Sweeping Change Needed to Keep Belmont From Becoming a Bellwether

Whether the Los Angeles Unified School District ultimately resolves the Belmont Learning Complex fiasco by completing or abandoning this school, one thing is certain: The “sweep it under the rug” attitude about environmental and health concerns that led the district to locate its crown jewel on an abandoned oil field still runs amok at the district.

Belmont is, unfortunately, the tip of the iceberg for a school district searching to discover the day-to-day procedures necessary to ensure environmental safety at its schools and, just as important, its core values when it comes to these critical matters. For students, the implications of the near-total collapse of environmental professionalism at the district cannot be overstated.

Recent independent reports, by the district’s internal auditor and by outside investigators engaged by the district, document astounding attitudes and incompetence within the district’s management ranks about environmental safety. From whitewashing reports on environmental conditions (so as not to “scare parents”), to underreporting known problems at district schools, to reassigning professionals in the district’s Environmental Health and Safety Branch who raise safety questions, the district’s record confirms the worst fears of its critics. The bottom line is that the district’s environmental safety procedures are so flawed that the district cannot say for sure whether its schools are safe.

For a school district that appears to be in short supply of everything except problems, it is fitting that the pressing need to address its environmental safety meltdown comes at a time when the district is experiencing an unprecedented school building boom. The district must select nearly 50 new school sites in the coming months to meet a June 2000 deadline for critically needed state funds.

And the schedule does not let up after that. The selection process for 50 more desperately needed sites, many of them in the inner city, must begin immediately. If sweeping changes are not made soon, the misfeasance (and worse) that allowed the Belmont fiasco to occur will surely claim as casualties many of these new school sites. This is especially true given the district’s informal policy of focusing site selection on former industrial sites, many of which pose an elevated level of risk.

There is a way out. The district will need the cooperation of everyone involved, from the many elected state representatives required to protect the district’s flanks in Sacramento, to health and environmental experts, local universities, public interest groups and, most of all, parents. The district should take the following steps.

First, it should admit the obvious: The district as currently constituted cannot responsibly select all the schools sites it needs by the current deadlines. The district must ask representatives such as Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) to protect the state funds while the district gets its house in order. The speaker and other local representatives have done this before, and they will almost certainly do it again if the payoff is real change.

Second, the district needs to adopt and publicly declare that its core environmental safety value is to achieve the highest level of protection for students and staff, even if that means exceeding some existing regulations or creating new ones. All of the procedures in the world are meaningless unless they are anchored to an articulated value system that places health and safety highest among the district’s guiding principles. Those who don’t share this view within the district should be terminated.

Third, the district must translate high principle into enforceable rules that will safeguard students at existing schools and ensure that the district’s new school sites avoid environmental safety risks. In order to do this, the district must publicly admit that it selects sites that have higher environmental risks in part to avoid using its eminent domain power in residential neighborhoods. This policy needs public debate.

Finally, the district must convene a group of parents and leading experts to develop over the next 180 days a specific school siting policy and a corollary (and equally specific) policy to review the condition of each existing school facility for asbestos, lead paint, chemical and pesticide management and other environmental safety issues.

A specific plan to totally restructure the district’s environmental division and provide for outside oversight also must be drawn up during this same period.

If the district commits to steps such as these, and follows through in the near term, parents of students at the district’s existing schools will breathe easier. And with new standards, appropriate sites in the community can be selected for new schools, sites that will enable the district to do what it should: Make its students safest when they are at school.