Space-Saver School, Tucked Into a Shopping Center, Nears Completion

After five years of obstacles and opposition, design challenges and community meetings, the final touches are being put on one of Southern California’s first space-saver schools--a three-story building in Santa Ana nestled in a shopping center.

The state created the space-saver concept for urban areas, where large plots of vacant land are scarce. It was meant to minimize the need to take property from residents and businesses to make way for schools.

The Santa Ana Unified School District was the first to win money for the program, although the Los Angeles and Long Beach districts also have received funding. The Los Angeles space-saver is now finished, but not yet open, at the Museum of Science and Industry; the Long Beach project is still in the planning stage.

The state’s pilot program has run its course and is now defunct, and some of the early ideas for creative placing of schools--building them atop bridges or wedged in at Dodger Stadium--never panned out.

Santa Ana’s space-saver, however, is close to what many envisioned.

“This is a culmination of efforts of many, many people,” said architect Christopher Francis of the Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School, located in the Bristol Market Place. “There was a time when the project was in jeopardy of not ever being built. It took the leadership of the district board president and superintendent on down through the administration and the community to get this done.”

Proponents had to overcome numerous hurdles. After the school site was approved in 1993, opponents of the project contended that a new school could be built on another site for far less than the space-saver’s $24-million price tag. Then in November 1994, state officials issued a report that the site was contaminated by old gas tanks--something that threatened to increase costs but ultimately did not.

Some residents near the site also worried about traffic and whether the structure’s huge size would ruin their quality of life.

“They were concerned with having the massive portions of the building too close to the backyards of the homes facing the south--they didn’t want students looking over into their backyards,” Francis said.

To mitigate traffic generated at the site, a 500-foot runway-style student drop-off zone was built. The school design was also modified to prevent students from peering into neighboring yards.

The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995 brought another concern. State officials became concerned that a terrorist could set off explosives in the parking structure beneath the school, but the school was already in the design phase. A military expert was brought in to assist structural engineers, who designed the building to withstand a certain level of bomb blast.

The committee of residents and merchants who worked on the project disbanded during the building phase, but will reconvene once the school opens next fall, said Michael Vail, senior director of facilities planning for the district. The principal, who has not been selected, also will be charged with meeting with shopping center merchants and residents once a month when school is in session to build a relationship with the community.

Although the school’s use of commercial land makes it unusual, it will accommodate only a fraction of the thousands of pupils who make the district one of the most overcrowded in the state.

And throughout California, school districts are bursting.

“This crisis has been going on for quite some time, and we’ve been warning folks the facilities are not keeping pace with the growth,” said Dwayne Brooks, director of facilities for the state Department of Education.

According to the state Department of Finance, California needs $2.6 billion a year to meet districts’ growth and modernization needs; it has an annual shortfall of $900 million.

Given the classroom crunch, the space-saver concept is just one way districts are trying to build schools without large parcels of land.

Although portable classrooms and year-round schedules have long been popular Band-Aids, new collaborations are trying to make better use of land, including partnerships between schools and community colleges.

Los Angeles Unified has five such schools on the drawing board--the only district in the state to try the experiment--including a new high school at East Los Angeles Community College that will allow students there to use the existing athletic and cultural facilities, Brooks said.

Multistory schools, rather than spread-out, ranch-style buildings, will become more popular, he said. Multistory schools had long been deemed too costly to build, in part because of earthquake structural requirements and the elevators needed for handicapped access, Brooks added.

“But now the cost of purchasing the land exceeds the cost of construction, so that makes [multistory schools] more economical,” he said.

Although the Mendez school will relieve some crowding, district officials say Santa Ana’s hopes hinge on the Nov. 2 passage of a $145-million bond, which would bring an additional $184.6 million from the state. The money would be used to build two high schools and 11 elementary schools and to expand Valley High School to accommodate 600 additional students.