Repair Needs Still Plague 2 High Schools : Facilities: Officials desperately seek ways to renovate the aging campuses. Burbank voters recently rejected a bond measure.

When Burbank High School opened its doors, Warren G. Harding was in the White House and Irving Berlin’s hit tune “April Showers” was on everybody’s radio.

The year was 1922 and the 110 students who attended the new senior high at 3rd Street and Burbank Boulevard had to travel to the edge of town to get there.

Today, nearly 2,000 students go to BHS, and the school, with its peeling paint and leaky roof, is in the heart of the community that grew up around it.

And after the failure of a $100-million bond issue earlier this month, the old high school is also at the center of an increasingly urgent debate in this city over what to do about its aging public schools.

It isn’t just a brick-and-mortar problem. A close look at Burbank High makes it clear that poor conditions there in particular are hurting the quality of education. Some classrooms seem dangerously dark. Forty-year-old fluorescent ceiling fixtures make it hard to read in the dim, yellow haze.

When it’s hot, there is little air conditioning and what there is isn’t reliable. When it’s cold, the heat can’t be trusted either.

“Sometimes I wear my coat all day long,” said library technician Lynn Golnick.

On the other hand, power failures occur regularly, as do stopped-up toilets and locker-room shower drains.

Raising taxes to get the funds needed to fix such things isn’t a popular idea. The proposed bond issue--Burbank’s first since 1952--would have cost most residents less than $50 a year.

If the measure on the April 12 ballot had passed, the district also would have received about $23 million from the city’s Redevelopment Agency and about $15 million from the state.

More than $100 million of the total would have gone into the two senior high schools, Burbank and Burroughs: about $56 million to tear down Burbank High and rebuild it, and $49 million to renovate Burroughs, built in 1927.

The two schools are in equally sad shape, said Board President Elena Hubbell. “But if I had to pick one that best exemplifies problems throughout the district, it would be Burbank.” A few months ago, the district hired Ali A. Kiafar, a 41-year-old architect who also has a doctorate in urban planning from USC, to tackle those problems. As assistant superintendent for planning development and facilities, he is paid $83,000 a year.

One of Kiafar’s first chores will be deciding which repairs must be made at Burbank High this summer to keep the old school open another year.

At a minimum, he already knows that about $20,000 will go into fixing the leaky roof. But things like painting the school--which hasn’t been done for a decade now--is out of the question. So is replacing rotten wooden door and window frames.

“You don’t do cosmetic things in a situation like this,” Kiafar said, shaking his head. “There are major, major problems with the physical plant. Wiring, plumbing, heating, sewers, all of that.”

The school district will eventually have to sell bonds to build a new high school, Hubbell said. It may try again as early as November.

“We’ve looked at every type of funding available and we just have no choice,” said Hubbell. “The money isn’t there.”

However, the board plans to hold a town-hall-type meeting next month to give other residents another chance to air their suggestions. The meeting is tentatively scheduled for May 14 at Burroughs High School.

The same struggle to repair or replace aging schools is going on in other communities throughout California.

Much of the problem can be traced to California’s landmark Proposition 13. Since the 1978 property-tax cut, school districts have had to rely on bond sales to help make up the revenue shortfall.

But those bond issues often fail. This year alone, voters in at least five communities in addition to Burbank have rejected them, according to the California Teachers Assn.

The reason why is no mystery to Burbank resident Elizabeth Michael, a 37-year-old former political campaign consultant now running for Congress and an outspoken opponent of the recent ballot measure.

“There’s an anti-tax tide in this country that won’t quit,” she said. Burbank school officials “can put this on the ballot every year for the next 10 years and it won’t pass.”

Michael added that although she agrees that Burbank High needs work, “I’m not convinced of the urgency of those improvements.”

How serious are conditions at the old high school?

On a tour of the campus last week, Kiafar and David Gott, director of facilities planning, pointed out several areas they are most concerned about. Gott has worked at Burbank High for 34 years.

A series of well-meaning attempts have been made over nearly three-quarters of a century to expand and modernize Burbank High. But in the process, it has grown like Topsy.

Several additions of different sizes and shapes have been tacked onto both ends of the original building. The result is a long string of buildings spread over several blocks.

It is now so far from one end of the school to the other, Gott said, that students have to run to make it in the six minutes they have between classes.

A student with a science class at the north end of campus one period and industrial arts the next at the far south end “can’t possibly get there dodging 1,700 other kids,” he said. There are no elevators in the original three-story building or other facilities for handicapped students. The old concrete stairs are narrow and steep. A wheelchair would never make it through the cave-like doorway of the girls’ restroom on the first floor.

The school library isn’t air-conditioned, nor are most of its 63 classrooms, many of which also face west.

Probably half of the 20-foot-high windows in those classrooms have been painted shut, according to Gott. Outside, 1950s-era metal louvers over the windows intended to keep out the heat and glare are stiff with rust.

“I’m confident there are days when the temperature in some of these rooms hits 115 or 120 degrees,” Gott said.

In a dank first-floor storeroom, the smell still lingers from a family of stray cats that crawled in below it through a rotten window screen earlier this year and made a home for a while.

The high school’s ancient electrical system is inadequate “to say the least,” said Kiafar.

Some areas have just one circuit breaker for every three classrooms. Teachers try to avoid blowing fuses by warning each other when their students will be using computers or when they plan to show movies.

The plumbing system, which frequently backs up, isn’t any better, Gott said. Many of the school’s underground sewer lines, as well as water and gas pipes, date back to the ‘20s.

A large, heated outdoor pool, built in 1931, looks pretty good from the water’s edge. But one level down, in a room next to the pool where the filter equipment sits, Gott points to a deteriorating concrete wall.

Earlier this year, steel bars were added to reinforce the wall. Just on the other side is the pool. “We’re checking it every day now for leaks,” Gott said.