Revived Effort to Build L.A. Schools Faces Many Hurdles

After years of sputtering progress and discouraging setbacks, the Los Angeles school district has made a promising new start on a program to build 86 schools in five years.

From Sylmar to San Pedro, district agents are scouring the city for land, negotiating deals, meeting with community groups, conducting environmental reviews and resolutely pinpointing houses and apartment buildings that will have to be demolished.

But even as the district moves with uncharacteristic speed and vigor to piece together dozens of complex projects, it’s far from certain that it can build classrooms fast enough to keep up with enrollment.

The $2-billion program could falter or collapse if the district is unable to meet a series of deadlines imposed by the state. Up to $750 million in state bond money is available to the district to help pay for construction, but the money must be claimed by mid-2002. For every project that isn’t ready, L.A. Unified will lose its funding to other, more nimble districts.

“This is big. This is like Hoover Dam,” said civil rights lawyer Constance L. Rice, who has become a champion of the district’s school construction campaign. “We cannot not succeed.”

A wide range of hazards could throw the district off schedule. School officials estimate it will have to raze about 1,200 homes and apartment units, which could set off debilitating political battles. Every step in the process, from cleaning contaminated soil to drawing architectural plans, requires complicated state approvals that depend on the cooperation and efficiency of bureaucrats in Sacramento as well as Los Angeles.

Already, there are signs of slippage: The district created its own detailed timeline for the work, and 36 projects have fallen behind schedule for a variety of reasons, according to a report released last week. Those projects may still qualify for state money, but every delay makes it less likely.

The stakes are enormous. If the district fails to open schools at an accelerated pace by mid-decade, it will run out of seats for an ever-expanding student body.

If it succeeds, decades of busing thousands of children out of the city’s most crowded neighborhoods would at last end. And dozens of campuses that look like shantytowns of portable classrooms would be reconfigured with underground parking and multistory buildings.

Still, 86 new schools would not solve the whole problem. More than half the district’s schools--including all senior high schools--would remain on multitrack, year-round calendars. To restore regular schedules would require more than twice as many schools, a 10-year program that district officials are already planning at Supt. Roy Romer’s direction.

This year, the district will concentrate on the vexing business of staking out land for 17 high schools, 6 middle schools, 24 elementary schools, 35 primary centers and 4 continuation schools.

For help, L.A. Unified has turned to high-paid real estate consultants such as Rick Rodriguez.

Rodriguez cruises the streets of the Eastside from El Sereno to Cudahy in his black Mercedes convertible--sometimes accompanied by community members--scouring neighborhoods for potential sites.

On one tour he found a parking lot he thought would be just right for an Eastside primary center. But when he presented the idea at a community meeting, residents pointed out a problem he could not have detected. To get to the school, the residents told him, children from one housing project would have to walk through the rival gang territory of another housing project. Rodriguez said he hopes to have attendance boundaries redrawn so that the new school would serve only one housing project.

His biggest challenge is finding high school sites east and southeast of downtown. An early plan to use the campus of East Los Angeles College fizzled over a bureaucratic impasse.

“To get 20 acres, how many houses do you have to take?” Rodriguez asked. “They don’t want to move, and if they did, there is no place in this area to move to. Four or five houses is one thing, but to knock out eight to 10 blocks is too much.”

An aerial photo of East L.A. shows only two undeveloped areas large enough for a high school. One was easily recognizable as the Evergreen Cemetery. Rodriguez checked out the other, a large empty hill across the freeway from Cal State L.A. It was sandwiched between Sybil Brand Institute, the county’s jail for women, and the Sheriff’s Department headquarters, not the best neighbors for a school.

To stay on schedule for the state bond money, the district must identify a high school site in the first quarter of 2001. Any hitch would jeopardize the funding for a $40-million project.

Massive as it is, the school building program is not the largest in Los Angeles history. More than 100 new schools were opened twice before in a single decade, as residential development expanded the city’s frontiers during the 1920s and the 1950s. What makes today’s challenge unparalleled is the complexity of placing schools in crowded urban neighborhoods.

There are generally three choices: clearing densely populated residential land, closing businesses or rehabilitating polluted industrial land. Larger campuses sometimes involve all three. This calls for delicate negotiations with dozens of property owners, demanding environmental reviews and huge outlays for relocation.

Few Schools Open in Recent Years

In recent decades, the district has failed in nearly every department. It lacked the will to force people out of their homes and the business acumen needed to pull off tough real estate deals. As a result, it opened only a handful of elementary schools and primary centers in the last 20 years and not a single high school since 1971.

The low ebb came when environmental hazards led the board to scrap the nearly completed Belmont Learning Complex near downtown last year and to drop the acquisition of 40 acres of industrial land for a South Gate high school.

These two fiascoes precipitated a shake-up that has filled the top ranks of the facilities division with highly paid construction specialists. They have beefed up staffs, tightened the organization and established clear milestones for all the school projects.

But even as the new team was taking shape, money was running out. When the statewide school construction bond of 1998 opened the floodgates of state money, L.A. Unified had only a few projects eligible for funding. As other districts lined up their projects, the district faced the possibility of collecting only a fraction of the money they were counting on.

Rice’s law firm and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund challenged the state funding mechanism in court, alleging that it favored wealthy suburban school districts that could easily acquire vacant, untainted land.

A judge agreed and forced state officials to change the rules last August, giving L.A. a better chance to compete for up to $750 million, which will be parceled in stages from now until June 2002. In addition, the district can claim another $278 million in state funds to restore playground space gobbled up by portable classrooms. Those funds, which must be spent under annual deadlines or be forfeited, can be used to expand or build new schools. Those two pots of money would cover half the estimated costs of the five-year construction plan.

As the district races to meet its deadlines, it is about to confront the volatile issue of forcing homeowners and tenants out of their homes. Battles with homeowners groups or housing advocates have the greatest potential to throw school officials off-track and scuttle projects.

The district estimates that school construction will displace about 220 single family homes and more than 1,000 rental units. About 260 business properties, some of them currently unused, must also be cleared.

In the easy cases, the dislocation can be limited to half a dozen or fewer houses behind a strip mall to make room for a 2-acre primary center. Even then, the human dimension is wrenching.

“There are memories here you can’t get any place else,” said Georgie Lawson, 77, who received a notice that the district wants her home of 52 years for a primary center in Van Nuys.

Portraits of her three children hang on a wall in the living room. Dusty books and papers remain untouched in the study of her husband, who died in October. Jacaranda trees Lawson planted five decades ago dominate the backyard.

“It’s all I have,” said Lawson, a retiree who, ironically, worked for 40 years as a custodian in two nearby L.A. schools. “I haven’t any desire to move. This is my home.”

School district officials say they considered several other potential sites, but settled on Lawson’s home and three others as the least disruptive option.

“We all have a great deal of compassion, but we also have the exquisitely important mission to deliver seats for the children of Los Angeles,” said Scot Graham, the district’s director of real estate. “It’s a difficult place [for us] to be in as humans.”

Commercial Sites Prove Easier

The district has achieved some notable successes in finding commercial parcels for some of its larger campuses. These include the former Santee dairy in South Los Angeles and an abandoned Gemco department store in Sun Valley, both destined to be high schools.

But any site has the potential to provoke civic fratricide, especially when the district’s plans would bump low-income tenants into the housing market at a time of such scarcity that people recently were discovered paying rent to live in an abandoned hospital with no kitchens and poorly functioning plumbing.

Beleaguered housing officials look askance at any displacement of low-rent housing.

“You’re doing damage to a lot of people you are building schools for,” said Sally Richman, a policy and planning manager with the Los Angeles City Housing Department. “An easier solution would be to take single family homes. But homeowners are more powerful politically. They know how to scream. Tenants are not as organized.”

School officials counter that their need for new schools is greatest in the most crowded neighborhoods, making apartments a necessary target.

In the densely populated Pico-Union district, for example, planners are eyeing a block of apartment buildings with 184 units for a new elementary school. Another plan would take out two blocks of apartments in North Hollywood.

District officials say evicted tenants will receive generous relocation benefits, sufficient in some cases to make down payments on houses. But housing advocates are trying to organize the tenants to resist.

“The fact that you’re going in and taking out 184 units at a time of a housing crisis is unconscionable,” said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, a nonprofit group that fights for rent control and promotes federally financed housing. The district, Gross said, should be required to replace any housing it demolishes.

On a recent evening, coalition organizer Esther Portillo, along with half a dozen UCLA students, went door-do-door in the seven buildings on North New Hampshire Avenue targeted for condemnation. Few doors opened. When occupants did respond, often exposing beds in their living rooms, they mostly listened politely but showed no reaction.

Later, about 25 tenants stood quietly through a 90-minute meeting as children scurried back and forth across the apartment courtyard. Portillo signed up captains in each building to recruit others for a trip downtown when the Board of Education considers the proposal.

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), who until December represented the area on the City Council, has long opposed residential condemnations. Rather than contesting the plan, however, she has intervened in an attempt to reduce the impact and ensure that tenants are consulted.

Eager to avoid a run-in, school officials are now considering an alternative design that would take only half of the apartment buildings. They also promised that they will start working with housing agencies and nonprofit organizations on joint efforts to build replacement housing.

Meanwhile, the district has been reaching out to community groups. Despite lingering distrust over the district’s notoriously heavy-handed tactics, the outreach has paid off in some cases.

When the Community Coalition, a South-Central grass-roots organization, polled one neighborhood on potential sites for a primary center, the unanimous pick was a recycling center at 112th Street and Vermont Avenue, a notorious hangout for troublemakers.

The owner, Alex Salami, would like to sell and had other irons in the fire--an apartment building or a shopping center.

“If I could put a school or a shopping center, I’d rather it go to the kids,” he said.

District planners said they could make the site work by taking just one house.

Though generally opposed to any residential condemnation, the coalition saw no better opportunity.

“We just love it because it takes out a nuisance site,” said Solomon Rivera, associate director of the coalition. “I wish they would all line up like this.”

The recycling center represents a concept articulated two years ago by a group of civic leaders who envisioned school construction as an engine to eliminate blight and build centers of community activity that would combine libraries, parks and school facilities.

Since then, the promise of that movement, called New Schools Better Neighborhoods, has faded somewhat under the unforgiving time crunch and other practical limitations.

Many of the bars and motels that the Community Coalition hoped to convert to schools simply didn’t have enough land, Rivera said. Blocks of homes would have to be added to the thin commercial lots.

At best, the success or failure of any project will depend on how well the district and its advocates can hold together a delicate consensus among the city’s power brokers on the overriding urgency of building schools.

Rice, the civil rights lawyer who helped win back the district’s money, is now intensely lobbying to keep diverse interests focused on that goal. She is imploring developers, environmentalists, homeowners, housing advocates, business owners and rival political factions to put aside their agendas when it comes to schools.

“It’s, ‘Come to Jesus!’ time,” Rice said.

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Times staff writer Duke Helfand contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

New Schools

To ease overcrowding, the Los Angeles Unified School District is embarking on a program to build 86 schools in the next five years. Another 80 schools will be expanded during the same period.

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Construction plan

High schools: 17

Continuation high schools: 4

Middle schools: 6

Elementary schools: 24

Primary centers (K-3): 35

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Enrollment Projections

Growth will start to taper off by mid-decade except at the high school level, where enrollment will boom for most of the decade. (In thousands)

Source: L.A. Unified