Schools May Go to College

Public high schools in Los Angeles are increasingly crunched for space, while the area’s community colleges are long on land and short on cash. Each one’s problem is the other’s solution, and in an imaginative plan cooked up by officials of the two systems, the Los Angeles Unified School District would use space on four campuses of the Los Angeles Community College District. Some existing buildings would be shared; some new structures would be built on community college land.

The partnership displays the resourceful thinking that will be needed to help educators ride a demographic surge in student enrollment. As with most innovations in the public sector, however, it will have to cut through a thicket of red tape. When state and local officials met in Sacramento last week to iron out the plan, disagreements centered on two issues:

* Cost. State legislators, college district officials and school district officials are wrangling over how much money the school district should pay the colleges to lease and share land and buildings. One proposal, for instance, would have the school district pay the community college by using school bond money to build a campus parking structure. Another would allow the community colleges free use of high school classrooms at night.

All of these schemes require state legislators to waive some rules that govern spending of state school bond money. This should not be a complicated task. Some state legislative leaders have suggested that the school district give the colleges no more than $2 million each, about what the land itself is worth. Some college officials, in turn, have suggested that the sum should be closer to $20 million, the cost of finding, buying and clearing a piece of occupied property.

While the colleges may not deserve $20 million, they should be compensated for sparing the city the social disruption often caused when neighborhoods are torn up for new schools, or the costly contamination problems associated with former industrial sites. The deal would also promote college attendance by allowing qualified high school students to take college courses. There are valid concerns about mixing 13-year-olds with adult community college students. Most of the mixing would be in later grades, as juniors and seniors ease into college classes, but both sides still would have to be alert, especially for men preying on teenage girls.

* Academic standards. Many community college faculty members want to limit enrollment at the new high schools to high-achieving students. But that would deprive the partnership of a major benefit: giving new chances to students from schools with few Advanced Placement courses, poor libraries, inexperienced faculty and other deficient resources. The best compromise is to orient the new schools to academic themes, like the high-tech emphasis proposed for the high school on the East Los Angeles College campus, but leave enrollment open to all students.

The school-college partnership now being planned in Los Angeles touches on a debate among public educators nationwide about how to improve the environment of American high schools, which students in a recent survey derided as academically unstimulating and socially traumatic. The partnership provides a partial remedy to both problems, but it should not be ensnared in larger disagreements over the nature of high school. This is not a cure-all, just a practical way of solving some of the school district’s space problems. It is, finally, a sensible trade-off that works for a community college system with extra space and an LAUSD with a desperate need for new schools.