been sent a busing form with an incorrect pickup point and departure time. Earlier, Keshishyan had been sent a letter from another school inviting her to an orientation.

‘She’s Nervous’

Situated in a crowded neighborhood that is home to many recent immigrants, Grant Elementary is one of the most--if not the most--crowded schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The school has a capacity of 750 children, and the neighborhood contains more than twice that number. District officials said they knew of no other school that buses out more children than it keeps.

Of the district’s 600 schools, it also has the most crowded playground, said Dean Miyazaki, a district facilities project manager. If all the Grant students were on the playground at once, they “couldn’t play all the various games that require space--hopscotch, kickball, tetherball,” he said.

Children who enter Grant as kindergartners get to stay there through sixth grade, but most older children who move into the neighborhood must be bused to places such as Playa del Rey, Bel-Air, the Crenshaw area and the San Fernando Valley. In some families, this means that siblings are split up, the younger ones at Grant and the older ones on the bus.

During the past year, the number bused has risen from 800 children to about 900, Principal Beverly Neu said. The result is a Grand Central Station outside the school every morning and afternoon.

The school, near Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, offers an extreme example of the problems encountered by dozens of schools in inner-city neighborhoods, which have grown crowded because of housing development, immigration and rising birthrates. Yet these areas--Hollywood, the Wilshire corridor, South-Central, South Gate and Bell--also have a scarcity of available land.

Just a few miles away from Grant on Wilshire Boulevard, the district wants to buy the closed Ambassador Hotel, considered one of the few chunks of land in the central city where a new school could be built without having to level a neighborhood. But commercial developers also have their eyes on the site.

The district tries to handle the swell of students by busing; expanding the capacity of schools, such as Grant, by operating them on a year-round schedule; erecting portable classrooms, and using community college facilities. This year, the district will bus more than 20,000 students from overcrowded campuses to schools with more room, at a cost of $1,176 per student.

A partial solution for the crowding at Grant Elementary is in the works. A 14-classroom building and enlarged playground for Grant are under construction and will be finished in May. Even then, Grant will have to remain on a year-round schedule, and it will still be necessary to bus at least 400 children to other schools.

Over its 86-year history, the student body at Grant has evolved from an American-born, Anglo one to a largely foreign-born, Armenian and Latino one. Grant has bilingual Spanish and bilingual Armenian classes, but its students speak 15 other languages as well, including Farsi, Vietnamese, Romanian, Korean and Amharic.

Hollywood has been “getting immigrants from whatever country the U.S. was allowing them to come from,” said Anne Baillie, who has taught at Grant since the late ‘60s. In her classroom, Baillie and an Armenian aide juggle 30 third- and fourth-graders, mostly Armenian and other immigrants, who read at levels ranging from “The cat runs to Ana” to “Carl decided to take dance classes and concentrate on learning ballet.”

The student body is also highly mobile. Two hundred new kindergartners start each year at Grant. By the time they reach the sixth grade, said Mariana Roberts, adviser of bilingual programs at Grant, three-quarters of them will have moved away.

Moving Up and Out

She said the impermanence comes with the neighborhood. Attracted by the relatively low rents, immigrants consider Hollywood a port of entry. But the seedy motels, adult bookstores and liquor stores on Hollywood Boulevard, a block away from the school, are all the incentive most need to try to move up and out.

Residents say drug dealers and users and other unsavory characters wander the area. Will Pettit, 28, who has lived a few doors down from Grant for five years, said, “If I (were) a child, I’d hate to have to come here to go to school.”

But, with the apartment construction frenzy in the neighborhood, people will continue to pour in, residents and school administrators say. Three apartment buildings with more than 200 units are going up within a block of the school. And scattered vacant houses in the neighborhood, their windows boarded up and lawns littered with weeds and broken bottles, are probable sites for yet more apartments.

School district demographers expect that by 1993, the number of elementary-age children living within Grant’s enrollment boundaries will rise by nearly 300.

“We see it just going on up, right off the end,” said Gordon Wohlers, administrator of the district’s priority housing program.

Old Problem

The burgeoning number of children is not new. Before 1980, Grant was on double sessions, teaching half of the students in the morning and half in the afternoon. In 1980, it started busing and operating year-round.

In early 1985, the district began searching for expansion sites for Grant, which was occupying half of a block at Wilton Place and Harold Way. It would take four years of environmental reports, meetings and hearings before the rest of the block, with 32 households, was cleared for the school expansion.

The ground breaking for the classrooms and playground was in May. The project, mostly funded through state bonds, is costing $3.25 million to buy the residents’ land and homes and cover their relocation expenses and $1.9 million for construction.

It was a long and bitter process that has left residents and school district officials angry at each other--and frustrated that the finished building will do so little to relieve overcrowding and reduce the need for busing.

‘What Buttons You Push’

The owners and tenants “had a good sense of what buttons you push to get your voice heard in the public arena, and they used that arena very effectively,” said Bob Niccum, the district’s real estate director.

District officials acted “like Baby Huey,” replied Sandy Melvoin, one of the residents displaced by the expansion. “They come out . . . destroy everything around them, and they did not solve their problems,” said Melvoin, who was chairwoman of the Carlton Way/Harold Way Neighborhood Assn. and who rented one of the houses targeted for demolition.

The association of 90 homeowners and tenants argued that the endangered homes, some built in the early 1900s, were essential to the neighborhood’s character and could be a basis for gentrifying Hollywood, Melvoin said. Seven of the houses, because of their age and architecture, were recognized as historically significant structures by the city, but did not fall into a category that was protected from demolition.

‘Sad to Watch’

Residents started vacating the block in April, 1987. Melvoin, who moved out in September 1988, among the last to leave, said it was “sad to watch them go one by one.”

Another displaced resident, Mary Saatjian, who with her parents co-owned a big 1914 Dutch Colonial house that was a neighborhood landmark, acknowledged Grant’s need to expand, but said the compensation “was not adequate.” Her family is still entangled in a lawsuit with the district over the value of the home.

“We were all very naive,” Saatjian said of the Carlton residents. “Some people didn’t realize the value of property in Hollywood and just accepted the (district’s) offer.”

What the district should have done, Melvoin says, is build another school elsewhere. The association had suggested alternative sites, including vacant commercial lots and buildings nearby.

No Other Site

Project manager Miyazaki replies that the district tried to do so for years before finally abandoning the attempt two years ago. “We were literally unable to find a site” that would not displace a large number of people and businesses and that was not at a busy intersection, which would be unsafe for children, he said. Buying “a whole block for a new school, in that area, I’d say is impossible.”

As the homes on the block were swept away, so was most of the opposition to the expansion. “They got what they wanted,” says Melvoin, who now lives in North Hollywood.

The remaining neighbors grumble about the bulldozing and hammering, but support the expansion in the name of education. “It’s for the kids, education, for the (betterment) of the country,” said Jimmy Paredes, 25, who has lived on Wilton Place across from Grant for four years.

“I don’t feel that great about those people having to move, but I feel good about the school--it’s needed,” said Manuel Vasquez, 34, who for three years has managed a 60-year-old apartment building on Carlton Street across from the site. “You never can have it all.”

‘There’s No Choice’

At the Harold Way depot, many seemed resigned to the busing.

Parent Mike Khachikyan, who came to the United States nine years ago, was helping answer the questions of newer Armenian immigrants. “In our country, every small place, (has) schools and (children in the area) go to that school,” he said. “(I) explain to them, there’s no choice (here).”

But the busing carries a host of anxieties and unknowns. “It is not good for me,” sighed Heline Keshishyan, saying she worries every day whether the bus will be late or will run into a disaster. Exactly where Valley View, her son’s school, is, she doesn’t know. Last year she spoke to the teachers over the phone, and this year she wants to meet them.

The parents have high hopes for the school expansion. Khachikyan said his sons, aged 9 and 13, have complained about being bullied by some older Latino boys at Dorris Place Elementary, where they are bused. If they could go to Grant, he said, “I think (it would be) different, because a lot of Armenians are . . . here.”

Wants Sons Together

Keshishyan hopes the expansion will unite her two sons. Grant’s policy of enrolling the kindergartners but busing older children has meant that sixth-grade Oganes goes to Valley View, on the traditional school calendar with a long summer vacation, although her first-grade boy Vahe is at Grant, on a year-round schedule with four short breaks throughout the year. She hopes there will be room for Oganes at Grant. If not, she said, when Vahe is older, she may put him on the Valley View bus so the brothers can be together.

“We need the school (expansion) here. It (will be) much better,” said Khachikyan. “It’s not going to be like this,” he said, motioning at the swarms of parents and kids and shouting above the roar of the buses.

Acknowledging that the addition cannot fit all the students, he paused and said, “I don’t know, maybe we’re going to be lucky.”