Schools Reopen to Labor Talks, Quake Damage

When school bells beckon thousands of San Fernando Valley students back to school today, their earthquake-damaged campuses will look much the way they did in June, their teachers will be taking strike votes and their friends might be miles away on other campuses.

Welcome to the 1994-95 school year. It’s the first year after the devastating Northridge earthquake damaged schools and psyches. The first year teacher contract talks were conducted prior to the beginning of the semester. And the first year hundreds of students chose where to attend school under the new open-enrollment policy.

Overall, Los Angeles Unified School District officials and school board members say they want this to be the year of improved student achievement and attendance and safer campuses. But they acknowledge that quake-damaged schools and continued labor tensions could hamper those efforts.

“We have the potential to change . . . with less politics and division and more focus on students,” said Mark Slavkin, the school board president. “But it’s frustrating--getting schools back and making them even better has been very slow. It obviously hurts morale.”

Indeed. Teachers union President Helen Bernstein said she expects about “15 minutes” of labor peace and that teachers still harbor resentment toward the district for a 10% pay cut imposed two years ago.

“The anger and distrust is just rampant,” Bernstein said. “We have huge class sizes, no supplies. The demoralization and anger hasn’t been touched.”

Teachers on Tuesday and Wednesday will begin voting whether to accept an 8% restoration of the 10% pay cut or to strike. While union leaders have suggested that teachers take the district’s offer, Bernstein said she can’t be sure which way the membership will go.

For their part, some teachers say they had hoped for a full salary restoration but that the 8% offer is likely the best they will get. Many Valley teachers say they are distressed, also, by the constant reminders of the Jan. 17 earthquake they will face.

At Kennedy High in Granada Hills, one of the two most heavily damaged campuses in the district, students and teachers will return to portable classrooms and to a large construction zone in the middle of campus.

“It’s going to be like a city being developed while people still live there,” said Dave Ptashne, Kennedy High School’s health education teacher and union representative. “I think a lot of teachers were really counting on having the classroom buildings open.”

District officials say they, too, had expected more work to have been completed over the summer but that the federal and state money to pay for the repairs has been slow to arrive. The district had identified 41 schools as their top priorities for repairs. So far, just three have been completed.

“It’s going to take a long time to repair these schools because there’s a lot of red tape with federal money--that’s not a surprise to anybody,” said board member Julie Korenstein, whose district includes many of the hardest-hit campuses. “We’re not dragging our feet because we choose to. We went through a massive earthquake and we’re still living in its shadow.”

Yellow tape cordons off classrooms, gymnasiums and auditoriums around the Valley. At Cleveland High in Reseda, for example, students will be forced to walk around barricades on campus to get to classes and they will eat lunch under a huge canopy while the cafeteria is remodeled.

At Encino Elementary, the problems are more than structural. Because the two-story classroom building remains closed, kindergarten classes will be held both in the mornings and afternoons rather than just in the mornings--as many parents prefer.

“We’re stuck in the same crunch for space as we were last year,” said Ferol White, the Encino principal. “It is a shame. The thing that’s most upsetting is to have to change the kindergarten program.”

At San Fernando Elementary, Principal Candy Fernandez said the district has repaired four bungalows but she has a two-story classroom building and auditorium that cannot be used. “After all this, I hope that in my lifetime this will be a beautiful campus.”

While repair work has yet to be completed on many campuses, some schools have had beams and walkways shored up and makeshift walkways installed.

At Danube Avenue Elementary in Granada Hills, the precariously balanced overhead arcades have been rebuilt and the entrance to the school shored up.

While the earthquake severely damaged the school buildings, it also took a toll on enrollment. After the quake hit, schools in the most damaged areas reported large numbers of absent students.

While the district this year will be better able to determine the impact on enrollment, officials already estimate about 1,500 fewer students in the 641,000-student district.

To accommodate a drop in enrollment, some campuses haven’t replaced teachers who retired last year, and others plan to have fewer classes. At Danube, for example, class sizes are expected to be smaller and one teaching position will not be filled.

But some schools will experience a surge in enrollment due to the district’s new open-enrollment policy. This is designed to give students more flexibility in choosing schools by allowing them to transfer.

Hundreds of new students are expected at Taft High in Woodland Hills, for example, which had about 600 openings.

Students also will be attending new magnet schools opening for the first time this year. The district last spring expanded some magnets and created new ones, and thousands of students are expected to take advantage of those programs.

The magnets are intended to draw students from all parts of the district to schools outside their neighborhoods for specialized courses with smaller class sizes.

Aside from the constant movement of students this year, the district also expects some administrators to change campuses as well. Under the new LEARN program, in which schools select their own staffs, administrators can be interviewed and selected by local committees.

Sixteen Valley schools this year are becoming part of LEARN, an acronym for Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now. The schools aim to raise student achievement through more parent, teacher and student involvement.

A new districtwide reorganization plan that went into effect this summer also shifts local decisions from the Downtown bureaucracy to the local campuses. Schools have been grouped into clusters and complexes, with the overall goal of opening communication between administrators, teachers and parents from elementary, middle and high schools in the same neighborhoods.

At their first cluster meeting recently, administrators discussed ways to share information with each other. Ron Berz, the Taft principal, suggested schools swap attendance-improvement strategies and coordinate schedules so that teachers and others could observe each other.

The district also has established a new parent and community services branch to promote parental involvement on campuses this year. New parent centers will be opened at local schools, offering more classes to lure parents to their children’s schools.

Some schools, which received federal money after the earthquake, are establishing new enrichment programs for students this year. At Tarzana Elementary, where classroom walls collapsed, the school received special funding to offer homework assistance and other after-school activities.

“If any lessons were learned after this earthquake, it was how to work cooperatively,” said Roberta MacAdam, the Tarzana principal.

“We are really looking forward to the new year--now that we have walls.”