Leisure, We Do Quite Well, but . . . : HEARTS OF THE CITY / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news

It was a hand-wringing Thanksgiving weekend for Santa Ana school officials, wondering if they dare ask voters next year to pony up an extra $15 annually to pay for school improvements. A poll showed $18 would fly about as far as a turkey. At $15, the thing just might trot.

Meanwhile, not far down the road in Irvine--where the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways meet in a harmonic convergence--hand-clapping is the order of the day after last week’s opening of the new 21-screen Edwards theater complex, already dubbed “The Big One.” And why not? Edwards officials say the multiplex is the world’s biggest, both in square footage and in potential occupancy, with its 6,400 seats. The 21st screen is scheduled to open in January and will be 3-D IMAX and six stories high. The square footage--just shy of 160,000--dwarfs the 90,000 square feet at Cineplex in Universal City, according to the architect.

The chest-puffing will be short-lived. Darned if Ontario hasn’t announced that it will someday sport a 30-theater complex, merely raising the bar another notch.

The new Edwards theaters cost a paltry $27 million. In other words, just a little more than the going rate for a new middle school and plenty for a couple new elementary schools, were you so inclined.

Rest easy, folks, we are not so inclined.

Here in Southern California at this point in history, we do leisure quite well. We lead the nation in leisure. When it comes to per-pupil spending, we’re in the Bottom 10.

Bond issues for school construction have been as welcomed as stale yams, as residents in Santa Clarita and Burbank can attest. Last summer, the Legislature was unable to muster enough support among its members to put the question to voters statewide, who probably would have shot it down anyway, just as they did in 1994.

Santa Ana, then, is not the only district looking down the barrel. Farther south, the Capistrano Unified School District waits for funding “to build new schools that we desperately need to build,” according to spokeswoman Jackie Price. The district has an immediate need for a middle school and elementary school, says Price, but the state’s school building fund is empty.

Hey, buck up. Why not celebrate what we do well?

To get in the mood, you might venture to the new Irvine Entertainment Center, of which the Edwards 21 is the centerpiece. Even if you’re one of those soreheads who wants to spend money on schools, you’re going to like this place.

For best effect, come down after dark, when from afar the theater gives off a whiff of Las Vegas. Kinda sparkly, kinda glitzy and that “21” lighted up gives you that lucky feeling. I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but why is it not hard to picture a floating casino on the lake in Mission Viejo?

The center has AT&T; on one side of it, Western Digital on another. Then lots of open space. Down here in Irvine, where nothing ever seems to go wrong, it’s tempting to say the center is surrounded on all sides by the future.

Not to be a wet blanket about it, but that’s exactly what drives school districts nuts. A lot of them are boxed in, with no place to go. Santa Ana, for example, is thinking of building a school on top of a parking structure in a shopping center.

After touring the Big One, I couldn’t help but think of Santa Ana anguishing over whether voters would fork over an extra $15 a year to upgrade school facilities.

Fifteen dollars. The price of two movie tickets.

You hear the argument that people are tired of tax increases and suspicious of public officials, including school administrators. No way, they say, will they give them $15 a year, without accountability. And yet, they’ll hand over $15 for two crummy movies and demand accountability from . . . whom?

If you’re going to waste 15 bucks, why not take a flyer and waste it on education?

Don’t get me wrong, nobody likes entertainment more than I do. Every society needs its leisure outlets. “It’s the escape aspect of it into another world, to exchange places with the characters in a movie that we don’t deal with in everyday reality,” says theater architect Marios Savopoulos of the Newport Beach firm of Musil Perkowitz Ruth Inc.

Savopoulos has created a grand illusion, indeed, with the giant movie murals, stainless steel and polished granite, and sweeping staircase. “People want to be in a grand environment,” he says. “They want to feel important. That’s what we wanted to do, make them feel important.”

School officials make that argument too. They want children to feel important. Just as in the entertainment business, sometimes that costs money.

“It’s interesting when you watch people with taxes, in general, and the mentality, particularly in Orange County with its no-tax or enough-tax mentality,” says one Orange County school official. “It almost doesn’t matter what it’s for. Whether it’s for schools or roads or whatever, [they say], ‘I’m taxed all I’m willing to be taxed for, and I don’t want to be taxed one more cent.’ We’re seeing that a lot.”

Sure, the entertainment center was built with private, not public, funds. But let’s not kid ourselves--if there’s enough money to go to the movies, there’s enough money out there to rebuild education in California.

They may not call your school the Big One, and it may not offer valet parking, but what would you rather leave your kids holding on their 18th birthday: a handful of movie stubs or a high school diploma that means something?