Board Drops School Plan After Protests

Responding to protests from outraged neighbors, the Burbank school board moved Friday to withdraw plans to build a school for disciplinary cases on the same campus as a school for students with academic problems.

District officials made the decision to keep the Brighton Community School for students with disciplinary problems at the district’s headquarters after a special school board meeting Thursday. The meeting drew as many 200 protesters, who said the board’s plan threatened their safety and property values.

“For this coming school year, the community school will remain at their current site at the school district’s administrative offices,” district spokeswoman Andrea Canady said Friday. “The decision was based on the community’s concerns.”

The Brighton school has been adjacent to the district headquarters since 1992, school officials said. But the district recently sold the 4-acre site for $8 million to the city, which plans to build a new branch library and park on the land.

School officials thought they had found an alternative site on the Monterey High School campus, where classes are held for students with academic or attendance problems, until neighbors such as Rosanne Mecca organized against the project.

“I’m so pleased,” Mecca said Friday. “Normally, this neighborhood is kick-back and uninvolved. But these issues were very important to us. We did our homework, then presented it to the board. We witnessed the system did work, and the Monterey school area gets a gold star.”

District officials offered to provide additional supervision, stagger the opening and closing hours of the two schools there, increase the police presence in the neighborhood and eliminate some of the fencing that some critics charged would create a prison-like atmosphere.

Other proposals included busing the students with disciplinary problems to and from the campus, and assigning 15 such students of middle-school age to the Monterey site and placing 40 students of high school age in temporary classes at the district office site at 330 N. Buena Vista St.