Think Beyond the Little Red Schoolhouse

The Belmont school is a poisoned apple chewed by the worms of outrageous costs, poor administration and, most important, health dangers. However, the Belmont crisis came about because central Los Angeles has too many students and too few places to educate them.

The idea of traditional school facilities has to change to meet the needs of overcrowded cities. The vision of what a school should look like has changed many times in the past; there are few one-room, red schoolhouses anymore. While new schools should be built where possible, other school space must be acquired in unorthodox fashion.

As long as the building is upgraded, it doesn’t have to be new. Last month, a friend’s son moved into a Harvard University dormitory that contained a log of the students who occupied the same room back to the early 1800s. This young man will still get a top education at Harvard.

In the early 1990s, the facilities committee of Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, or LEARN, looked at the problem of providing adequate space for the schoolchildren of Los Angeles. I served on that committee. The panel issued a number of recommendations to deal with classroom shortages. Among them were a request for state legislation to permit easier and faster conversion of existing commercial structures into classrooms; the creation of different construction criteria for different school levels; and the leasing of space and joint public/private ownership of mixed-use projects.

As I wrote in a 1991 commentary: “Why do urban high schools have to be built with approximately 17 acres of land, as now required? Build up, not out. Remodel empty buildings. Build smaller, neighborhood schools with fewer classrooms. Streamline school construction and use other creative ideas to meet demands.”

This is no panacea. It is a practical solution, and sacrifices will have to be made. Taking over an empty commercial building means going without a playground. Neighborhood school structures pleasing to the eye would be substituted with less-costly, box-like office buildings or mini-malls.

Many architects and educators would object to such a plan. Others would claim that, once again, inner city students are being treated as second class because suburban students would more often enjoy traditional schools. Indeed, one Belmont commissioner reportedly argued that inner city students deserve facilities similar to those enjoyed by students in Beverly Hills.

Yet there are certain realities that have to be dealt with in trying to find classroom space in overbuilt cities. There are advantages to renovating an empty building into a small school. Children go to school in their own neighborhoods, and the recast school can be a catalyst for improvement and renovation in the surrounding buildings.

We must understand that schools are places of learning because of what they offer on the inside, not what they look like on the outside.

Charter schools already are taking advantage of their unique status to convert unsuccessful commercial property into local schools. The Camino Nuevo Charter Academy in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles is a proposed 240-student elementary school in a two-story structure originally designed as a retail and office mini-mall.

More money than ever is going into school construction. However, there will never be enough money to solve the problem of trying to build enough large, new schools in crowded city neighborhoods. With the interest on school bonds nearly doubling construction costs, stretching taxpayer dollars to reconstruct already established buildings will put more students in smaller classrooms closer to home quickly, less expensively and without the agony of more Belmonts.