Growing Pain

At one San Fernando Valley high school, groundskeepers mowed the paved basketball court to cut down weeds sprouting through cracks.

Throughout Los Angeles Unified School District, parents are complaining to school officials that their children are stumbling on grassy patches on the asphalt playgrounds and skinning their knees.

Homeowners are calling school administrators, annoyed about the unkempt campuses in their neighborhoods.

Brown weeds, green weeds, knee-high weeds. “The weeds are out of control,” said Robert Hamm, deputy director of operations for the school district. “We are trying our hardest to get the situation under control,” especially before the fall semester begins in a few weeks.

The pesky outgrowth of the district’s new policy banning the use of pesticides and herbicides has school officials stumped about how to control weeds creeping through asphalt, invading walkways and appearing in tracks surrounding baseball fields.

Frustrated gardeners and administrators have tried yanking weeds, whacking weeds and heating weeds.

Defiant and ugly, the weeds return.

“It’s an endless job,” said Maurice Rossini, an assistant principal at Reseda High School, where a crew of gardeners last week tried to manually weed the 33-acre campus. “You can’t get all of it. You start at one end of the school and by the time you’re finished, they’re already growing back.”

Weeds have become such a nuisance that district officials are mulling over whether to temporarily use low-grade herbicides to reduce the risk of tripping accidents. Such use would be allowed under the district’s stringent pest-control policy, which the Los Angeles Board of Education unanimously approved in March.

The policy phases out the use of pesticides and herbicides over the next three years. At many schools, however, officials said they stopped spraying weeds last fall out of respect for parents and others who were concerned about possible health risks posed by the 60 or so pesticides the district used, many of which were not available to the public.

Because of the halt of herbicide use, “weeds are our biggest problem right now,” said Rick Henry, the district’s integrated pest management coordinator. “We’re discussing what to do. . . . We have had complaints about students tripping [on weeds] and skinning their knees, so there is a safety issue.”

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Although using an herbicide is temporarily allowed in the phase-out portion of the policy, officials said it would require approval of the pest management team of 15 administrators, teachers, parents, community members, health officials and scientists.

That might be difficult to achieve because of the high level of support the policy--one of the strictest in the nation--has received from parents, activists, scientists and physicians.

Whether a low-grade herbicide poses human health risks depends on the product and is highly debatable, said Bill Currie, an entomologist for the federal government for decades before becoming owner of the International Pest Management Institute in Prescott, Ariz.

“It’s a tough call,” said Currie, who helped the district develop its policy and serves on the committee. “But I don’t believe there is such a thing as no risk,” particularly with children who may be more susceptible to risks.

So far, district officials said controlling pests without chemicals has been manageable. The policy calls for patching cracked walls and installing other pest barriers, restricting food in most areas, educating students and staff about sanitation, and steam cleaning behind ovens, refrigerators and other places where mice, rats and roaches lurk.

The district has budgeted $2.5 million to implement the new pest control policy for the 1999-2000 school year and $1.3 million annually thereafter. Included in that is funding to buy equipment for manual weeding and to hire 15 more gardeners districtwide to pull weeds.

But with 668 schools in the district, officials acknowledged that, although gardeners may work long, hard hours, their labor could go unnoticed.

Already, principals at middle and high schools--most of which have one full-time gardener responsible not only for weeding but such other chores as tree trimming and lawn mowing--complain that they have not seen the extra help.

And they won’t. The additional gardeners serve mostly on a roving crew that tends to the district’s 420 elementary schools, which do not have regular gardeners because of recent budget cuts. Currently, the district has 26 gardeners for the elementary schools but is planning to hire about 50 more.

Sometimes, if the weed situation is extremely bad, the roving gardeners will help secondary schools, as they did recently at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles.

The district will get help with its weed problem when it repaves hundreds of campuses in the next few years.

Meanwhile, the district is researching and experimenting with alternative methods to kill weeds. Earlier this month at a former middle school in Woodland Hills, officials began testing the heat wand--a round tube attached to a propane tank that, ideally, would instantly kill the weed at its roots. They expect to know in the next few weeks whether the wand is effective.

Although open to pesticide alternatives, several principals supported using low-level herbicides. At El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, weeds have invaded not only the asphalt but the dirt area around the baseball field, prompting numerous complaints from parents and community members.

“The weeds have become a gaping problem,” Principal Ronald Bauer said. “It is not something we are proud of, but our hands are tied.”

He said spraying weeds with a low-grade herbicide is “a safe and sane” way to control the problem.

“It’s so frustrating,” Bauer said. “I dare anyone to come up with another solution other than an army of gardeners. The weeds are winning the war.”