Schools Plan Deserves a Chance

While the group that wants to carve two San Fernando Valley school districts from Los Angeles Unified was in Downey last week arguing the theoretical benefits of a breakup, a group of Valley business leaders was meeting to talk concrete proposals for helping the schools.

That would be literal concrete. The Valley Industry and Commerce Assn.’s land use committee asked Kathi Littman, director of building and planning for LAUSD, for an update on the district’s efforts to find sites for new Valley schools.

According to LAUSD projections, the Valley will need 21,000 additional seats by 2006. And that’s assuming schools are on multitrack, year-round schedules. The greatest need is for new high schools, which take, at a minimum, five or six years to build.

Why so long? The state requires the district to complete all environmental reviews before buying land, and such reviews alone take at least a year. Then there’s getting neighboring homeowners and businesses on board, which can take even longer. And, of course, there’s the initial difficulty of finding land, period, in the built-out Valley.

VICA members appreciated the problems but didn’t let the LAUSD off the hook. They peppered Littman with questions.

Why has the district taken so long to prepare for projected enrollment increases? Why can’t the district reopen Valley elementary schools closed years ago when enrollment dropped? How can the district be trusted to act when not a single school is yet under construction? And why shouldn’t the Valley break away, given the LAUSD’s inability to get schools built?

Littman acknowledged the group’s frustration--which, she said, she shares. That frustration is the reason she recently left the private sector, where she worked as an architect, to take the LAUSD job.

The district has hired an outreach firm to work with neighborhoods and is working on legislation to get badly needed funding for retrofitting closed schools. It’s trying to “think outside the football field,” as Littman put it, and consider innovations such as putting basketball courts on the roofs of parking structures so that high schools can be built on smaller parcels of land. It’s looking at sites for small “academies” such as the one proposed for the Cal State Northridge campus.

Valley residents have every reason to be skeptical, given the LAUSD’s inept record. But Littman, hired as part of sweeping changes being made by interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines and a reform-minded school board, brings a desperately needed sense of urgency, not to mention know-how, to the task.

Breaking away from the rest of the LAUSD is not going to solve the Valley’s need for new schools. It would more likely delay construction even longer, given the effort that would go into starting new districts from scratch. Littman’s team has a plan, now. Like the already proposed Cortines plan for dividing the district into 11 semi-autonomous mini-districts, it is more than theoretical. And it deserves a chance.