Wall-to-Wall Students

Cahuenga Elementary is the kind of public school that most parents want for their children. Among its selling points are a great principal, better-than-average test scores that continue to improve and a successful dual-immersion language program. But the campus, in Koreatown, long ago ran out of room, forcing about 1,900 students to be bused far from their neighborhood school and leaving their parents to ask when a new school will be built.

A Los Angeles Unified School District master plan calls for building about 100 new campuses, including high schools, middle schools, elementary schools and primary centers for kindergarten through the third grade, over the next five years. While Los Angeles Supt. Roy Romer says relieving overcrowding is a top priority, he also says he can’t foresee even a reduction in busing within those five years because the planned construction, for which funds are available, won’t quite stay even with projected enrollment growth. The district, given its dismal history of building only 17 schools--including several nontraditional campuses--in the past 10 years and not one regular high school since 1971, will be hard put to achieve even that goal.

The superintendent, however, has a school board that is more willing than past boards to demolish homes to build schools. A professional construction management team has replaced educators promoted beyond their expertise, and state construction funds are available, although the LAUSD needs--and deserves--much more. Romer is also making deals to buy or lease buildings that can be turned into schools and encouraging the creation of more charter schools, which need not meet the state’s strict construction rules. His success will be measured against an easy standard, the Belmont fiasco.

The unfinished Belmont Learning Complex, built without necessary environmental safeguards on an abandoned oil field contaminated with explosive methane gas and toxic hydrogen sulfide, symbolizes the district’s failure to build new schools safely, on schedule and on budget. More than $170 million had been spent before a majority of the Los Angeles school board voted to halt work in January because of concerns about safety, cost and liability.

The debate now flares anew. Romer wants to revisit Belmont and favors opening it as a school if possible. School board President Genethia Hayes not only opposes that but questions the safety of existing campuses located nearby. The local school bond oversight committee threatens to hold up funds for alternatives to the stalled project until experts determine whether it can be made safe for a school, at what cost and when. If those questions can be answered quickly, conclusively and without wasting millions, the school board should agree to another look. In any case, the district cannot afford to get bogged down again in the Belmont dilemma while enrollment, now at 723,000, continues to surge.

Because of overcrowding, more than 15,000 students are bused away from their local schools, often against the wishes of their parents. At Cahuenga, children start lining up for the buses before 6:30 a.m. Students who stay at Cahuenga are on a staggered year-round calendar designed to expand the capacity of the campus. They are among 325,000 students who attend school on a nontraditional calendar. Even then, some schools are so crowded that students cannot get the classes they want, face long lines in cafeterias and restrooms and miss important activities. As more schools convert--every high school is scheduled to go year-round by 2006--more parents who can afford alternatives will flee.

Without new campuses, the children turned away from Cahuenga may ride a bus every day kindergarten through 12th grade. Their middle schools, Berendo and Virgil, are overcrowded. So is their high school, the old Belmont.

Under such conditions, it will be difficult to build trust. The district can begin by giving parents and other taxpayers all of its timelines, internal deadlines and construction budgets, so the people most affected can measure whether new schools are being built on budget and on time.