Sites Should Be Studied

Schools that have stood silent all summer--those that have not been pressed into service year-round--will fill up with students again Wednesday, the first day of a new school year. The operative words here are “fill up.”

Year-round schedules have eased some of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s crowding problems, as has busing excess students to less crowded schools. Neither solution is entirely satisfactory. But both may look downright popular compared with the coming battles over choosing sites for new schools.

The district needs to build 100 new schools in less than a decade to meet a projected 10% enrollment increase that year-round schools and busing alone can’t accommodate. Finding places to put new schools is not proving easy. Two potential sites in the San Fernando Valley recently came under fire, one because neighbors wanted a grocery store there instead, the other because building a school would have meant taking 44 homes.

It didn’t help that, in both cases, district officials neglected to let nearby residents know they were considering the sites, a violation of district policy officials are striving to correct. What’s needed, then, is continued scrutiny of the district’s site selection process as well as timely involvement by neighboring communities.

But what’s also needed is schools. Community members, for their part, need to distinguish between truly bad ideas and their own reflexive NIMBYism, a Not-In-My-Backyard response that would oppose a school no matter how diligently the school district followed proper procedures.

The Los Angeles Board of Education will vote this month whether to conduct feasibility studies on a number of sites school officials have recommended. We can tell you now that none will be perfect. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be considered.

Take the site of a former Gemco department store in Arleta, where residents had initially hoped to attract a needed grocery store. It turns out the grocery store will be built at a nearby location, not this one, but neighbors still don’t want a high school, complaining that it will bring traffic, trash and crime. What a sad comment on how schools--once seen as a neighborhood asset--are viewed these days.

The school district should do everything it can to ensure smooth traffic flow and a safe, clean environment. But given how badly schools are needed and how difficult it is to find sites, it should also go ahead and study whether the Arleta site is indeed a workable choice.

The same goes for the other sites, including one in North Hollywood that would require taking about 30 dwellings, mostly apartments--a substitute for the site that would have taken the homes of 44 longtime residents. Yes, we need housing too, whether single-family homes or apartments, but locating schools outside of neighborhoods on industrial sites has its own problems. The half-finished Belmont Learning Complex, being built on a former oil field west of downtown, is the most obvious example. Environmental problems could keep the $200-million school from ever opening.

A feasibility study is just that--a study to see if the location is feasible. It’s not a guarantee that a school will be built there. But schools must be built somewhere. What must be kept in mind is that there will be no perfect parcel in this already built-up city. What must be kept in mind is not just the needs of the neighborhoods but of the kids.