Legal Fight Leaves School Drab, Grimy

With a flurry of welcome activity, painting crews arrived at Dorsey High School last summer and set to work patching cracks, sanding the rust off metal beams and laying a coat of primer on grubby classroom walls and doors.

Then, with the job barely underway, the crews vanished, leaving Principal Nancy Rene with a mess.

Striding past a building with ripped security screens and paint curling off the eaves in sheets, Rene lamented one day this week, “Our school looks dirty, awful, just filthy.”

“Our school colors are supposed to be green and white,” she said. “Right now, we’re green, white and grubby.”

Dorsey is caught in a legal imbroglio. When the painting contractor was charged with bid rigging the Los Angeles Unified School District withheld payment. The firm in turn sued the district for failing to pay its bills and walked off.

The firm, Cam Painting, was recently cleared of wrongdoing, but the civil suit is still pending. Until that problem is resolved, district officials told Rene, the school would have to put up with the dismal surroundings.

Frustrated and embarrassed by the worsening atmosphere at their school, student leaders have devised a plan to stockpile cleaning supplies and spruce up the South-Central campus themselves after class and on weekends.

It’s called “Dorsey Beautiful on the Inside.” To execute the plan, the students calculated they need about $2,055 to buy soap, gloves, paper towels, brooms, dustpans, mops and sponges.

“We can’t wait for the district or it will never get done,” said Rachel Owens, 16. “We’re willing to do the work. All we need are the funds, which the district won’t give us.”

In an interview Friday, Julie Crum, the district’s director of modernization, urged more patience.

“I agree, it’s sad,” Crum said. “But the matter is in litigation and negotiations and it hasn’t been settled yet. Until the negotiations are complete and the school board approves it, we cannot hire another contractor.”

Crum declined to say why the job cannot be completed by another firm. She referred the matter to the district’s outside lawyer, Gregory Wedner.

Wedner said the project was bonded, meaning that the work is guaranteed if the original contractor fails. Wedner said he did not know if the bonding agency had been contacted.

Now that the criminal charges have been dropped, Wedner said, the district and Cam Painting are trying to settle the civil suit. He said he hopes to have a resolution within the next 30 days.

In the meantime, Rene has turned to Howard Miller, the district’s chief operating officer, to intervene on behalf of Dorsey, which is home to 1,800 students and three magnet programs.

“We must, finally, once and for all, resolve these issues,” she said in a letter written last month. “Our students cannot continue to try to work and study in these terrible conditions.”

“Since the painter has walked off the job, we are left with primer only in several halls,” she added. “Several classrooms are filthy and in urgent need of paint.”

Michael Barragan, 17, shares Rene’s frustration. “Every time I enter a classroom I wonder, ‘What will it take?’ ”

“Is the district ignoring us because of low test scores?” he asked. “Or is it that we’re a poor community?”