El Camino Real Reopens, but ‘It Doesn’t Look Like Our School’

Los Angeles Unified’s last earthquake-ravaged school reopened Wednesday as confused but eager students wound their way around a revamped, partially reconstructed El Camino Real High School.

School administrators and armband-wearing volunteers guided arriving students through a mini-city of 39 bungalows set up on the athletic blacktop, with somewhat more ease than did their counterparts Tuesday at John F. Kennedy High School in Granada Hills.

At El Camino, which unlike Kennedy did not suffer red-tagged buildings, district officials determined that 102 classrooms were not usable after the quake because of stress cracks in the masonry, downed ceilings and loosened partition walls.

Eight rooms were repaired in time for opening day and officials expect most others to be ready in the next two months.

Students began arriving before 7 a.m. to pick up their programs, which list classes and locations. Clusters of teen-agers milled about the courtyard, waiting for first period to begin, some touring the new layout, others comparing classes with friends the way they might on any other first day of school.

After an early morning survey of the territory, Sarah Wilkes, 17, reported her findings to a group of newly arriving friends.

“It’s just rows and rows and rows of bungalows,” Wilkes told them. “It doesn’t look like our school. And it’s going to be really crowded--the walkways are really skinny.”

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Bungalows were assigned numbers that would match room numbers in the main building, so that when regular classrooms are repaired, students could be easily rerouted into the building. But programs with familiar-sounding room locations offered more confusion than comfort.

“I have no idea where to go,” 16-year-old Shannon Galindo said. “The classes on the programs say the rooms in the main building, and that’s closed.”

That the bungalows had no numbers also served to complicate the morning. Realizing the problem Tuesday, teachers tried to make do by taping handwritten numbers in bungalow windows.

Students, however, still had problems. Joe Bijou, 16, was about to give up in frustration after half an hour of wandering around with little success in finding his first class.

“This must be a typo,” Bijou said, staring at his already crumpled program and throwing his hands up in exasperation. “It says ‘CO-2’ and it’s supposed to be one letter and one number. It’s not even on the map.”

Remnants of yellow police tape and a sign across one reopened building that still read “Earthquake Damage, Do Not Enter” caused another mix-up.

“I asked if I was supposed to go in there,” Joey Barlev, 14, said. “I thought I might get in trouble for going to my class.”

Once in class, teachers did their best to make students feel comfortable. English teacher Naomi McCoy spent hours Tuesday rescuing posters of literary figures like Huckleberry Finn and Julius Ceasar from the indoor construction site and hanging them around her bungalow.

“There are things we are going to have to do without for the next four weeks,” she told her first-period expository-writing students. “But I wanted to give you something to look at.”

Assistant Principal Linda Miller said 378 students of the school’s 2,540 student body did not show up Wednesday.

And although 56 students transferred to other nearby schools in the weeks after the quake, 15 transferred back Wednesday.

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In order to assure their seniors would graduate along with the rest of the students in the district, El Camino administrators decided to begin school five minutes early, end 10 minutes late and scrape together other bits of time from elsewhere in the day. A weeklong spring break was also reduced to a daylong holiday.

“I think it will get better if we all work together,” said Jose Centeno, 15, as he waited in a gymnasium line for his program. “Right now, it’s going to be tough.”