The Neighbors Matter, LAUSD

The Los Angeles Unified School District needs to build 100 new schools to deal with serious overcrowding and to meet state-mandated class-size reductions. In the northeast San Fernando Valley alone, the district wants to build at least six primary centers, three elementary schools, two middle schools and two high schools. Given that the Valley doesn’t have a lot of wide-open spaces waiting to be developed, the LAUSD has a problem. But it compounds its problem by the way it goes about looking for school sites.

Just last month, Arleta residents complained that the district was eyeing an old Gemco lot for a high school when the neighborhood wants it for a supermarket.

Now some North Hollywood residents fear being moved out of their homes--some after 50 years in the same house--because the school district is considering their neighborhood for a new elementary school.

Both sites are unpopular with the neighbors, but the Arleta and the North Hollywood brouhahas have more in common than that. What really steams residents is when the LAUSD doesn’t adequately notify the neighborhood of its plans. In the Arleta case, the school district admitted it had been in a rush to try to snag a good site before a Mexico City-based food retailer developed it. In North Hollywood, residents claimed the notices they received were so full of jargon they were impossible to understand.

So just as it did in Arleta, the LAUSD must start from scratch in North Hollywood and make the neighborhood part of the process. That’s still no guarantee residents will get what they want. But it will eliminate at least one of the school district’s problems: the self-inflicted one.