School Site Workers Try to Beat Clock

For about a month, John Chapa has raced the clock, working 14-hour days to convert an empty church into a school. Armed with a cellular phone and shovel, he orchestrates a 12-man crew in two nine-hour shifts beginning at 8 a.m.

The mad rush is underway so the Mekhitarist Fathers’ Armenian School can move in by the start of the academic year. The school’s lease on its previous location, Valley View Elementary in La Crescenta, which is owned by the Glendale Unified School District, expired in June.

So what would usually be a four-month construction project has become a two-month blitz.

“It’s not normal, but I have to finish it by Sept. 8,” said Chapa, 24, who works for Amak Construction of Glendale. “They said they’d give me a paid vacation to Vegas when I finished.”

School officials purchased the 4 3/4-acre site on Foothill Boulevard in Tujunga in June and have plans to accommodate 275 to 300 pre-kindergartners through ninth-graders. The location will be a permanent site for the Armenian school, which opened in a small Hollywood house in 1979 before leasing the former elementary school in La Crescenta in 1984.

Reductions in class size and increases in enrollment prompted the Glendale district to reclaim the Valley View Elementary campus, which is undergoing its own hurried renovation.

Dick White, who works for the district’s planning, development and facilities office, said a $2.5-million face lift at Valley View began June 1 and will be completed in time for the first day of school, also Sept. 8. Crews have been working 15-hour days, six days a week to get the 22-classroom school ready for about 350 registered students, he said.

Mekhitarist spokesman Raymond Hovsepian said school officials were informed in late 1996 that their lease would not be renewed. The school was given until this summer to move out, and a search for a nearby site was launched.

With funds mostly from private donations, Hovsepian said, the school purchased the vacant property from the Armenian General Benevolent Union for $1.8 million in late June. Renovations are expected to cost about $600,000.

“We were under the gun to reopen the school,” Hovsepian said. “We didn’t want to lose any students.”

Serge Samoniantz, a spokesman for Mekhitarist, said finding a permanent spot gives the school more stability. He said the other Armenian schools own their property.

Samoniantz said there are six Armenian schools in the San Fernando Valley and about 14 in Southern California. The Armenian population has been estimated at 100,000 in the San Fernando Valley, with the greatest concentration in Glendale, La Crescenta and Burbank, he added.

The opening of the Mekhitarist school at its new site comes at a significant time in Armenian history. Samoniantz said Sept. 8 is the 297th anniversary of the founding of the Armenian Benedictines, the order that operates the school.

Long-term plans call for the existing buildings to be torn down and replaced by new buildings.

“Right now we haven’t even had time to draw up plans,” Hovsepian said. “We’re just happy that we’re opening the school uninterrupted.”