Whittier Schools Put Hopes in Bond Issue : Education: The district displays its tattered, outdated facilities to gain support for raising $75 million through tax hikes.

From a distance, Whittier High School is a pretty sprawl of yellow stucco buildings. But on closer inspection, paint is peeling, walls are cracked and many windows are broken.

Some classrooms are burdened with cranky steam radiators, antique desks, and grooved wooden floors that look much the same as they must have when Richard M. Nixon studied there in the late 1920s.

The old-fashioned electrical and plumbing systems haven’t changed much, either. Only one of the school’s four ancient boilers is working. The fuse box is a decades-old tangle of exposed wires that incur power outages with the least provocation--most recently, when a proud father plugged a video camera into the gym wall to film his child playing ball.

Conditions aren’t much better at the other five schools in the Whittier Union High School District, school officials say. Some fire alarms are unreliable, pipes have rusted, and power conks out so often that “where’s the juice?” has become as familiar a refrain as the schools’ fight songs.

After years of patching pipes and plugging holes, school officials decided to ask voters to approve a $75-million bond measure on March 5 to pay for a variety of substantive repairs. If Measure A is approved, the money would be divided evenly among the schools, which range in age from 30 to 65 years. The district serves 8,700 students from Whittier and parts of Norwalk, Santa Fe Springs, La Mirada, La Habra, La Puente and Pico Rivera.

The ballot measure would raise taxes for the average homeowner in the school district by $20 a year over the next 33 years. “That’s two Domino’s pizzas and a couple of beers a year. Pretty reasonable,” School Supt. Lee Eastwood said in a recent interview.

The bond sale would pay for more than $6 million in fire and safety improvements, including the repair of some schools’ fire alarms that have shorted out for weeks, according to campaign literature. About $21 million would be spent on upgrading heating, plumbing and cooling systems.

Nearly $4 million would update science and computer labs, which Whittier instructor Barry Kerns says are outdated. The district would also spend $3 million to making the campuses more accessible to handicapped students, $8 million on classroom expansion and $4 million on outside grounds, where trees have uprooted patches of parking lots and have cracked tennis courts.

Supporters of the bond measure swap dozens of horror stories.

“The bathrooms are so bad--the toilets don’t work, and there are no doors--I just hold it,” complained Santa Fe High School junior Michelle Valenzuela, who was working campaign phones with about two dozen students, parents and teachers last week. A campaign brochure, which will be distributed this week, features pictures of the dilapidation, accompanied by the warning: “Our schools are falling down around our children.”

Assistant Supt. Lowell Shira prefaces his pitches to community groups with a “show-and-tell” program of props, including a piece of electrical wire that broke through insulation at Santa Fe High, an old fuse box from Whittier High and a length of pipe that rusted through at California High School. A pipe just like that burst under the grounds of La Serna High last weekend, Shira told the University Club Wednesday night. Police noticed water “spraying all over” the campus, even spurting through handrails on the school steps, Shira said. A dozen men worked overtime to stem the flood before school opened.

“You walk on the campuses and you think you’re walking on hot mineral springs because water is bubbling up from broken pipes,” Eastwood said.

“The electrical control board at Whittier High School looks like something out of ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ The guy’s got to hit it with a baseball bat to get it moving again. Of course it’s dangerous--that’s why we need this stuff!”

Such talk may be a bit exaggerated, said L.A. County fire inspector Capt. Jack Rahder. He said the schools are inspected annually, and comply with safety codes. “If there are any major violations, we don’t know about them. Probably what you’re looking at is they want to justify the improvements,” Rahder said.

So far, there has been no organized opposition to the measure, but a handful of parents have grumbled at local PTA meetings about the bond measure’s price tag. “Just about everyone I’ve talked to is opposed to it because of the tax increase,” claimed Thomas Borgogna, a Santa Fe Springs father of three.

Borgogna said he hasn’t decided how to vote next week, but that he is worried about the welfare of students. “How did things get so bad?” he asked.

Eastwood blames the state. “We’ve put a ton of money into fixing these buildings, but we haven’t been able to keep up,” he said. “The problem is the state is not providing adequate dollars.”

But district administrators also decided that funding instructional programs was a priority, Shira said. “The district made a conscious decision to put most of its money into operating and instructional costs” rather than into major maintenance, Shira said. Administrators did not want to slash funds for instructional programs, which has helped district students score in the 80th percentile on statewide achievement tests, he said.

The district spends $3,677 on each student--about $100 more than the statewide average. Of the district’s $45-million annual budget, about $1.6 million is targeted for maintenance, according to Shira. The rest pays for operating and instructional expenses.

In fact, schools throughout the state are struggling to find money to pay for construction and rehabilitation projects, according to Duwayne Brooks, facility planning official with the state Department of Education. He said there is a $6-billion backlog of requests from local school districts, but “the state has no money.”

As a result, he said, many districts have had to turn to other alternatives, such as selling bonds or selling off school property to pay for repairs.

A decade ago, the Whittier district sold a high school to pay for improvements at the other campuses. But high school officials, citing a surge in enrollment at local elementary schools, have predicted that the number of high school students will increase by 2,000 students over the next decade. Eastwood said it would be impractical to “cannibalize” another school.

The school board approved the bond election last fall. “This is not a beautification campaign,” school board President Joe Duardo said. “We have real safety concerns. These buildings need to be fixed before something happens.”