A New Strategy for New Schools

The Los Angeles school district’s new management team Tuesday recommended a strategy for heading off a looming enrollment crisis--downplaying the building of high schools and instead concentrating on building primary centers and converting middle schools to senior highs.

A strategy of building 150 primary centers, shifting existing elementary schools to grades four through eight and converting middle schools to handle high school students offers the only realistic hope for meeting enrollment needs, Howard Miller, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s new chief operating officer, told the school board.

The district, which has 710,000 students and 660 schools, will need seats for the 120,000 additional students in the next six years, he said.

To meet that need, the district must also enlarge the capacity of its existing campuses by building multistory buildings and underground parking, Miller added.

“We must use existing space more intelligently,” he said. “The space we own is some of the most valuable land in the city.”

Under the current approach, he said, crowding in the district will continue to worsen for the next five years.

“We run out of space by 2006,” he said. By then every high school will be on a year-round schedule and there won’t be room for a single new student unless the district pursues alternatives to its current master plan, he said. The current plan calls for eight new senior high schools that the district has almost no prospect of completing.

Most board members reacted favorably to Miller’s proposal, but reserved judgment until more details are present.

“Great,” said board member David Tokofsky. “It’s smart.”

“It’s creative,” said board member Julie Korenstein. “It’s a little bit different than what we looked at before.”

Miller said he plans to offer more details in December, including specific plans for school reconfigurations in some of the district’s most crowded areas.

He also said he plans to retain outside organizations to help the district with land acquisition and construction of new schools, and expects to name those firms in December.

He noted that even if the district moves aggressively to build primary centers, traditional schools will also be needed.

The 150 primary centers he is proposing will provide seats for about 50,000 students, he said, still leaving a deficit of 70,000.

The difficulty of finding and acquiring land has proved a major roadblock in the district’s efforts to build 100 new schools.

The traditional school model requires four to 10 acres for an elementary campus, nine to 15 for a middle school and 20 to 25 for a high school.

In dense urban areas, land in such quantity is usually scarce, forcing the district either to take housing or to buy contaminated industrial property. Both approaches can take years.

“We must have a strategy based on smaller school sites,” Miller said.

By shifting the focus of school construction to smaller sites of two to three acres, Miller said, the district may recover some of the $900 million in state bond funds that is quickly slipping from its grasp because so little progress is being made.

In an interview, Miller said that he still hopes for legislative relief to secure some of those funds for the district, but that the district needs to show progress on its faltering construction program to make that possible.

“By focusing on this strategy, we’ll have everything farther along than it otherwise would have been,” Miller said. “The key to getting any kind of help is to be as far along as possible.”

Part of the attractiveness of the new the strategy, Miller said, is that it would reduce the time and the cost of adding classroom seats. The average senior high school takes six to nine years to build and costs $40,000 per student, compared with two years and $20,000 per student for a primary center.

Under the proposed plan, “we can increase senior high school space at K-3 prices. We essentially are buying high school seats for half cost,” he said.

Miller, a former board member who was named last month to head the district’s floundering school construction program, presented the concept as an educational boon as well as a facilities solution.

By focusing long-term strategy on expanding educational facilities for younger children, the plan could lead the way to children’s centers and even facilities for 3-year-olds, he said. In the meantime, the new primary centers would work as gatekeeper schools responsible for teaching students how to read.

“Consistent to our goal of reading by grade 3, no student moves out until they are literate,” he said.

But the new plan still faces a number of questions. For example, both Korenstein, who has been driving San Fernando Valley streets in search of potential school sites, and board member Victoria Castro, a former principal, questioned how well eighth-graders and fourth-graders would mix.

Castro said she took part in the movement that changed the old junior high school model to middle schools to separate older and younger students.

Castro also said she couldn’t endorse the strategy until she saw more details on which schools might be converted

Miller’s proposal did receive a strong endorsement from one of the founders of New Schools/Better Neighborhoods, a group of Los Angeles civic leaders who got together in the spring to push the district to adopt new models for their proposed new schools.

“I don’t think we’ve seen much of a paradigm-shifting discussion until Howard Miller’s presentation today,” said David Abel, the group’s chairman.