After 4 Years, School Halts Growth Plan

Ending a four-year standoff with neighbors, the Buckley School has abandoned plans to expand facilities and boost enrollment on its wooded campus.

The exclusive private school, nestled in a picturesque canyon at the end of Stansbury Avenue, had long grappled with neighbors’ complaints about traffic jams and parking problems on nearby streets. When the school proposed in 1996 nearly doubling its square footage and adding 220 students, a small uproar ensued.

Strong community opposition and the school’s own misgivings about burdening its 36-acre hillside campus with more buildings and students, playing fields and parking spaces convinced Buckley officials to change course, Headmaster Paul Horovitz said Friday.

“We’ve begun to think of the value of smallness,” Horovitz said. “It makes much more sense to continue to work on the traffic problems and to explore a more modest growth.”

The 750-student school has not ruled out future expansion, perhaps along the lines of 25 more students and a larger building, but school officials said that neighbors will be fully consulted about any changes. At a meeting last week with residents and Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Feuer, Horovitz promised to form a “neighborhood liaison” committee.

Buckley’s decision reflects a general easing of hostilities in this upscale Sherman Oaks neighborhood, a marked change from the days when accusations of parking and other school violations flew fast and furious at community meetings.

Alarmed by the proposed expansion, the local homeowners group formed a committee just to deal with issues concerning Buckley. Feuer, who represents the area, refused to support the expansion plan until the school addressed its nagging traffic problems.

The debate even divided the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn., which banned residents with children at the school from serving on its Buckley committee, prompting one angry resident to condemn the group’s complaints as “a torrent of blather from cranky empty-nesters.”

At the height of the controversy, famed science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison, a neighbor of the school, even criticized the expansion plan on a national talk show. The television appearance prompted a pile of protest letters and calls--some from as far away as Florida--to Feuer.

“It was just a big mess,” said Jane Blumenfeld, Feuer’s chief of staff. “Everybody was accusing everybody.”

In 1998, the school hired a new headmaster--Horovitz--and the tenor of the debate began to soften, according to neighbors.

“I give Paul a tremendous amount of credit,” said Henry Lipson, co-chairman of the homeowners’ committee. “He called the [expansion proposal] an albatross around their neck because it was preventing anything from going forward, any change in the school’s relations with the neighborhood.”

The school has recently adopted several new policies to ease the traffic crunch, including leasing off-campus parking spaces, banning student parking on Stansbury Avenue and starting a mandatory car-pooling program.

“We’re not here to butt heads with our neighbors,” said James P. Higgins, chair of Buckley’s board of trustees. “We’re here to be a member of the neighborhood.”

Lipson and other residents said the changes have helped unsnarl traffic. The homeowners association has since withdrawn its complaints to the city Planning Commission, which had been considering Buckley’s expansion plan.

Arnold Newman, another Sherman Oaks resident who had opposed the expansion, said the school’s decision will also protect the greenbelt that separates the campus from Fossil Ridge Park, an area where the soft shale has preserved 10-million-year-old whale and porpoise fossils, relics of an ancient sea.

The expansion “would have immeasurably degraded the visitors’ views from Fossil Ridge,” said Newman, a naturalist. “I’m glad their decision is to maintain that beauty. It serves them and the neighborhood in one fell swoop.”