Torrance Trustees Won’t Open School After All : Education: The eleventh-hour reversal leaves overcrowding problems unresolved, pending further study.

Torrance school officials did an abrupt about-face this week, voting against reopening one of the district’s middle schools just two weeks after giving the green light to the plan.

The controversial reversal came about after Trustee Owen Griffith made an eleventh-hour decision to switch his vote. Griffith and Trustees Ann Gallagher and William Blischke instead voted to buy six portable classrooms to handle overcrowding at existing campuses. Gallagher and Blischke had voted against the reopening in the first vote.

The surprise 3-2 vote underscored the divisiveness over the issue, with several factions vying over which school to open and which students to transfer. More than 80 parents attended the hearing Monday night in what some people said was one of the most raucous school board meetings in recent memory.

Griffith’s vote stunned Trustees David Sargent and John Eubanks, who had voted two weeks ago along with Griffith in favor of reopening a middle school.

The board members said the change followed a weekend of intense lobbying by parents affected by the potential change in the middle school structure.

“There was a very intensive lobbying effort to turn (Griffith’s) vote around, and in the end it was successful,” Sargent said. “It’s very frustrating. We appeared to have taken dead aim at our big toe and fired.”

Numerous parents argued that they needed more time to study proposals drafted by district officials to ease crowding at existing middle school campuses. Parents from Arnold School wore bright red shirts to the meeting, and many others wore paper signs showing clock hands with the slogan, “We need more time.”

Griffith said he changed his vote because he felt that reopening another school now wasn’t the best answer.

“It just appeared to me that we weren’t making things better,” he said. “I think that we will have to reopen another school soon but we need more time to study it.”

Parents in favor of the change were angered by the vote, saying that the community had plenty of time to study the issue before the hearing.

“All this is is a Band-Aid solution,” parent Donna Spreitzer said. “The board said two weeks ago that portables were not the answer. So why did we go through all this time and effort for nothing?”

School district officials have been increasingly concerned about crowding in the middle schools. One of the schools, Calle Mayor, has about 1,000 students enrolled although its capacity is around 700. Enrollments at other elementary schools have risen as much as 20% in recent years.

Trustees said each school that is reopened could reduce enrollment at existing campuses by about 30%.

However, the cost factor weighed heavily with board members. District officials estimated that it would have cost nearly $275,000 in administrative costs alone to reopen a school. An additional $530,000 would be needed for construction, remodeling and other improvements, according to district officials.