School Wanders No More : Sylmar: Los Angeles Lutheran Junior-Senior High is dedicated, ending a long search for a permanent campus.

Gone are the days when the local bowling alley substituted for the school gym, and snagging a spare constituted physical education.

No longer are classrooms separated merely by partitions, nor are any administrators banished to portable bungalows.

The Los Angeles Lutheran Junior-Senior High School finally has a place of its own: a five-acre plot in Sylmar, secured after a lengthy search involving more than 130 potential sites from Sand Canyon to Simi Valley.

What once was a burned-out shopping center is now a sparkling new, $4-million facility sliced into 13 classrooms by gleaming blue and white walls, standard-bearers of the school’s official colors.

The site, formally dedicated Saturday, represents what school officials hope is the last chapter of an itinerant history for the school, now in its fourth location in 38 years.

The school first opened its doors in Inglewood on Sept. 8, 1953, as Walter A. Maier Lutheran High School, named for a prominent Lutheran minister. An association of Los Angeles congregations had purchased the vacant lot at 2941 W. 70th St. six years earlier and built the school from scratch.

The first class consisted of 28 students. Enrollment grew steadily through the 1960s, but the school retained an intimate atmosphere.

“There were 123 students in my class,” recalled Doris Ferrel, 47, of Van Nuys, who graduated in 1962. “I knew everybody in my class, and I knew most of the students in my school.”

Enrollment peaked in 1967 at 652 students. But the neighborhood around the school, mostly residential, began to decline, and Lutheran High went down with it.

By 1972, as enrollment shriveled, the association decided to relocate. But it was not until 1976 that the school reached an agreement with a group of Catholic sisters to take over Villa Cabrini, a school on Glenoaks Boulevard in Burbank spanning 30 acres studded with olive trees, a large chapel, several classrooms, a retreat and learning center, parking lots and plenty of open space.

Administrators, faculty and students made the move in the middle of the school year--on Valentine’s Day, 1977. The move certainly touched Ferrel’s heart, who by then had two daughters attending Lutheran High at the new Villa Cabrini campus.

“They loved it,” Ferrel said. “They thought they had the greatest high school around with all that area.”

Lutheran again flourished, though it never reached the enrollment of its Inglewood days. Still, it underwent two major changes: dropping “Walter A. Maier” from its name and adding seventh- and eighth-graders to the student body. The school’s facilities included a swimming pool, a new track and football field, and a large gym that the Harlem Globetrotters occasionally borrowed for preseason practices.

“The potential there was great,” said Barry Walter, 40, a 1969 alumnus and former member of the school’s board of directors. “The problem was, the . . . facility had been pretty badly damaged in the Sylmar earthquake.

“Some of the buildings had been declared unusable, and some of them needed extensive work. We spent quite a bit of money trying to bring things up to code.”

Indeed, a $3.5-million mortgage proved to be the school’s undoing, and Lutheran began selling off land to pay its debts. The number of students also began to dwindle, partly because of the proliferation of Lutheran schools.

“Finally, there was just no way we could hang on to the property,” Walter said.

The school was forced to move in 1986 to Chapel of the Cross Lutheran Church in Mission Hills, site of a former elementary school. The junior high had to be disbanded. Some of the administrative offices were put in portable classrooms.

Without a gym or playing fields, athletic teams practiced in nearby parks, and P.E. classes were bused off-site, sometimes to municipal swimming pools or bowling alleys.

And Walter, with other members of the school’s board of directors, began searching doggedly for another place.

“We looked at anything that anybody mentioned,” he said. “It could have been a couple of acres or 20 acres of hillside property. Somebody went and looked at it.”

Lutheran High’s directors thought the school would stay in Mission Hills only a year. It stayed five. More than 130 sites were inspected, many of them seriously, with bids submitted and neighborhoods canvassed. But to no avail.

School officials signed purchase agreements on a parcel in Lake View Terrace but hastily backed off when a disturbing fact came to light: An earthquake fault sliced directly through the middle of the property.

“It got real frustrating,” Walter said.

But last year, school officials found the Sylmar site--a vacant supermarket and a handful of ragged stores. “It was pretty run-down,” Walter said. “The neighbors . . . were really pleased that we were turning an eyesore into something nice.”

Renovation was under way by the beginning of this year, although the March rains delayed the project slightly. Gloria Tourville, 17, Lutheran’s student body president, said she and other students were hopeful--but skeptical.

“When you saw it, it was this little grocery store,” she said. “You wouldn’t think our school would be built there.”

It almost wasn’t. At least not on time. “In August, we were sweating,” Walter said. “It got down to the wire.”

In the end, the latest incarnation of Lutheran High opened Sept. 9, just a week behind schedule.

The school can accommodate up to 250 students, and master plans call for eventual expansion. With the two junior high grades reinstated, enrollment--down to 89 the previous year--shot up to more than 160.

“We had planned for 145,” Principal Dale Wolfgram said. “So 165 was a very pleasant surprise.”

Football and softball fields have been seeded. A plot of land has been reserved for a gym. The only reminders of the old days are the mobile P.E. classes--students still have to walk five minutes to El Cariso Regional Park to use a playing field.

But 16-year-old Trevor Dietrich, a Simi Valley junior, said he has watched the school’s eight-man football team swell.

“The football team has 20 people now,” he said, then added quickly: “We’re not good, but it’s a big team.”