Schools Seeking Malls, Rooftops for Campus Sites

With its empty storefronts and silent walkways, the 1950s-era Plaza at Indian Hill looks like it’s taking its last gasps. But turn the corner and you can see that the back wing of the old Pomona mall is buzzing with action.

Stores vacated by major retailers earlier this decade serve as classrooms for 650 students at Pueblo Elementary School. Mall hallways and courts, now covered in bright crayon art, have become a library and cafeteria.

It may seem an odd setting for a school, but Pueblo is one example of the lengths to which urban districts are willing to go to locate a campus site. In Santa Ana, an intermediate school is being built on top of a shopping center parking garage.

Surging enrollment has state officials projecting that California will need at least another 307 campuses by 2003--60 new schools annually--to accommodate more than 6 million students who will attend public schools.

Pomona Unified’s Pueblo school was so much easier to develop than a traditional school that officials are finishing plans on two more “Pueblitos,” or smaller learning academies, in a former Ralphs grocery store next door.

“In many places around the city, we have dying malls,” said Jerald Livesey, a Pomona Unified assistant superintendent. “Here, we were able to go in and get a considerable amount of land for an inexpensive price.”

The schools were needed, Livesey said, because the district was growing at the rate of one elementary school--or 600 students--annually. Its facilities were already operating on year-round schedules. So when a school board member who had leased an office in the Pomona mall for his radio station suggested renting space for a school, the district took a look. Pomona, like other districts, was reluctant to use eminent domain to acquire land because of the potential for public outcry. And the mall’s handful of tenants didn’t seem to mind the school taking over one of the center’s wings.

Shirlee Vickers, owner of Fashions by Shirlee, said there has been some upside to having a school for a neighbor, from increased security patrols to more foot traffic.

“My business hasn’t increased that much, but when the teachers come through for workshops, some will stop in. Before that, it was like a ghost town in here.”

The mall was the cheapest solution for the district. For two years, it has been able to more than cover the cost of its master lease by renting to a handful of small businesses, such as Vickers’ shop and the Super Saver $1 theater.

Being a landlord can help defray operating expenses, but most districts don’t want the extra responsibility and risk.

The district will buy the mall later this year. The $6.4-million cost of the sale and renovation will still be less than the $7 million it spent on an all-portable school or the $15 million it spent to build a permanent structure elsewhere.

In adapting a site such as Pueblo Elementary did, there are other potential problems, school officials and urban planners caution. Many properties require gutting and extensive remodeling that can make them costlier than a school built from the ground up, said Dwayne Brooks, director of school facilities planning for the state of California.

And they can provide a less than ideal learning environment, with smaller, if any, playing fields and libraries. Often the locations are next to busy streets, posing a danger to pupils walking to school.

Moreover, such complex redevelopment projects can be a burden for school districts without much construction experience, as evidenced by Los Angeles Unified School District’s handling of the $200-million--and escalating--budget for Belmont Learning Complex, which is being built on contaminated land near downtown.

Indeed, the biggest challenge in urban areas isn’t building the schools, said Richard W. Thompson, director of urban design and planning for Los Angeles architectural firm A.C. Martin Partners. It’s finding a site that the community will accept, where the ground isn’t too polluted to be reconditioned.

Districts such as LAUSD, already strained by the effects of mandatory class-size reductions, have few options other than to build on gritty industrial sites, because those are among the few remaining locations available. And most schools have little room left to add portable classrooms.

“As you put more and more up, you encroach on the playground and other necessary areas,” said Gordon Wohler, assistant superintendent for policy development at LAUSD. “Obviously, every school district would prefer to build permanent construction.”

For the first time in years, many districts actually have the cash to do just that, thanks to the passage last year of state and local school funding initiatives.

To fulfill its master plan for 51 new schools, LAUSD is not only having to comb city agencies’ real estate portfolios for excess property such as parking lots, it’s now considering such options as moving an elementary school onto the campus of a community college, or building schools on city park land in exchange for allowing the public access to some school facilities.

The district has to find sites to accommodate an additional 60,000 students who have enrolled in the last four years, mainly in the east San Fernando Valley, central Los Angeles, Cudahy, Huntington Park and San Pedro. Another 80,000 students are expected by 2006.

The swell in enrollment reflects the peak in the country’s birthrate in 1990, analysts say, as the children of the baby boom reached child-bearing age.

In California, the enrollment surge has been intensified by a growing immigrant population that is choosing to stay near their ports of entry, said Peter Morrison, a demographer with think tank Rand Corp. in Santa Monica.

School districts in such areas as Santa Ana, Westminster, Fresno and Stockton are feeling the biggest pinch as these immigrants enroll their children.

Santa Ana has 700 portable classrooms at its 50 schools--enough for 27 free-standing elementary schools, said Mike Vail, Santa Ana Unified School District’s assistant facilities superintendent.

Increasing enrollment prompted officials to propose a new middle school at the back of the old Bristol Marketplace shopping center at 17th Street. The 106,000-square-foot school under construction sits atop a parking garage just outside a Montgomery Ward store.

Although the property would be a second choice for most commercial developers--it faces away from Bristol Avenue traffic--it’s by no means cheap. The 11-acre site cost about $18 million, and construction costs have pushed the total above $43 million.

The campus, which will open in fall 2000, lacks some conventional features of a middle school, such as a gym and playing fields. Instead, it will have a “multipurpose room” and a patch of turf covering a section of the parking lot.

“This project didn’t save money, but it didn’t cost more either,” Vail said. “And we didn’t have to go through the eminent-domain process,” which could have taken even longer to complete than this school. Besides, under a special “space-saving” school grant, the district was able to get the state to pay for the pilot school.

But Thompson and others say school districts shouldn’t be so reluctant to use eminent domain as a tool. “[Eminent domain is] their leverage,” he said. “The problem is, we want the schools, but we don’t want to be inconvenienced to get them.”