Awaiting Funds, Playgrounds Go Downhill

Once or twice a week, before they head out to play at recess, fourth-graders at Figueroa Street Elementary School drag trash cans onto the playground and clean it up with their bare hands. Some pick loose gravel off the disintegrating asphalt, while others yank out the weeds that shove skyward through yards-long fissures.

The youngsters don’t complain because most can recall a painful stumble or fall on the playground that left them picking shards of gray rock from their wounds.

“One time I tripped like this and skinned my knee,” said Maria Alamos, 9, demonstrating how her toe caught in a hole.

The sorry state of the yard at this South-Central campus is the rule in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Nearly 400 school playgrounds are moonscape stretches of cracks and craters, crumbling asphalt and melting macadam that often date from the days when the students’ parents, and in some cases grandparents, attended grade school.

For passersby, the schoolyards are like vast billboards advertising the decline of public education.

Yet, for decades, talk of playground renovations--which cost about $100,000 a pop--has been shoved aside in the press of emergency mends: patching holes in roofs, wrapping faulty wiring, fixing leaky pipes. Meanwhile, the schools’ already substandard open space has been shrinking as growing enrollment has pushed portable classrooms onto the ball courts.

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People who study play for a living, such as Roger Hart, director of Children’s Environments Research Group at City University of New York, consider the demise of schoolyards a national tragedy, particularly in major cities where they may be children’s only safe outdoor havens.

“Where children form friendships is not in the competitive setting of the classroom, it’s . . . on the playgrounds--that’s where we create democratic society,” Hart said. “It’s a stupid missed opportunity when you’re designing the learning environment indoors, but not thinking about the outdoors.”

In the Los Angeles school district, that oversight could be reversed in November if voters pass a $2.4-billion school bond--about 2% of which would launch the district’s largest playground repair project ever.

But getting the required two-thirds vote from a tax-tired population is far from guaranteed. And even the measure’s passage would not ensure that the nation’s second-largest school district could fix so many playgrounds in a timely or adequate fashion. A modest project to repave nine yards last summer saw only one completed on time.

Beyond the practical concerns lies a philosophical one. The current plan to simply replace schools’ old blacktops raises the hackles of those driving a national movement to transform such asphalt jungles into fresh-air classrooms of vegetation and creative equipment.

“Oh my God! It’s going back to the ‘50s!” said Robin Moore, a professor of landscape architecture at North Carolina State University, who stepped onto the cutting edge of playground design two decades ago by turning a Berkeley school yard into an ecosystem.

“They have a great opportunity in Los Angeles,” Moore said. “Not to take it up is blinkered thinking.”

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American playgrounds were born around the turn of the century out of concern that city children lacked the taxing physical work of their country cousins. But public school grounds were rarely touched by various playground movements that radically altered many community parks in the ensuing decades--including the 1950s novelty era, which spawned concrete turtles and Sputnik rockets, and the 1970s vogue for wooden climbing structures.

The majority of schoolyards remained expanses of flat, hot, hard ground punctuated occasionally by metal jungle gyms. The reason given now as then: easy maintenance.

Only small gardens--often disconnected from the regular playground and overgrown--indicate that someone has paid attention to the movement toward “naturalization,” which has swept through Europe, Japan and Canada since World War II.

In Los Angeles, most school playgrounds were laid down 40 years ago. Since then, it has been patch as patch can, with the gradual breakdown hastened recently by the 1994 Northridge earthquake and 1995 floods. The result at many schools is a collage of lumpy repairs often slopped right over the painted lines meant to define games--old hopscotch squares, tetherball circles, volleyball courts.

“Every time we call about repainting the lines, they say, ‘You ought to wait for the resurfacing,’ ” said Rosemary Lucente, Figueroa Street School’s principal. Watching boys playing soccer in an area once painted as an oval track, she said, “Look, they’re staying within the confines . . . they have imaginary lines.”

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Playground deterioration rose into political consciousness here only a year ago, when 9-year-old Andrew Penn of Pomelo Elementary, in the West San Fernando Valley, showed the school board his six-inch scar from a fall during recess. The debate at that September 1995 meeting focused on how to spend a $31.5-million state windfall. Penn’s principal thought that Andrew’s injury spotlighted one need.

The board members ordered a hasty injury study. Of schools that responded, San Jose Street Elementary in Mission Hills was the worst off, documenting 58 playground injuries in a three-week span.

The board agreed to spend more than $1 million to repave nine of the worst playgrounds, prompting the usual wrangling over which schools got picked--especially after San Jose Street was not among them.

Board member David Tokofsky complained that four of the schools were in the Westside/West Valley district of Mark Slavkin, then the board president. Only one was in Tokofsky’s Eastside/Northeast Valley district, one in South-Central, and none in the Center City and Mid-Wilshire areas.

“The areas where there’s the least places for kids to play outside of school have the least number of playgrounds being addressed,” Tokofsky said. “It’s behind the doors, eke out a little bit more if you’re president. It’s pork.”

But one of the lucky schools in Slavkin’s district seemed a natural--Pomelo Elementary, of the famous six-inch scar.

Amid appropriate fanfare, a new playground was dedicated there last month, its sleek black surface and freshly painted kickball diamonds commemorating the first major resurfacing project in the district since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.

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Not on display at the West Hills campus was the rest of the story: Of the nine playgrounds scheduled for summer overhauls, only Pomelo’s was finished in time for the start of school. Work had not even begun at two campuses, and students at several others were welcomed back from summer vacation by construction in progress--and no official place to play.

The district’s maintenance director, Jim Samples, blamed the holdup on complications involved in putting public projects out to bid--contracts were not signed until August, two months after the district released funding.

In preparation for the possible passage of the huge bond issue, groups of playgrounds are being pre-bid, Samples said, in hopes of circumventing such delays.

At Charnock Road School in West Los Angeles, a promised summer resurfacing began only this month, though Principal Shirley Kouffman was hardly complaining. “The end result will be so wonderful that we’re willing to put up with the inconvenience,” she said.

Indeed, delay or not, her campus was far better off than most of the district’s 663 schools.

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The politically sensitive choice of which playgrounds get fixed first--if the bond issue passes--will be made with the help of an allocation committee being established by the district. But that leaves open another fundamental issue: how they should be fixed.

Looking at Los Angeles from afar, some academics say it would be a crime not to bring local campuses into the modern age of play. Joe Frost, a professor at the University of Texas who has written extensively about playgrounds, said many cities are finding that $100,000 a school is enough to do something far more creative than asphalt, “to make their playgrounds more interesting and exciting for children.”

Frost is helping schools in Anchorage overhaul their playgrounds, putting in climbing superstructures, sledding hills and natural areas.

Although Los Angeles schools would have some discretion over how the bond money is used, the district’s deputy maintenance director finds it hard to envision such changes here. Sure, Lynn Roberts said, it would be great to plant grass and trees instead of sending in steamrollers. But that ignores the pricey, irritable irrigation systems in a district with too few gardeners and too many schools with basic needs.

So while officials would “love green space,” Roberts said, “we’d probably have to paint it on because we don’t have anyone to maintain it.”

Newer creative play structures--elaborate concoctions of ladders, bridges and slides--are also expensive, costing more than $20,000 apiece. So the district’s current plan is to simply reinstall whatever equipment is left on Los Angeles’ playgrounds after re-galvanizing the rusty metal.

Debate about how to refurbish playgrounds is not limited to the halls of academe. It is heard in hallways at Figueroa Street School, which is negotiating with the nonprofit group TreePeople to help plant trees around its perimeter--if someone will commit to care for them.

“The maintenance people wanted to take out the shrubs [struggling to grow] around the outside of the fence,” said Assistant Principal Miguel Campa. “I mentioned that to the TreePeople and it was blasphemy.”

“They’re right!” said mentor teacher Gloria Simosky. “We should have more plants, not less. . . . Soccer should be played on grass. Volleyball should be played on grass.”

“But it’s just like a pet,” Campa said. “You shouldn’t have an animal if you can’t take care of it.”

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Experts have long argued that the setting can affect the way children play. A pivotal book on the subject, “The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren,” written in 1959 by British couple Iona and Peter Opie, advocated natural spaces where youngsters can dig, explore and exercise their minds--and less asphalt, which is more suited to organized sports and other large-motor-skill exercises.

Present-day play experts say the key is asking what children want.

Posing the question on Figueroa Street Elementary’s playground brought an avalanche of responses. Yes, the students said, they want more balls, a second basketball court, maybe a pool. But also grass, more trees, a playhouse, some sand and a smooth place to jump rope.

Typically, older students have more grassy areas at their disposal--the football field would never be asphalt. But their blacktop areas are no better than those at the elementary schools.

At Gardena High, the tennis courts are so rough that coaches from other schools have threatened to boycott matches there. Coach Daron Andrade doesn’t blame them, noting that the last stopgap slurry sealing was done eight years ago, and only after a player suffered a bad sprain.

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Safety and liability concerns have prompted the greatest changes in schoolyards in 80 years, but those have largely involved removal of equipment. In Los Angeles--which was hit with seven damage claims stemming from playground accidents in the last fiscal year--swings and slides have been taken out and rings chained and scheduled for removal, and jungle gyms probably will be next. The latest scare is lead-based paint, commonly found on playground equipment in a survey released in September by the Consumer Products Safety Commission.

Playground safety advocates say the efforts are tardy and sparse considering national estimates that playgrounds lead to 15 deaths and 200,000 emergency room visits annually. Studies say schoolyards tend to be the most dangerous, with officials responding slowly to even grave dangers: It took four years after a 6-year-old fell off a swing and died in 1951 for Los Angeles schools to add rubber matting under play equipment.

“It is a subtle form of child abuse--we are inviting innocent children to dangerous playgrounds,” said Seymour M. Gold, a professor of environmental planning at UC Davis, who helped draft the state’s playground safety standards.

According to Gold, no playground built before 1981 meets current state regulations, enacted six years ago. Those standards, which must be met by the year 2000, include having foot-thick protective surfaces under equipment, wider tubing for better gripping and climbing structures no more than six feet tall.

Such safety measures, Gold said, hardly mean sterile playgrounds. He believes that school districts could use the money that they save with fewer injury settlements to pay for landscaping and the new play apparatus that children love.

“If kids could vote,” he said, “things would be different.”

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Of course, some schools find a way without a bond issue.

Fenton Avenue Charter School in Lake View Terrace resurfaced its playground with a community grant--awarded for being close to a garbage dump--matched by campus funds freed by the fiscal independence allowed charters.

The 112th Street School near Watts got a new playground and paint job, thanks to developer John Shea, after he built a new gym at a private Catholic school across the street.

Laurel Canyon’s Wonderland Elementary is a model of the possible. Along one flank of the playground stands a row of raised planting beds that inspired kindergartners to hold a spring carrot festival. Each classroom has been assigned one of 17 freshly planted trees to nurture. And the crown jewel of the remodeling is a multitiered climbing structure set atop a double layer of rubber padding.

At first, Principal Judy Perez makes the transformation sound effortless:

“The equipment we had before was really substandard and old--a jungle gym and a ladder, it’s what every school has. We decided we wanted something better.”

But then Perez acknowledges how much Wonderland--a gifted-student magnet located in an upscale neighborhood--benefits from middle-class parent volunteers rare in a big city school district. They raised $25,000 for the equipment, and donated materials and labor for the planting boxes. Dozens spent a Saturday at the campus this month, painting flowered murals, building trellises, and planting trees, with TreePeople’s help.

Walking to a corner of the yard where she hopes to begin her next playground project, a full outdoor classroom, Perez said, “We’re very fortunate, yes.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Prop. BB

Proposition BB on November’s ballot would allow the Los Angeles Unified School District to float $2.4 billion in bonds, the first local school bond issue since 1974.

* In addition to funding the overhaul of 400 playgrounds, it would pay for improvements at all 663 campuses, including rewiring, lead paint removal, computer purchases and air-conditioner installation at schools in the hottest parts of the district.

* A voter poll conducted last spring found widespread support for the bond, although the backing fell below the required two-thirds majority when the cost to property owners was disclosed.

* Property owners would pay about $38 more in taxes for every $100,000 in assessed value.