School District Awarded $73,000 in Back Rent
A Norwalk Superior Court judge has awarded Pico Rivera’s school district a year’s worth of back rent from a private school that leased a district campus for more than a decade.
The Armenian Mesrobian School, a kindergarten-through-12th grade program that vacated Pico Rivera’s Selby Grove campus in July, was ordered to pay the El Rancho Unified School District about $73,000 in unpaid rent from July 1, 1996 to July 7, 1997.
An attorney for the school did not return a call Tuesday. District Supt. Jim Waters said school officials had contended that they owed nothing.
Waters said administrators from Armenian Mesrobian told the court they had spent some rent on repairs to an alternate campus, and that the district had refused to accept rent payments for five months in a row last year. He explained that the district initially turned down the money because it did not want to recognize the school’s right to occupy the building. The district plans to reopen the campus to meet class-size reduction requirements.
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