Amid the Rubble, Broken Promises

The Northridge earthquake hit nearly three years ago, but you wouldn’t know it looking at Laurel Davidson’s third-grade classroom. As in many rooms at Encino Elementary School, time seems to have frozen.

Cracks snake along the room’s four walls like freeways on a city map. A brown papier-mache dog--a student’s forgotten art project--lies amid a pile of plaster chunks, dust and earthquake rubble in the middle of the floor.

“Oh my God!” Davidson cried out, seeing the room for the first time in more than two years. “It just makes me want to cry. I miss this room.”

Ever since Encino Elementary’s two-story building was damaged in the Jan. 17, 1994, temblor, Davidson and the 10 other teachers who taught in the building have been working out of portable bungalows on the school’s playground. What the teachers thought would be a one- or two-year wait has turned into a seeming eternity. And the frustration is evident.

“I started my teaching career in 1962 and I’m going to end it working out of this box with no ventilation, no windows that open, no sinks for the kids to wash their hands, no storage places for them to hang their book bags,” said teacher Julie Walden, who has been at the school 11 years.

Walden and her colleagues are not alone in their annoyance with what they say has been slow progress in repairing earthquake-damaged schools. Educators at several San Fernando Valley schools badly damaged by the quake are complaining about the slow pace of repairs, which is making temporary facilities feel much too permanent.

“If they would just say this will be ready in 2003 and it was ready in 2003, then we could live with this for now and prepare for that,” said Kennedy High School Principal Warren Mason. “But they tell you one year and then change the date to the next year and then the year after that.”

These educators do not blame their bosses at the Los Angeles Unified School District. They say they understand that there were delays getting money for the work from the federal government. So far, all but two major projects have been funded.

The problem, school district officials say, is finding architects, engineers and contractors to get the work done. Other repairs are awaiting approval by the state Office of Emergency Services.

Repairs still haven’t been completed on more than two dozen quake-damaged schools in the Valley. Much of the work is minor. But there is still major damage at several schools where two- and three-story buildings had to be demolished or closed. Encino, Van Gogh and San Fernando elementary schools, along with Cleveland and Kennedy high schools, are among those hardest hit by repair delays.

District officials in charge of the repairs predict city schools will be operating normally by the end of 1998. To date, the district has repaired 3,944 of the 5,333 buildings damaged in the temblor. Repairs at 727 other sites still are underway, the district reports.

LAUSD officials say they have cleared most of the logistic hurdles that come with coordinating such a large number of repairs with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The school district and FEMA have been working closely this past year, said Margaret Scholl, director of the district’s earthquake recovery program.

“We’re in agreement on all kinds of issues,” Scholl said. “There’s never been a disaster like this one, and we’ve made positive accomplishments.”

But Scholl’s assessment offers little comfort to Lena Saylor, cafeteria director at Cleveland High School in Reseda.

Every school day since the earthquake, Saylor and her crew of mostly female workers have had to push 6-foot-tall, 60-plus-pound food warming machines from the school cafeteria down a 12-foot ramp to a row of outdoor tables where they serve the students. They perform the job three times a day, beginning with breakfast, then repeating the procedure for the midmorning nutrition break and again at lunch.

“It’s taxing because of the injuries some of the girls have sustained,” Saylor said. One worker got her hand caught between a door and one of the warmers. “Those warmers are only made to push around in the cafeteria, but not the distance we take them.”

The foundation beneath Cleveland’s student store and lunch shelter buckled during the earthquake, and the facility has been closed since. Before the quake, cafeteria workers served from behind ticket-booth-style windows while students stood in line under the shelter. Now, students swarm tables set up beneath a gigantic, metal-framed tent.

“It’s miserable,” worker Nancy Sax said about the new setup. “When these things are full you have to have two people to take it out because it’s extremely heavy. Plus, the students aren’t orderly here.”

School district officials say they expect Cleveland’s lunch shelter to be finished by next summer. Thirty other projects due for completion next summer are also in the design phase, according to district reports.

Work at Kennedy High School will probably take longer. The quake destroyed the three-story administration building, which also housed 20 classrooms. It is now a dirt lot that is used as a practice field for the school band. Baffled visitors often pass the lot two or three times looking for the school by its Gothic Avenue address.

Instead, the administration offices are at the other end of the 25-acre campus, housed in former shop classrooms.

Several repairs to the campus have been made, including the installation of a new elevator, Vice Principal Nancy Parks said. But much remains unfinished.

“People are getting antsy and frustrated,” Parks said. “I think the students just adapt to it, but it’s harder on the teachers.”

Seniors are the only students at Kennedy who can remember a pristine campus--complete with a working theater, Principal Mason said.

There is no public address system at Kennedy because it was located in the destroyed main building. So were most of the student lockers. Birds nest in the broken ceiling of the gymnasium’s lobby--where the ceiling lights used to be. For night games there, school employees cart in halogen lights.

Fifty classroom bungalows dominate the school’s parking lots, leaving limited parking for staff and forcing students to park on streets throughout the Granada Hills neighborhood.

“It was a relatively compact campus before and now it’s a supervisory nightmare,” said Parks, who has worked at Kennedy for 10 years.

Parks and Mason are skeptical the repairs will be finished by the promised date in 1998.

“They told us recently that we would be able to hold an assembly in here in January,” Mason said, tapping the front door of the school’s 300-seat theater. Construction has just started on the theater, and workers expect it will take about four months.

“I don’t think we’ll be seeing anything by January, do you?” Mason said.

John Hall, principal of Encino Elementary, shares the same skepticism.

“The constant unfulfilled promises are difficult to deal with,” he said. “It’s kind of like when parents promise to take their children to Disneyland one weekend and that weekend never seems to come. . . . I keep waking up to see that building looking pretty much like it did after the quake.”

Meanwhile, time continues to stand still inside Encino’s condemned school building. The earthquake was on a Monday--Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a school holiday. Davidson left her third-grade classroom the previous Friday after preparing for the first day of the upcoming school week, a Tuesday.

And still on the chalkboard, in perfect teacher’s script, is “January 18, 1994.”