TUJUNGA : Christian School to Occupy Vacant Site

A Christian school won approval Friday to convert a long-vacant building on McGroarty Street into a facility for 125 students.

The building will be used by Trinity Christian School, a private school on O’Dell Avenue in Sunland. Enrollment is now 170, kindergarten through sixth grade.

“This facility has been an eyesore for a while,” said Philip Taylor, one of the neighbors of the building just off Mount Gleason Street on the border between Sunland and Tujunga.

Trinity leases the property from the Sunair Foundation, which ran a home for asthmatic children there until 1985. Five years ago, an attempt to place a home for emotionally disturbed teen-agers on the site was denied by the city zoning board of appeals.

Although neighbors supported Trinity at a hearing Friday, concerns were voiced about traffic and noise.

Trinity Christian School plans to open the building as an additional campus for fourth- to seventh-graders in September. The school will eventually grow to a kindergarten through eighth-grade school, Vice Principal Debbie Taylor said.

School officials said that the starting class times would be staggered and parents would be encouraged to drop off their children at the O’Dell Avenue school so they can be shuttled to the McGroarty Street school by van.

The use of the building for a school was approved by John J. Parker, associate zoning administrator for the city on the condition that the student population be limited to 125, that school traffic use Mount Gleason Street, and that 7:45 a.m. be set as the earliest time students could be dropped off.

The school also had the support of the Sunland-Tujunga Assn. of Residents.

“Nobody I’ve talked to has opposed the school,” said Rois Davidson, a neighbor of the building who spoke at a public hearing on the issue Friday. “It would definitely upgrade the property.”

Trinity Christian School was founded in 1978.