Private School Loses Right to Close Street

A Sepulveda private school lost its 15-month-old license to barricade a public street after Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs accused the school of using the threat of drug trafficking as a ruse to gain parking spaces.

By a 10-O vote, the council revoked a temporary permit given the Montclair College Preparatory School in December, 1988, to close off 110 feet of Langdon Avenue.

When the council granted Montclair the right to erect a chain-link fence across the street in 1988, the street was a “drug depot,” Montclair Headmaster Vernon Simpson said. After it was barricaded, drug dealers moved elsewhere, he said, pleading for authority to continue the closure.

But Wachs claimed that the anti-drug argument “in this case is a ruse. They want to expand the school and to get additional land for parking” from the city by securing council permission to permanently close the street, he said.

The school last year won permission from city zoning officials to expand its campus to accommodate six new classrooms and increase its enrollment to 400 students from the 250 allowed under a city zoning permit issued 15 years ago.

Wachs, who originally backed the temporary street-closing permit, said he wanted that permit revoked because closure is opposed by “everybody” in the neighborhood but the school. The closure has inconvenienced the residents of a 37-unit townhouse project next to the school, several nearby industrial establishments and a day-care center, Wachs said.