L.A. Schools to Cut Basic Repairs, Focus on Major Projects

The Los Angeles Unified School District is facing its lowest level of school maintenance in district history in the wake of a budget cut that will shift dozens of employees from basic repair jobs to large-scale projects, according to a district official.

Margaret Scholl, director of maintenance and operations, said the financially beleaguered school system will save $1 million by having up to 200 workers out of an already-thin maintenance force bypass routine repair tasks and focus instead on major projects. The routine jobs are covered by the district’s general fund, while the larger repairs are partially funded by the state.

The Los Angeles Unified School District board approved the transfer of some of its 900 maintenance employees last week as part of a package of measures adopted to close a $130-million gap in the district’s budget.

In a school system that generates 300,000 repair requests a year, Scholl says the change in priorities means schools already suffering from various problems will have to wait even longer--and sometimes indefinitely--to have a water fountain fixed, a chalkboard repainted or a toilet unplugged.

“We’ve skated by all these years without doing all the routine maintenance that we should be doing,” Scholl said in an interview. “We’ve patched for so long, and now we’ve even cut the people putting on the patches. We’re down to the lowest level of maintenance service ever given in this district and we have the highest backlog of needs.”

Last week’s unseasonably warm temperatures generated at least 1,500 requests for air-conditioning repairs, said Scholl. And short of a tremendous infusion of money, Scholl said the district will continue to play catch-up to a mounting backlog of maintenance problems. In the meantime, routine repairs are often left undone, creating more expensive problems in the future.

“I believe that someday there’s going to be too many emergencies to handle and we’re going to have to shut schools and send kids home,” said Scholl. “Some problems will be able to be fixed in a few days, and others will take a lot longer. And in a school district with so little room, that’s a major emergency.”

Maintenance has been just one of the areas to suffer as the nation’s second-largest school district battles a fiscal crisis that has forced the board to cut salaries, freeze spending and make $600 million in budget cuts over the last two years. State education officials say similar cutbacks are occurring throughout the state.

“You can pick any county in California and it’s virtually certain if you make phone calls to schools you’ll get, ‘Yeah, we’ve got leaking roofs, yeah, we’ve got plumbing that we have to wait weeks to get fixed,’ ” said Bill Rukeyser, special assistant to State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig. “Those kinds of stories are unfortunately all too common.”

Some believe that a deteriorating physical environment can have a negative effect on students. “When the school’s nice and clean they treat it with respect, it’s their second home,” said Maria Tostado, principal of Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. “But when it’s a mess they feel, ‘Hey, nobody else cares, why should I?’ ”

Tostado said maintenance has steadily eroded throughout the three years the district has wrestled with massive budget problems, but says this year is the worst she’s seen in her 22-year career.

“Toilets, when they get jammed and flooded, we have to have about 10 of them broken before they’ll come out and fix them,” Tostado said. “We don’t call for Venetian blinds (replacements) anymore. We just take them down and put up paper.”

Tostado said the wear and tear is particularly high at a school like Garfield, where more than 3,000 students are in attendance at any one time on the district’s multitrack year-round calendar. “Kids kick holes in the walls,” Tostado said. But “we haven’t had a plasterer here in I don’t know when, so the holes just get bigger and bigger unless you fix them yourselves--which sometimes I do.”

Scholl said maintenance problems are handled by triage, with emergencies being taken care of immediately. That means plumbers will go to schools to fix stopped-up toilets, but might not bother with clogged water fountains as long as there is at least one working on campus. A broken light switch that plunges a classroom into darkness will be quickly repaired. But a broken outlet may go unfixed.

And graffiti that pops up on a campus wall will probably have to be painted over by a student crew or custodian rather than someone from the maintenance department, according to Scholl.

Jose Ramos, a government and economics teacher at Garfield High, said that it is often the little things left undone that can add up to the biggest headaches. “It’s the small things that are sometimes the most crucial,” Ramos said, noting that the air conditioner cooling his classroom has been broken for months.

Meanwhile, Scholl said the district is currently facing a $600-million backlog in major maintenance, ranging from schools needing to be repainted to unpaved playgrounds.

The deferred maintenance fund, which pays for such major projects, has shrunk to $5 million from $30 million just a few years ago--the result of the district not having enough money to attain a larger amount of matching state funds, said Scholl. “We have playgrounds that are 45 to 50 years old that are covered with cracks and we can’t repave them. We can’t afford it.”

Ramos said he wondered when the brunt of budget cuts would be felt as acutely in adminstrative offices as they are in schools. “There are other areas in the district that could be cut,” he said. “Why the maintenance workers?”