Workers Rush to Get School Ready by Tuesday

As one of Orange County’s “fundamental” schools, Jim Thorpe Elementary’s stringent curriculum requires extraordinary involvement from parents, who shape school policy and sign contracts promising supervision of everything from attendance to nightly homework assignments.

But if parents really want to make a difference this weekend, they might want to grab a hammer and saw.

Four days before it is scheduled to open its doors to 775 students, Santa Ana Unified’s Jim Thorpe Elementary is a mess.

Inside classrooms, teachers are neatly stacking boxes of blocks, bags of crayons and pieces of clay. In one room, books called “Let’s Count” and “If a Tree Could Talk” are laid out. In another, a blue horse, a green frog and a yellow duck, designed to help kindergartners learn colors, have been carefully hung on the wall. Folders with each child’s name have been placed in cubbies.

Outside, it’s a mad scramble.

Streets surrounding the school are still being widened and paved. The “playground” is barren dirt. Contractors are still building shelves, hanging blinds and testing fire alarms, and late Friday, the six-acre site was still littered with paint rollers, yellow caution tape and rubber hoses. “Wet paint” signs decorated the walls. Swaths of concrete were still being poured, and other areas inside the school grounds didn’t look much different from the bean field next door.

School administrators insist that the $13-million facility, which has been in the works since 1989, will open, as scheduled, on Tuesday.

Sort of.

The furniture hasn’t arrived, so the district is lending the school tables and chairs. Books have arrived, but they aren’t inside yet because the library isn’t finished. There is no playground equipment yet, so teachers are piecing together makeshift plans for recess, such as a game of kickball on a blank area of blacktop. There is no landscaping and no grass. A team of parent volunteers and teachers has been enlisted just to get the kids from their parents’ cars, past the construction and into the school.

When will the regular furniture arrive?

“We’re not sure,” Principal Betty Wagner, a 30-year education veteran, said with a weary smile on Friday afternoon.

“There will still be some things that need to be finished,” said Wagner, seated in a courtyard sprinkled with empty boxes of bricks and bustling with construction workers toting ladders, caulk and tools.

“But once [students] are in a classroom, they are going to feel like they are in any other school. . . . I think we’re going to be fine. Things will run as smoothly as they do anywhere else.”

For the most part, teachers are stoic.

“Life goes on,” said Elaine Karman, a kindergarten teacher. “Actually, this is a good lesson to learn: You have to be flexible. You just have to have some patience.”

Parents are trying, but after a point, time runs out and patience becomes immaterial.

“The streets are going to be a big problem if it’s not done by Tuesday,” said Patty Klioumis, whose children, Frantsesca and Kostas, are scheduled to start second and fifth grades, respectively. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Some parents have suggested that the school postpone opening day. But that doesn’t seem likely in a school district so overcrowded that playgrounds, libraries, cafeterias and parking lots at other schools have been turned into classrooms. Not only is Jim Thorpe scheduled to open at capacity, but there already are three temporary trailer classrooms out back.

“Everyone is trying their very best. Right now the parents need to come together and support the staff and the principal and the teachers,” said Kimberlie Barari, whose son Nikki is scheduled to start first grade. “But the decision needs to be made on Monday. If it’s completed on Monday, then fine. If not, they need to say it’s not safe for kids. If there is anything risky, they need to put off the opening of school.”

That is not an option, said John W. Bennett, the district’s deputy superintendent of operations. Contractors are working overtime and will work over the weekend, and district personnel have been called in to lend a hand. At a minimum, administrators insist, the incoming streets will be widened and paved by Tuesday, as will the field of dirt that is designated as the school’s playground. And the school will be safe, Bennett said.

“The contractor and the district personnel are putting in an all-ahead effort to make sure everything is ready to go,” he said. “If you ever talk to anybody that ever remodeled their own home, there are always things that go ‘bounce.’ All construction takes time.”

Jim Muhic, the district’s construction director, explained that the school’s design sat in a drawer for years while the district waited for money to build the school. Once the funding fell into place, administrators had only about nine months to build the school--though elementary schools often take 14 months to complete.

Then, he said, heavy rain in January and February--which began just days after construction got underway--effectively placed the entire site under water for two months. That put the project behind from the start, he said.

An unflagging economy and hearty development boom, meanwhile, made it difficult this summer to recruit an army of workers, Wagner said. “I haven’t had a weekend off in a month,” said one subcontractor, Steve Babcock, who was busy Friday hanging blinds in a classroom window.

“This is sort of the way the game is played,” Muhic said. “We’ve had schools that sat empty for three months. We’ve had schools like this. You try and predict it, but it’s almost an impossibility.”

Under the circumstances, the school grounds remain a remarkably jovial place, even as workers prepare to hunker down for a long weekend.

“Labor Day will be a day of labor,” Karman joked.

Friday morning, workers discovered two tiny kittens trapped in a pipe. They were rescued, and word was filtering through the grounds that the cats might be named Jim and Thorpe.

Even the trucks lumbering by classrooms might be a blessing in disguise, Muhic pointed out.

“The kids will like it,” he said with a grin. “They like to watch that stuff.”