District Drops Optimism on Building Plans

One month into the task of trying to fix Los Angeles’ badly broken system for building schools, the district’s new management team has concluded that students will have to wait even longer than anyone had expected before they can attend school in modern, uncrowded classrooms.

Ambitious talk of constructing 100 new schools in 10 years, which has been a district slogan for much of the past year, is beyond hope of achievement, according to officials familiar with the conclusions reached by the district’s new chief executive officer, Howard Miller.

Contrary to the optimistic projections that school officials were making only weeks ago, Miller has determined that no new senior high or middle schools and only one elementary school will be far enough along to meet the June 30 deadline to qualify for money from the state bond fund.

Solving Los Angeles’ enormous school overcrowding problem may require a fundamental shift in how schools are built--with multistory buildings added onto existing campuses, senior district officials say.

Even with that change, however, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s new managers have concluded that new schools will be completed so slowly that overcrowding is certain to worsen before it starts getting better.

How long it will be before overcrowding gets better remains unclear, but Miller hopes to deliver an estimate within two weeks.

One step, Miller said in an interview, will be to drop unrealistic plans to acquire land for 100 to 150 new schools and, instead, find better ways to use the land the district already has.

Miller also has concluded that the district must sink its own bond money into a crash building program and give up hope of obtaining large amounts of state matching funds.

Constructing multistory school buildings would be a major change from the traditional one- and two-story buildings that have dominated school architecture. But that approach would help ease one of the most serious difficulties the school district faces: how to find room for schools in a crowded city without tearing down housing.

Miller cites an East Coast model: “You walk around Manhattan and you see these crowded schools, five, six stories high, that people pay thousands of dollars to send their children to,” he said.

Miller, a real estate lawyer and former board member, took over the district’s facilities operations Sept. 21 and was charged with righting a school construction program that was widely viewed as out of control. Less than three weeks later, the Board of Education named him chief administrative officer over all day-to-day operations.

Sources say Miller is now performing triage on the plans for 100 new schools, rescheduling unrealistic completion dates and shaping up as many plans as possible to make a case for recovering some of the lost state money.

One of the major obstacles that has set back earlier projections is a new state requirement that the state Department of Toxic Substances Control certify any school site as safe before it can qualify for funding. That review process can take years.

Miller’s strategy involves using preliminary environmental reviews to select preferred sites. The district would then seek money to purchase land and petition the state to set aside funds for construction after environmental review and remediation.

“It cannot be just a simple, ‘Well, we deserve the money, let’s set it aside,’ ” said Santiago Jackson, the district’s assistant superintendent for legislation. “It’s got to be more targeted than that.”

The district has qualified for $278 million in state bond money earmarked for the state’s most crowded schools. That money will be used to build about 50 schools, mostly small primary centers for kindergarten through third grade.

But for months, district officials have been saying the bulk of the district’s construction program depends on receiving about $900 million in state bond money that would be matched from the local school bonds approved by Los Angeles voters in 1997.

Eligibility rules for the state money require the district to own the land and have a state-approved design before presenting an application for bond funds. The district already has submitted six applications, and no more than three others are expected to be ready by the June deadline, officials say.

With its claim on the state money severely diminished, the district faces a dilemma: If the district spends local money now, there will be little or none left to stake a claim for state matching funds later. If the district holds onto the local money, there is no way of knowing when state bond money will again be available.

In an interview, Miller said the district must move ahead, while bargaining for as much state money as possible.

“The district has an obligation to build schools for students,” he said. “It has to proceed down that road.”

But, while moving forward on a crash program, the district must come up with new ways to identify and acquire land and to make better use of the land it has, both officials and outside overseers say.

“The strategies need to be more sophisticated and more inclusive of people,” said businessman David Abel, a member of the citizen committee that oversees Proposition BB spending.

Abel, chairman of a group called New Schools Better Neighborhoods, said the planning process should include teachers as well as community members and should encompass many new models, including multistory buildings and multiple schools on a single site.

What teachers want, he has found, is “an intimate place where learning is going to take place and where supervision isn’t the driving mandate.”

Miller, a longtime friend of Abel and a member of New Schools Better Neighborhoods, comes to the district imbued with those ideas.

“The old models of how sites are found and schools are built, the old assumptions, the way the district has managed its application process and its entire land acquisition process, simply doesn’t work any more,” Miller said.

“We need to face the issue of schools’ site size and be able to build on smaller sites. We need to be able to build smaller schools.”

Although larger buildings and smaller campuses may sound inconsistent, they can work together, Abel said.

“You can build a multistory 350-student complex, if that’s the only piece of land you have,” he said. “You can also have multiple campuses on a site, but they have to be broken up into modules so the kids have ownership.”