PACOIMA : Plans Envision Bright Future for Old School

The battle for the minds of students at Pacoima Elementary School--waged daily by teachers competing with gangs and drugs, Pogs and MTV--may someday move from the 79-year-old, cracked, creaking, dreary blue classrooms of today onto a new plane.

Outside, there would be a carefully landscaped campus, fountains, an arbor, stone benches and interconnected breezeways decorated with student paintings. Inside, lectures on Martin Luther King Jr. would be taught before a three-tiered ziggurat, or Egyptian-style platform. Math problems would be worked out by students at low-slung, worm-shaped tables that could be reconfigured to seat a lone student or up to 20.

The idea is to keep students interested in learning. “It could happen,” said Lawrence Gonzales, the school’s principal.

Last week five senior UCLA Extension design students displayed the product of months of work they completed in an advanced interior and exterior design course that examined the needs of this crumbling elementary school in the San Fernando Valley’s poorest community.

Gonzales said he plans to use the ideas, models and sketches by the UCLA students to sell the idea of renovating the school to local businesses, which he hopes will provide the funding.

The program was conceived by Jeffrey Daniels, head of UCLA Extension’s Interior and Environmental Design Program.

“I focused on creating connections between the two main buildings and all the classrooms,” said Amalia Gal, 32, of Santa Monica.

Gal’s renderings illustrate her concept of opening up the school and creating a more community-like atmosphere. Currently, classrooms are lined up like closets in a series of square rooms. One of Gal’s ideas was to split the buildings down the middle and create an amphitheater at one end.

Lisa Nikkah, 24, said she lost track of the number of hours she spent analyzing the space inside the old school and creating new designs. She focused on revamping classrooms to provide an arts area, computer work area and general-subject teaching area in each room.

Several elementary school students inspected the efforts of the UCLA students and expressed wonder.

“They really gonna do all this?” asked Alex Rubalcaba, a sixth-grader. “It’s pretty nice.”

Olga Garcia, a longtime teacher at the school, said the kind of renovation proposed is badly needed.

“We need new classrooms,” she said. “The old ones are in terrible condition. The baseboards are awful. The floors creak and there are holes in the walls. When kids go into new, clean rooms, they find it exhilarating.”

Gonzales plans to seek funding for the renovation as soon as possible. “This is the new era--the new partnership between public and private sector,” he said. “We’re going to go to banks and say, ‘You’re in our community, we’re in your community, and we serve the same people. Let’s do something nice.’ ”

Other schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District will participate next semester in the UCLA program, called “Learning Environments for the 21st Century.” A Pico-Union-area elementary school and a Cerritos infant-care center for teen-age mothers in high school will be the next projects design students will tackle.