School Site Debate
* Re “Proposed School Site Stirs Bitter Debate Over Safety of Poor Students,” April 16: The proposed new high school, New Millennium, would be on a site included in a recent report of 15 schools nationwide that have been proposed or built on dangerous land. It is one of only two sites in California to make the list compiled by the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. The other was the former Belmont Learning Complex project in Los Angeles, “which had been proposed for an abandoned oil field poisoned with methane.”
The center’s report says the Watsonville site “would put low-income students of color in a school isolated in an industrial commercial/agricultural zone far from most of their homes.” Our school officials are light-years ahead of Watsonville’s. They have already built Belmont--and they located it near the students’ homes and their headquarters across the freeway. Let’s hear it for politicians and bureaucrats everywhere.
ANNA MELKUMYAN
Los Angeles
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