Wiser Way to Site Schools

Yes, the Los Angeles Unified School District needs to build more than 150 schools to accommodate severe overcrowding and another wave of enrollment increases. Even so, no school site should jeopardize the health of students or open the school system to unending liability. The school board’s decision to pull the plug on the contaminated site proposed for a combined South Gate high school and elementary school demonstrates a commitment to a smarter way of building schools.

“Think small” has replaced “think big.” Rather than commit $20 million or more to clean up the stew of chemicals at the South Gate site, 40 acres formerly occupied by foundries, metal plating shops and automotive facilities, the district will seek 13 smaller sites for primary centers serving students in kindergarten through third grade. This strategy will relieve overcrowding by allowing existing elementary schools to be converted to middle schools, and the South Gate middle school will become the additional high school needed by the area. The students will finally get their neighborhood school, though the process might take longer.

Abandoning the South Gate site is expensive. The district has already spent $25 million acquiring the land, and litigation from property owners could drive costs higher. But the decision had to be made. Even after the district’s environmental safety team warned in October of open-ended environmental problems, the district staff continued with property condemnations. Its wrongheaded actions enraged most board members and resulted in the appointment of Howard Miller as chief operating officer. He recommended the switch to primary centers on smaller school sites.

The new policy should save construction time and money. The one- or two-acre sites needed for primary centers are easier to find in crowded areas of the district than the big parcels needed for a traditional high school. When construction costs are added up under the new approach, a seat for a student in a primary center generally will cost $20,000, half that of a seat in a traditional high school built from scratch.

The South Gate decision was the first of many hard choices the school board will face regarding school construction. The past policy of building on industrial sites to avoid taking houses and apartments resulted in the unforgivable decision to erect the Belmont Learning Complex on an old oil field, later determined to be contaminated. Construction at the site near downtown Los Angeles has been halted until the board can determine whether to proceed and open the campus.

Building primary centers rather than larger campuses will take some pressure off the board, but some locations will still require trade-offs between siting schools and saving homes or businesses. The school board’s wise new approach should make those trade-offs less severe and less frequent.