School Bonds Have Flunked in L.A. Before

The Los Angeles electorate’s failure to approve the Board of Education’s plea for a multibillion-dollar bond issue to finance badly needed school renovation and construction has sent analysts and school officials scrambling for explanations.

Many attribute the voters’ rejection of the proposal to “the realities of the new Los Angeles.” Among the most frequently cited of these are the fact that an ever-decreasing number of white voters send their children to public schools, the fact that, as the electorate as a whole grows older, fewer likely voters have school-age children, and the suspicion that California’s lingering anti-tax sentiment has spilled over onto proposed bond issues of all sorts. Finally, there is the belief that the general dissatisfaction with public education has made voters reluctant to finance more of the same.

But history shows that school bonds have had a rough time in Los Angeles before and that the poor conditions of educational facilities that so alarm administrators today are nothing new. In fact, more than 60 years ago, the city was convulsed by a struggle over school funding whose intensity has been unmatched ever since.

Nearly one year after the disastrous 6.3-magnitude Long Beach earthquake struck March 10, 1933--killing 115 people, leveling thousands of buildings and causing $45 million in property damage--local school officials took a hard look at their facilities. What they saw created a new sense of urgency about the necessity of increasing school safety. The Board of Education proposed a $20.4-million bond issue to correct the problem--about $246 million in today’s dollars.

Teachers and proponents of the bond measure organized students. Together, they waged one of the most visible campaigns in the district’s history, staging school marches and mass demonstrations that sent tens of thousands of elementary school students out of their classrooms and into the streets.

Ministers who saw a connection between loose morals and the earthquake suddenly were sharing front page space in the city’s newspapers with photographs of boisterous students from Micheltorena School in Silver Lake. The children taught Los Angeles residents a lesson or two about school spirit as they lined nearby streets, waving placards and chanting, “Make our schools safe” and “Take us out of the danger zone.”

Meanwhile, the district’s administrators produced visible evidence of their plight by setting up 879 wood-and-canvas tents on campuses across the city. Soon, most of the district’s 330,000 students--about half the number enrolled today--were attending classes in such makeshift facilities. During the hot months, students were bothered by flies. In the winter, rain dripped on textbooks and the wind blew the tent flaps, sending chills through young bodies.

School enrollment declined. Partly, of course, that was because the Depression forced many older children to work to help support their families. But there was also a sharp decline in enrollment in the lower grades. Bond supporters, including The Times’ editorial page, quickly attributed the drop to parents’ fear of sending their children to unsafe schools.

Despite the vigor and visibility of the pro-bond campaign, however, voters soundly defeated the measure. But the students, many of whom faced the prospect of a continued education under canvas, grew increasingly militant. At 3rd Street School in the heart of affluent Hancock Park, 950 children dressed in red, white and blue carried banners around the school grounds, asking voters to pass a second, scaled-down bond measure of $12.4 million.

Rescue finally came in the form of federal aid. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal made school construction a centerpiece of its public works program. Buoyed by federal funds, Los Angeles voters decided that they knew a good deal when they saw one and passed their own local funding measure, setting in motion a citywide reconstruction program.