Los Angeles Times Special Quake Report: One Year Later : Still Shaken / Challenges : The Comeback Trail / Twists and Turns on the Road to Recovery : Schools Answer the Bell Slowly

What else could have happened to city schools?

The Los Angeles Unified School District had teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, narrowly avoided a teachers’ strike and deflected a drive to dismember it.

Then, on Jan. 17 came the earthquake. It lasted just a few seconds but forever altered the course of the district.

The temblor damaged nearly 300 campuses and placed dozens of school programs on hold.

“This is the worst year I’ve ever had working in education,” said Ron Twombly, the principal at Holmes Middle School in Canoga Park, which sustained almost $1 million in earthquake damage. “I couldn’t have imagined the hours, the planning, the mess. I’m just now catching a second wind.”

From the Downtown district headquarters to dozens of school campuses in the San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles, administrators and teachers say they are only now emerging from a year of upheaval. In the months after the earthquake, staffers tried to rebuild damaged buildings and psyches. Students spent hours in counseling with psychologists paid from federal disaster funds. Many teachers had to recreate their classrooms with fewer materials and textbooks in bungalows or other undamaged rooms.

Assistant Supt. Roger Rasmussen, who is serving as the district’s liaison with federal and state emergency agencies, said the district is still living with the disaster: “The schools themselves still are reeling from the impact of this earthquake.”

District officials estimate that the school repairs will cost between $100 million and $150 million. But the pace of the repairs has been slow and the infusion of money even slower. The district blames the federal government’s bureaucracy and red tape.

For its part, the Federal Emergency Management Agency says it is funding projects in a timely fashion despite the large number of damaged buildings and classrooms. The district has about 1,200 repair projects under way at about 300 campuses. And FEMA officials are quick to point out that students are all back in classrooms. “I think that’s a significant accomplishment,” said James Lee Witt, FEMA director.

The earthquake seriously damaged about 150 schools, leaving 18 campuses closed for three or four weeks after the temblor. Some still are not operational: students from Van Gogh Elementary in Granada Hills attend classes on the Frost Middle School campus; it will be at least three years before Van Gogh reopens.

Nearly half, or 20, of the district’s high school gymnasiums were closed after the quake, and 752 classrooms were declared unusable at 64 schools. In addition, nearly 100 auditoriums and multipurpose rooms sustained significant damage.

Most of those big-ticket repair projects, however, still have not been approved by FEMA and some schools no longer host home basketball and volleyball games; others have been forced to cancel holiday programs and assemblies.

On rainy days, some students eat lunch in their classrooms, others try to stay shielded from the wet weather under canopies because lunch shelters and cafeterias remain closed.

But the disaster has had positive effects. Many schools are better prepared now than they were before the temblor. Parent groups have raised money for earthquake supplies and schools that lost materials were given federal money to buy updated computers and textbooks. Many administrators have made their classrooms safer by securing furniture and equipment.

“I feel much better than I did a year ago about preparedness,” said Ronni Ephraim, principal at Limerick Avenue Elementary School in Canoga Park. “I’m much more confident that in our schools, our children are better prepared.”

Harriet Sculley, president of the 31st District Parent Teacher Student Assn., which covers the San Fernando Valley, called the disaster “the ultimate wake-up call. Everyone’s attention became focused on how to make our schools better prepared,” she said.

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At Cal State Northridge, which sustained about $350 million in damage, President Blenda J. Wilson looks at a calendar showing the last of the campus’ nearly 300 portable classrooms departing by fall 1998.

Ask Wilson about that date and her response is a visible wince. “I just need things to move more quickly. But the engineers have convinced me on some of the buildings that repairs just can’t go faster,” she said in a recent interview.

A year after the quake shattered the 353-acre campus, CSUN has come a long way toward recovery and achieved a degree of normalcy in its part-makeshift quarters. But full recovery remains four to five years away.

Gone is the rush that enabled the campus to bypass its damaged buildings and reopen only two weeks late a year ago. Today, with a return to proper paperwork and competitively bid contracts, there is a more even-paced march toward full recovery that will characterize the coming years.

When the spring semester opens Jan. 30, at least half a dozen major campus buildings will be closed--Sierra Tower, fine arts, engineering, computer center, administration, and the wings of the Oviatt Library.

Campus officials hope to demolish the partially collapsed 2,500-space parking structure on Zelzah Avenue early in the semester.

Many classes will start in portables, although the first of the campus’ 11 clusters of trailers should be dismantled later this month or next. And campus officials expect nearly two-thirds of the classroom trailers to be gone by the fall.