Plan for Radio Tower on Campus Angers Parents

The school is getting the tower. The students are getting the shaft.

That’s the way parents are describing the decision to construct a 70-foot radio transmission tower on the playground of Holy Redeemer School in Montrose as a moneymaking venture for the campus.

Parents are nervous about their children’s safety and the loss of valuable playground space because of the tower--which would handle cellular telephone calls and things like private business dispatching services and personal pagers.

But critics also say the schoolyard project has turned into a symbol of communications problems.

They charge that no one at the 50-year-old Catholic school had a clue that the tower and a small equipment building were planned for their children’s play field until the principal glanced out the window two weeks ago and noticed workmen pounding stakes into the ground.

Principal Susan Fite was puzzled by what she saw. And the surprises were just starting:

* Officials of Nextel Communications in Los Angeles announced that the tower had been approved for construction last year by officials of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

* Real estate administrators for the archdiocese explained that they drew up a $1,200-per-month site rental contract at the request of Holy Redeemer’s parish priest.

* No way, responded the pastor--countering that he had only asked officials to investigate the rental proposal, not sign off on it.

The finger-pointing has been accompanied during the past week by a flurry of dire predictions passed between parents of the 252 pupils enrolled at the Del Mar Road school.

Children could become sick and suffer long-term problems from radiation beamed from the tower’s array of antennas, many have warned.

The transmitter site will ruin the school’s only grassy area--a play field that has been the focus of school fund-raising efforts in the past, others complained.

As petitions protesting the tower were circulated after Mass on Sunday and among mothers dropping their children off for class this week, some questioned the tower’s structural safety in earthquakes or in the howling Santa Ana winds that often blow through Montrose. And they wondered about the effect of a 24-hour access road across the playground needed by Nextel.

On Tuesday, Nextel officials agreed to wait 45 days before starting work on the tower. Today, meantime, they plan to meet with parents at 7 p.m. at the school to try to answer those questions.

*

Some parents said they are already making plans to withdraw their children from Holy Redeemer if they aren’t satisfied by what they hear.

“I’m not going to expose my son to radiation eight hours a day,” said Yvonne Longo, the Glendale mother of a fifth-grader who has helped circulate the protest petitions.

Angela Smythe, a Glendale resident with girls in the second and fourth grades, said: “People are saying they know of 50 families that will walk out.”

Parent Dorothy Nuanes of Tujunga said she is prepared to withdraw her sons, now in the third and sixth grades, if necessary. “This is going to break this parish apart,” she said.

That kind of talk was worrying Fite as she forlornly inspected the Nextel stakes in her playground Tuesday afternoon. If as few as five students leave, the tuition loss will wipe out the monthly $1,200 profit from the tower site rental, she said.

Holy Redeemer’s pastor, Father Jack Foley, declined to comment. “I’m dealing with the company and the archdiocese, not the papers,” he said.

But Neal Blaney, director of real estate for the archdiocese, said the responsibility for the tower is Foley’s, not the archdiocese’s. “He’s the guy in charge. We don’t do a thing unless the pastor says he wants it.”

Nextel executive Jane Norine said an engineer will attend tonight’s meeting to assure parents that the health risk from radiated power from the tower will be much less than that of common baby monitors used in infants’ bedrooms.

She said Holy Redeemer’s protest is a little late: Besides the contract with the archdiocese, her firm has obtained a Los Angeles County permit and spent $200,000 on equipment for the site.

“We’re trying to come to an agreement,” Norine said. But “when you have opposition like this, it doesn’t matter a lot what you say. People believe what they want.”