Recipe for New School Uses Just Pinch of Land, Funds

On an angular corner where the historic Hennepin theater district meets the glistening glass and stone of a rebuilding inner city, an incongruous scene occurs each morning at 7:30.

Yellow school buses roll up. They come nine at a time, park nose-to-tail in a gritty alley and unload their cargoes of children from eight suburban school districts and one urban system.

Following snappy orders from staff, 600 students file through the Interdistrict Downtown School’s double doors to a concrete-floored cafeteria where they eat breakfast before heading upstairs to class--elementary grades on the second floor and upper classes on three and four.

Here, they are living an experiment in small, specially designed schools that can yield many lessons for Los Angeles, where nearly every piece of land large enough to sustain a traditional campus has been gobbled up by development or despoiled by industry.

“That’s exactly the kind of new thinking we need to look at,” said L.A. Unified’s chief operating officer, Howard Miller, charged with building 100 or more schools. “We can’t just be stuck with the old suburban model from the 1950s, especially in urban areas. New solutions are needed.”

Although they have no plan to abandon the conventional campus, the new leaders of L.A. Unified’s school building program have already declared that they can’t get the job done without finding ways to fit schools onto small, odd-shaped lots and to provide alternatives for expensive features such as playing fields. For example, students at the Interdistrict school use the nearby YMCA facilities.

Marked Contrast to Belmont

Clearly, the Minneapolis school isn’t a substitute for the comprehensive high school with triple gymnasiums and extensive playing fields represented by the 5,000-student Belmont Learning Complex.

But it stands in marked contrast to that $200-million project, which has been brought to the brink of abandonment by escalating costs and environmental problems. The Interdistrict school provides a dramatic success story showing that schools can be built in harsh urban settings on tight budgets and with wide community support.

And, unlike the blockhouse look of Belmont, the quirky school on Hennepin Avenue affords the city a visual gem with historical and cultural connections and a thrilling sense of place.

Following the Minneapolis lead would mean not just building a different kind of school, but taking a fundamentally different approach from the one long practiced by L.A. Unified.

Instead of beginning with a generic design and then staking out the land and funds to build it, the Interdistrict Downtown School began with a budget--a small one at only $11.5 million--and made the land and architecture work within it.

The key to the success was an unusual partnership of the school system, the city of Minneapolis and the University of St. Thomas.

The agreement, which provided the school with free land and a ready-made building pad on top of a 640-space underground parking structure, arose from mutual needs.

With a billion-dollar downtown office boom in progress, the city was aggressively seeking land for parking structures.

St. Thomas, a pastoral Catholic university in nearby St. Paul, had planned a downtown satellite that would include an education school geared toward training teachers for inner-city assignments. It also needed parking.

The projects were tied together by the university’s acquisition of a large surface parking lot bordering the historic Hennepin district, a strip of Broadway-style theaters on one of the city’s earliest thoroughfares.

The city’s redevelopment agency purchased the parking lot, excavated for the underground parking structure and topped it with a building pad. The school district received a small corner of the site, at 0.8 acres it’s less than a fifth the size of the average elementary school.

On the larger portion of the parking lot, the university built its Opus School of Education. The college shares a wall with the new public school, and the college library is available to the K-12 students and teaching candidates so they can do laboratory work next door.

“With limited resources available, institutions need to work together to find solutions,” said project architect John Pfluger.

Creative Sharing of Resources

The Interdistrict Downtown School is one of a few school projects that have caught national attention for their creative sharing of resources both to save money and develop experimental school designs.

Another is the Henry Ford Academy, run by the county school system in Dearborn, Mich., in a site donated by the Henry Ford Museum. Ford Motor Co. put up the money for renovations and curriculum development. The museum’s 80 acres are part of an extended campus.

And, in Hurricane, W.Va., the new Museum in the Community, a private, not-for-profit institution, is housing the school district’s gifted arts program at its new facility. As a result, the district’s capital costs have decreased, and teachers and students have benefited from an enhanced art-centered learning environment.

But by virtue of its success in the face of enormous odds, the Minnesota experiment provides perhaps the most telling lessons for Los Angeles, where the school district operates largely isolated from the rest of the city.

“There was something here that really brought people in to say, ‘Let me do my part. They really need me,’ ” said Ginny Pease, the project director who steered the school through crisis after crisis.

Pease credits a convocation of people--from desegregation advocates to developers to state bond officials--who responded to the lofty goals and the challenge.

“What people said is, ‘We’ve never done that.’ But they didn’t say no. That’s where it begins to fall apart is when people just begin to say no because they’ve never figured it out.”

The Interdistrict Downtown School began as part of a remedy to segregation. Local schools consisted of a large, predominantly minority district in the city and several predominantly white suburban districts.

The West Metro Education Program was formed to create several schools that would draw students from nine districts in proportion to their enrollments.

The glue that held the project together through years of obstacles, Pease said, was a survey in the nine districts showing that parents would be willing to send their children into the city to an integrated program.

The state Legislature allocated only $11.5 million for the first school, to be built downtown. With such a scant amount to work with, cost became the driving force of the project.

The lofty goal and the forbidding challenges brought together a team of talented and grittily determined bureaucrats, parents and consultants who held together through one setback after another and kept their dream alive.

As their commitment hardened with each new obstacle, the very nature of the school evolved.

“We had to get smart about deals,” Pease said. “School people weren’t very sophisticated. We went into this thinking we’ll just go buy a site.”

Helping Hand From Mayor

Initially, the school planning team hoped to cut costs by rehabilitating an abandoned building. But every prospect, whether the downtown armory or a warehouse, foundered on the underlying economics of a construction boom.

“Every site is priced by its development potential,” Pease said.

Eventually, supplemental grants raised the budget to about $13 million, still not enough to pay for land.

The breakthrough came with the help of Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, who had already supported city involvement in the school system in such ventures as opening preschool centers. The mother of school-age children, Belton had a personal interest in having a school downtown. One of her sons now attends the downtown school.

Sayles Belton, through the Community Development Authority, pulled the city into the picture, and the focus soon fell on the university’s expansion plan.

After months of negotiations, a university patron donated $2 million to compensate the city for the building site.

One last piece of the downtown school success story was the enthusiasm of an architectural firm that had invested in the city.

Having established its offices in an abandoned mattress factory beside the Mississippi only a few blocks away, the Cunningham Group looked upon the downtown area with a sense of common cultural history.

“It became a special job for us,” said project manager Pfluger.

Once the site was chosen--an awkward and tiny trapezoid that would have to become the transition between two divergent quarters--Pfluger crafted all the elements of the school into a four-story plan that took into account the city’s demand for an engaging facade on Hennepin as well as the university’s requirement for coordination with its building.

A band of precast concrete on the lower level of the school is color-matched to the creamy local stone called kosota on Opus Hall. The four-story brick facade facing the theater district is inlaid with a glass staircase echoing the theater marquees of Hennepin Avenue.

On top of that, Pfluger had to satisfy requirements of the school planning group to make the inside environmentally sensitive.

This resulted in a solar study to make the best possible use of sunlight, low emission wheat board cabinet work and some unusual features such as floors of buffed concrete.

The unostentatious surface is easy to clean and gives off no chemicals.

“We wanted terrazzo, but we couldn’t afford it,” Pease said.