12 Schools Planned in Burgeoning Northeast Valley

Nearly all of the new schools planned for the San Fernando Valley over the next five years are to be built within a mile-wide strip from Victory Boulevard to Lassen Street, just east of the San Diego Freeway, officials say.

To deal with explosive population growth in an area saturated with apartments, Los Angeles Unified School District officials have recommended building 12 schools in a corridor about the size of Los Angeles International Airport. Two others, also expected to open by 2005, will be built in North Hollywood and Sylmar.

Included are five high schools, one middle school, three elementary campuses, four primary centers and one kindergarten.

The district plans to build a total of 26 schools in the Valley within the next 10 years.

“There’s a kind of momentum that the district hasn’t seen in more than a decade,” said school board member Caprice Young, who represents a portion of the northeast Valley.

“We’re going to get these schools built. For the first time, we have the structure and everything in place to get it done and get it done fast.”

The northeast Valley corridor includes part of Van Nuys, Panorama City and North Hills. It is one of the most cramped residential areas in western Los Angeles County, where all district schools are already on year-round schedules because of overcrowding. The situation is expected to worsen, as more young and low-income families move into the area’s many apartments--a story being retold all over Los Angeles, from South Gate to Canoga Park.

Van Nuys resident Willie Barnes, standing in front of Panorama City Mall, predicted even more children in the future for the area.

“You know it’s a lot of kids around here,” Barnes said. “You know it’s going to be a lot more kids too. Look at every woman walking with little kids. They’re the same ones pushing strollers too.”

More scientific estimates of population growth indicate that Barnes’ forecast is correct, district officials said.

How did schools in one sliver of the city become so overcrowded?

School district officials said the fastest growing category of the area’s population is school-age children, and the district in the past moved too slowly to keep pace with that growth.

Although little new-home construction is anticipated, city and school records indicate that the high school population in the mile-wide strip alone is expected to grow by about 3,000 students over the next four years and by about 5,000 by the time today’s fifth-graders start their senior year.

“Younger families with school-age children are starting to replace older families [in that area], whose kids were already out of school,” said Rena Perez, district director of master planning and demographics.

To accommodate the growth and relieve the overcrowded classrooms, the district will try a number of new building options, said Kathi Littman, director of school building planning in the district’s New Facilities Department. Plans for new high schools, for instance, include constructing three- and four-story buildings in tight spaces and leasing or buying existing office buildings and converting them to schools.

“The schools will be more vertical, like the neighborhoods where the students live,” Littman said. “We haven’t done it much, but it’s not a novel concept.”

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Also, new schools will be constructed on campuses with existing schools. A single school with a large vacant field will become a learning compound, as the campus shared by Valerio Street Elementary and Fulton Middle School did earlier this year with the addition of Valerio Street Primary Center.

Candi Broussard, mother of a Valerio Street Elementary first-grader and a Valerio Street Primary student, said she had hoped to have more children, but changed her mind, because the schools are so crowded.

“It’s already worse than it was when I was here,” said Broussard, a 1990 Van Nuys High School graduate. “Can you imagine how crowded it will be when my son [the preschooler] is in high school? For me, it was, quit having children, or move. I’m still here.”

Littman said bureaucratic red tape previously made building schools nearly impossible. “When I joined [the district] in the late fall, there were a lot of old procedures and old relationships. The district . . . had a rather convoluted structure, using all these consultants. All the layers of bureaucracy were costly and inefficient.”

Young said the district, in determining funding for school construction, previously failed to take into account a number of important factors.

“They didn’t have plans for changes, and they didn’t budget reasonable fees for acquisition and relocation,” Young said. “The district has a long history of people starting projects underbudgeted and then going over budget. We’re cutting that out.”

Former Supt. Ramon Cortines dismantled many of the bureaucratic layers and started fresh with a leaner New Facilities Department. Robert Buxbaum, the district’s interim facilities executive, said most schools on the current planning list have been talked about for two or three years.

“Historically, the problem wasn’t looking around and finding property to build on,” Buxbaum said. “The problem was bringing a school project to fruition.”

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To help get schools built quickly, Littman said the district has hired high-ranking consultants away from private firms.

For example, Scott Graham, the new head of real estate, was formerly a development manager at Mitsui USA, an investment firm. Interim head of project management Charlie Anderson was previously an executive project manager for Arthur Andersen Consulting.

Although the new staff has yet to build anything, school board member Julie Korenstein and others say they are confident that the new management structure will speed things along, and maybe even catch up with growth in the next 10 years.

“It’s a very good beginning, at least,” said Korenstein, who represents part of the northeast Valley. “We’re going to have a beautiful new elementary school in Van Nuys to start with. We’re going to quickly build other schools the little ones can get to. . . . When the younger ones make it to high school, we will be more ready for them.”