District Should Have Stuck to ABCs on Project

The slums just west of downtown Los Angeles have been hammered by government for years.

Blocks of old houses and apartments, home to generations of Mexican immigrant families, were ripped down to make way for a huge real estate development, Central City West, which fizzled with the shattered commercial real estate market. Nearby, overcrowded apartment houses seldom see a city inspector. Garbage and refuse litter the curbs. The message is clear: Nobody cares.

Yet out of these slums, some of them probably as bad as any in America, boys and girls, the children of immigrants, will undoubtedly emerge to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, senators, possibly even president of the United States. For that is the classic American story: Up the hard road from the immigrant slums, nurtured by a loving family and taught by the institution responsible, more than any other, for our unique national melting pot--the public school.

But in this neighborhood, the public school system--the Los Angeles Unified School District--has been distracted from its job and become mired in a bureaucratic and financial quagmire that has delayed the construction of a badly needed high school, and substantially raised its cost.

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The school, for 5,300 students, would be built on a 35-acre site extending west and south from the corner of Temple Street and Beaudry Avenue. It would replace the nearby Belmont High School, so small that many of its students are bused elsewhere. The present high school would become a middle school. Together, the high school, the nearby middle school and two smaller schools in the area would draw about 9,000 students from Pico-Union, Echo Park, Chinatown and other nearby neighborhoods.

Originally the district wanted to build a high school for the area on the Mid-Wilshire site of the old Ambassador Hotel.

But the school district was beaten to the punch by famed New York real estate wheeler dealer Donald Trump, who bought the Ambassador. The district tried to purchase the hotel and its grounds from Trump, but he asked what the school officials considered an exorbitant price. The district looked a few miles northeast and bought land once designated for the failed Central City West.

School funds were short, both locally and in state government, which traditionally has financed much of local school construction. The philosophy of government-private enterprise joint developments, helping pay for public buildings, was taking hold here.

The school board signed an agreement with Kajima/Temple Beaudry Partners, dominated by a huge Japanese construction company, Kajima Corp.

Perhaps influenced by their brief association with Trump, the school officials conjured up vast dreams.

Public and private minds devised a plan for a school with Oxford-like mini-campuses, a place that would change the face of the impoverished community. There would be new housing on the edge of the school site. A big supermarket would serve a grateful community and send some of its profits to the school district. So would other retail stores. Families would swim and play in a new recreation center.

“The board wanted to try to use the momentum of building a school for [developing] housing and retail for the community,” said school board member Jeff Horton. “We tried to do this in a way that no school district has done.”

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Nothing worked. The price tag for the school has gone up from $60 million to about $81 million, making it California’s most expensive high school.

The school won’t open until September 1999, more than a year behind schedule. And, no doubt, we can count on the usual further delays.

No major market chain or other retailers have signed up. The supermarket has been scaled down to something just above the size of a big 7-Eleven. The 200 promised housing units have dropped to 120. Instead of Kajima raising funds on terms favorable to the district, as promised, the school district will borrow the money itself.

In other words, there was no need for the complicated public-private partnership, with its big development and consultant fees.

The district should have stuck to what it is supposed to know best, building a simple high school where kids can learn and begin their journey on the road out of the slums.

Leave the dreaming to Donald Trump.