BURBANK : School Program Faces Space Crunch

Students in the Los Angeles County-run community school program in Burbank will not be using classroom space at the district’s middle schools, Supt. Arthur Pierce said this week.

The district has been grappling with a space crunch since the Burbank Adult School--where two of the three community school classes had been held--asked for one of its classrooms back, leaving one class without a meeting place.

The community school program, taught by county Office of Education personnel, handles between 18 and 20 high school students who have been expelled from district schools or placed on court-ordered probation. The Burbank district is obligated to provide space for the county program. The third community school class is taught at the district administration headquarters on Buena Vista Street.

District officials had been considering holding a class at one of the district’s empty middle school classrooms, instead of at the adult school.

But two parents of middle school students and board member Denise Lioy Wilcox spoke in opposition to that idea at a recent Burbank school board meeting, saying they feared for the safety of regular middle school students.

To solve the space crunch, Pierce said officials decided to put the county program in a classroom at Monterey High School, an alternative education program for students having problems in regular schools. Many of the county students attending class are getting ready to make the transition back into regular high school classes, Pierce said.