Schools Brought Out of Retirement

The bell rang at Garden Grove Avenue Elementary School in Reseda on Wednesday morning for the first time in 13 years, summoning a gaggle of students to classrooms reborn with peach-colored paint and bundles of new supplies.

Like a number of other San Fernando Valley public schools, Garden Grove locked its doors in the 1980s after thousands of parents abandoned the Los Angeles Unified School District in the wake of mandatory school busing.

But the district, prompted by swelling enrollments and the state’s effort to reduce class sizes, reopened the long-shuttered campus Wednesday--the first of many schools across Los Angles County expected to reopen over the next year.

The Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District will open two elementary schools Monday to accommodate its own swelling student population. And the El Segundo Unified School District is planning to reopen a junior high school--which once served as the Los Angeles Raiders’ practice site--to free up space for more elementary school students.

The restoration of old schools comes as a result of demographic trends that have pushed enrollments to the bursting point.

In the 1970s and early ‘80s, a drop in the birthrate after the baby boom led officials to close schools and consolidate students. Enrollment was also dealt a severe blow by white flight, as parents in the Valley and elsewhere fled urban areas in response to busing-for-integration programs and growing racial tension.

But during the last decade, the emptying-out has gradually reversed as the children of baby boomers produced their own kids and immigrants began to arrive in Southern California in record numbers.

The statewide movement to free up extra classrooms to cut class size to 20 students in most elementary grades “jiggled a very full glass,” said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at USC.

The Norwalk-La Mirada district will try to keep that glass from running over Monday when it adds two schools to its existing complement of 16 elementary school campuses.

One used to house an occupational skills center for high school students but will open for students in grades one to three. The high school students will instead take their courses in a neighboring district. The other will open on the former site of a middle school.

Enrollment in the Norwalk-La Mirada District, projected at 21,746 this year, is expected to continue to rise through the year 2000.

“Unless the enrollment goes crazy, we can take care of it at least through the next five to eight years,” said Supt. Ginger Shattuck, who noted that the district now leases out three elementary schools that could eventually be reopened. “We can’t really project beyond that.”

The El Segundo district is doing its own campus shuffle. The district last summer allowed the now Oakland-based Raiders to prematurely quit a lease at El Segundo Junior High School, where the football team had practiced for years.

The Raiders’ departure held a silver lining for the school district, whose enrollment had declined to 1,803 in 1984 but has now surpassed 2,700--the result of young families moving into the area.

The district’s middle school, now housed at an elementary campus, will move back to the junior high site, opening up room for younger students in the years to come.

Los Angeles school officials, meanwhile, are tackling the enrollment issue on a far larger scale.

The district’s enrollment now stands at about 668,000 but is projected to grow by 50,000 children by the year 2001.

In the early 1980s, the district closed 12 elementary schools and one middle school, virtually all of them in the Valley. Now, in addition to Garden Grove, the district is considering opening three other shuttered campuses--two in the Valley and one in Westchester.

Officials are weighing whether the communities around those three schools suffer from the same overcrowding that plagued the neighborhoods near Garden Grove.

The area’s young, middle-class families in starter homes, as well as its apartment complexes teeming with recent immigrants, all feed the local elementary schools. Four within a mile or two of Garden Grove were filled to capacity last year, and two even had to bus students elsewhere.

By all accounts, the school district worked wonders at Garden Grove with $1.8 million in state funds from the state’s class-size reduction initative and eight months of renovations.

A neatly trimmed front lawn now stands in the place of weeds and overgrown ivy. Air conditioners now cool classrooms that once served as havens for graffiti vandals and homeless squatters.

The school also features several high-tech additions, including televisions, VCRs and cable hookups, and motion-sensor burglar alarms in every classroom, a new intercom system and underground conduits for computers.

“Now we can focus on student achievement,” said Principal Peggy Scaramastra, who had previously been assistant principal at a Van Nuys elementary campus.

Wednesday got off to a relatively smooth start, despite typical first-day kinks--students lining up in the wrong area on the playground before classes began, and frantic parents trying to register their children at the last minute.

“We didn’t want to move our children, but they said it’s a new school with air conditioning and better things than the other school,” said Jaime Aguirre, whose 9-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter moved from Anatola Elementary about a mile away.

Times staff writer Henry Chu contributed to this story.