Build Schools or We All Fail

The parents and students who live near the abandoned Belmont Learning Complex deserve some answers. How and when does the Los Angeles Unified School District plan to relieve overcrowding at the old Belmont High School? It’s a question that reverberates districtwide.

More than 5,000 students squeeze into Belmont High, which is about a mile and a half west of the downtown Civic Center. They attend school on convoluted year-round schedules. An additional 2,000 students live within Belmont’s boundaries, but because of overcrowding they are forced to take buses to distant, less crowded campuses in the San Fernando Valley. Their patience has run out.

Roy Romer, the new superintendent of the 712,000-student LAUSD, is educating himself on the Belmont Learning Complex fiasco. He is learning how the campus came to be built, without the necessary environmental safeguards, on an abandoned oil field contaminated with methane gas and hydrogen sulfide. He is talking to those who want the district to finish the school and to those--including a solid majority on the school board--who oppose salvaging a project that has already cost $170 million. He is recommending to the board a new environmental study to determine the best uses of the site and help end the controversy.

New to the area, Romer is trying to get up to speed as he deals with all of the district’s urgent facilities problems. The focus on this issue has intensified with lawsuits filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union, alleging that the state shortchanges big urban districts on school construction funds and that minority students are denied an equal education by overcrowded, substandard, year-round schools.

Romer wants to lease commercial building space to relieve overcrowding and start eliminating year-round calendars. To put all LAUSD schools back on the traditional calendar would require adding 210,000 seats--more than exist in any other school district in the state. Leasing commercial property, a strategy also considered by his predecessors, is complicated by the state Field Act, which sets stringent building safety standards for schools. Here’s where Romer, a former Colorado governor, should prove his political skills--by going to Sacramento and getting for L.A. the flexibility it must have.

Consider some of the other roadblocks: On July 20, 1999, one year ago, the school board directed its facilities staff to identify alternative sites for the Belmont Learning Complex. That directive was ignored. Last January, the staff was directed again to present alternatives. Since then many sites have been mentioned, including the LAUSD headquarters near Temple and Grand, the Evans Adult School north of downtown, a former train yard on the edge of Chinatown, a parking lot at Dodger Stadium, two hospitals, a closed car dealership and the old Terminal Annex mail facility north of the Civic Center. Most of the sites are not expected to survive environmental scrutiny or local opposition or both. Most school board members don’t even know the status of the replacement sites.

The LAUSD last built a high school in 1971, in Granada Hills, at about the same time the district promised a new Belmont High School. There is not a single more urgent task for the district right now than getting its building program in high gear.