New Campus Will Barely Ease Crowding

A new elementary school to be built next year on an overgrown field here will bring hundreds of students back to their neighborhood from such far-flung busing assignments as West Hills.

But the new kindergarten- through fifth-grade campus, at Vanowen Street and Columbus Avenue, will bring little relief from year-round schedules, officials said.

Overcrowding has forced nearby Hazeltine Avenue, Sylvan Park and Van Nuys elementary schools to adopt year-round schedules, and the opening of the 600-student campus will do nothing to change that.

The new school also will operate year-round, and if Los Angeles Unified School District projections are accurate it will be filled to capacity the day it opens.

Even so, Angela Gonzalez, the mother of three Hazeltine students, said the new school can’t open soon enough. As a parent representative at Hazeltine, Gonzalez has fielded complaints from Van Nuys mothers whose children are bused to schools as far away as Woodland Hills.

“It’s great news to hear of a new school because when we send our kids so far away, they are no longer part of the community,” Gonzalez said. “As soon as the bell rings they’re left behind.”

A mother who had one child at Hazeltine and another bused to Kittridge Elementary in Van Nuys asked Gonzalez to help get her children into the same school.

“It was a circus just getting them to school every morning,” Gonzalez said.

Another mother said if her children arrived at Hazeltine two minutes late and missed the bus to Woodland Hills, they then had to wait two hours for the next bus. As a result, they missed nearly three hours of school, Gonzalez said.

“I’m involved in the school and I belong to all the committees because I live a block away from the school and I can walk over there at any time,” Gonzalez said. “If my child were shipped off to Tujunga or Woodland Hills, I would never participate in any school stuff.”

Of the 1,500 students registered at Hazeltine, about 300 are bused to four schools in areas that include Tujunga and West Hills. Van Nuys Elementary buses 200 students to seven schools, including campuses in Granada Hills, Canoga Park and Sun Valley. Sylvan Park is expected to exceed capacity and begin busing students this fall.

Set to break ground Aug. 23, the Van Nuys school is one of dozens in the works that are designed to curb the need for busing and year-round school calendars.

Construction is expected to begin within 18 months on new 1,000-student and 700-student elementary schools at Rayen Street and Noble Avenue in North Hills and at Lankershim Boulevard and Tiara Street in North Hollywood, school board member Caprice Young said Tuesday.

But Gordon Wohlers, the district’s associate superintendent of planning assessment and research, said L.A. Unified has no illusions about how much the new schools will ease overcrowding.

A handful of new schools opening in the next five years will not be enough to thin out student populations sufficiently to return to traditional semester calendars, he said.

“My concern is that those schools [in the East Valley] will continue to grow,” Wohlers said. “We will be able to bring back the majority of children who are on buses traveling to the West Valley, but they will still be in crowded schools.”

Esmer Ramirez, a mother of two, lives blocks from the new Van Nuys elementary site. But because she lives west of Sepulveda Boulevard, Ramirez’s children will not be able to attend the new school. They will continue at Bassett Elementary, a school two miles away, and where a third lunch period was added to accommodate 1,350 kindergartners through fifth-graders and where no teacher has a permanent classroom.

“It’s good if they’re building a school in the neighborhood,” Ramirez said. “Well, it’s good for some kids. I don’t think most of the other kids in this neighborhood will ever see a new school”

The four-acre lot across from Valley Presbyterian Hospital where the Van Nuys school is being built, has been studied by the district for five years. The district already owns the land, which houses a small building for continuing education students from Van Nuys High School. The empty field formerly was used by the high school’s agriculture students to raise flowers, tomatoes and chickens.

Mike Scinto, senior project manager for the district’s new facilities group, said the district decided only 18 months ago to use the property for an elementary school after considering making it a hospital magnet or a children’s center.

But if it takes more than five years to build a much-needed school on property the district owns, Ramirez said, it could be an eternity before another school is built on a site that must be purchased.

“My kids are in second and third grade,” Ramirez said. “They will be in high school when a new [elementary] school is built for them.”

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More Walking, Less Busing

A new elementary school to be built in Van Nuys will bring hundreds of students that have been bused to schools around the Valley back to their neighborhood. Hazeltine and Van Nuys elementary schools now bus students as far away as West Hills and Tujunga.

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Hazeltine Elementary buses to:

* Riverside Drive Elementary, Sherman Oaks

* Nestle Avenue Elementary, Tarzana

* Haynes Elementary, West Hills

* Mountain View Elementary, Tujunga

Van Nuys Elementary buses to:

* Parthenia Street Elementary, North Hills

* Stonehurst Avenue Elementary, Sun Valley

* Chandler Elementary, Van Nuys

* Granada Elementary, Granada Hills

* Hamlin Street Elementary, Canoga Park

* Monlux Elementary, North Hollywood

* Sherman Oaks Elementary, Sherman Oaks