Parents Seek Whole Truth About Hole

Like dozens of schools across Los Angeles, Mountain View Elementary is bracing for more portable classrooms on its playground to house new students next year. There’s only one problem: A sinkhole recently swallowed a corner of the blacktop, prompting questions about the safety of the plan.

Now many at Mountain View are urging the Los Angeles Unified School District to abandon the portable classroom idea and bring in experts to determine whether other sinkholes lie beneath the playground surface.

“What happens if you have a bunch of kids in a bungalow and another sinkhole opens right underneath?” asked Ellen Cowie, a parent of two Mountain View students.

“It could be disastrous.”

District administrators said Tuesday the playground’s soil will be tested this summer to determine its stability. The district will decide how to proceed after it receives the results.

“Until I’m satisfied and comfortable that everything is safe for the boys and girls of this school, portables won’t go there,” said Assistant Supt. Gordon Wohlers, whose office coordinates portable classrooms districtwide.

Mountain View is one of several San Fernando Valley schools that receive overflow students from crowded campuses elsewhere.

Four to six new classrooms are slated to arrive on the school’s playground by December, housing at least 50 additional students from the East Valley, Highland Park and Lincoln Heights.

The new classrooms would be located within 50 yards of the 3-foot-wide sinkhole, which opened about six weeks ago, the result of wet weather and aging facilities.

Part of a now-unused septic tank in a corner of the campus--one of three installed by the school’s builders--had eroded and moist earth began to cave into the empty structure. Soil above then began to sink.

School district maintenance crews widened the hole to about the size of a pickup truck so they could stabilize it with layers of dirt, sand and concrete. Workers finished the job on Tuesday, adding a final layer of blacktop.

“We deem this area filled and stable,” said Edward Floura, a cluster facilities specialist for the Verdugo Hills-Sylmar area.

But the septic tank failure may only be the beginning of the playground’s underground troubles.

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Before the hillside campus opened in 1957, the site was occupied by homes. School district administrators are uncertain whether other septic tanks may remain from those years.

The architectural blueprint for the school does not indicate any tanks other than the original three. Floura said he is aware of only one other septic tank installed by the school district but that tank does not appear on the original blueprints, for a total of four.

But the playground is crisscrossed by cracks where moisture can seep into the soil, further worrying the principal and parents.

“I want someone to show me that the ground is safe before they start driving through there [to deliver portable classrooms],” said Mountain View Principal Ronald Jones. “I don’t want to have some freak accident happen.”

The sinkhole flap is part of a broader issue raised by Mountain View parents about overcrowding and safety.

The school currently receives about 150 students from other campuses that are at capacity. The bused-in students account for more than a quarter of the school’s enrollment of 555.

Parents say the outdoor lunch area is too small to accommodate the growing number of students and that arriving school buses and cars are beginning to create hazards of their own outside the school each morning and afternoon. Two students were injured in accidents outside the school last year, one of them seriously enough to be taken to the hospital for a bruised hip.

“It’s already a problem and the problem will just be worsened,” Cathy Bishop, whose daughter will enter first grade in the fall, said of the traffic.

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The parents fired off a series of letters and a petition urging the district to abandon its plans for additional bungalows. School district administrators say the school is just one of many asked to take students from schools already too full to accommodate their oversized enrollments.

For the time being, Jones, the principal, is focusing his energy on the playground--contacting district personnel to make sure that someone studies, and corrects, the problem.

“I have to reassure the community that I feel safe about the playground prior to their children coming here,” he said.