School Won’t Feel Down in the Dumps After a Coat of Paint : Lopez Canyon: A special trust fund created by the nearby landfill will allow a Lake View Terrace elementary campus to be repainted within months.

Thirty-two years have passed since Fenton Avenue School in Lake View Terrace got its first and only paint job--and it shows.

“It’s atrocious,” Principal Joe Lucente said Thursday as he pointed to peeling patches of drab green paint blotching the exterior of the elementary school.

And under tight school district budgets, it would have been 10 to 20 years before the painters arrived, except for an ironic piece of luck--the school is near a dump.

Living in the shadow of a landfill does not ordinarily bring good fortune, but for once it might be a good thing for the school’s 1,100 students, about 73% of whom are Latino and 21% black.

Thanks to a special trust fund established by the Lopez Canyon Landfill, about a mile uphill, the school may now be repainted within months instead of decades, Lucente said.

“I think it’s great because we need to be in an environment that’s clean and looks good,” said April Clark, a 12-year-old sixth-grader who described the existing paint job as “dirty” and “disgusting.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind it will enhance student achievement by having a proper atmosphere,” Lucente said.

Lopez Canyon officials told Lucente about the $5-million trust fund in November, after the landfill adopted the elementary school.

Eager to see his shabby buildings renewed, Lucente sought the help of Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who will ask the City Council on Tuesday to approve taking $172,000 from the trust to pay for repainting the school inside and out, including all 36 classrooms.

Bernardi got a firsthand look on Thursday at the school’s chipped doors, discolored walls, peeling trim and cracked surfaces.

“I think the need is urgent . . . unfortunately this area of Los Angeles has been neglected for years and hasn’t been given the services it’s entitled to,” said Bernardi, who during his tour was presented by a grateful student with a polo shirt decorated with the Fenton logo.

So neglected is the school that classrooms inside four bungalow units have had unpainted walls for more than a decade, Lucente said.

If the council approves use of the trust funds, Lucente predicted that painting could begin within two months and be completed by June, 1993. He already plans to seek more trust fund money next year to resurface the playground.

The Bureau of Sanitation, which operates the 160-acre landfill, also plans to provide volunteers to get the project rolling, said John De La Rosa, manager of the bureau’s refuse division. The volunteers will prepare classrooms for painting, Lucente said.

School district officials said that under current budget restrictions, school exteriors might get repainted every 20 years, but that funding no longer exists to paint school interiors.

“A lot of schools, particularly in the Valley, have not been painted since they were built in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s,” said Margaret Scholl, director of maintenance and operation for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “When it was time for those schools to come up for a repaint there was no money left.”

Scholl said the district has a backlog of requests for maintenance such as new roofing, paint or asphalt resurfacing that would cost more than $600 million.