Struggle to Study in Peace

During lunch in the shadow of a four-freeway interchange in Boyle Heights, children at Soto Street Elementary School must deal with road dust blowing onto their hot dogs and sandwiches.

Their teachers urge them to focus while classroom windows rattle and a relentless stream of commercial trucks clangs, screeches and groans, sometimes less than 20 yards away.

Their parents worry as they come home complaining of difficulty breathing and about having to strain to be heard above the freeway noise.

Many would like to muffle the racket, which exceeds federal standards for noise pollution allowed at public schools, according to recent Los Angeles Unified School District tests.

But a growing campaign to do so has only sparked a feud involving parents, the district and state transportation officials over how and whether the noise and air pollution should be addressed.

As at several other area schools nestled next to one or more of the four freeways that slice through Boyle Heights, such conditions have long been accepted as a fact of life at Soto.

“I don’t think there is a problem here,” said Principal Elva Reyes. “I don’t think going to school here is different than anywhere else.”

Small but growing quickly, the campus of 488 students faces more immediate concerns, she said, such as a space crunch and funding shortages, as it struggles to raise standardized test scores out of the bottom 20% among California elementary schools.

But several parents and teachers at Soto--backed by environmentalists and sound experts--believe that the constant noise hinders the students’ ability to learn and affects their health.

“It’s like living with a rock in your shoe,” said Margarita Sanchez, a nurse and parent of two Soto students who has been leading the effort to improve conditions there.

“It’s a constant irritation. They have to play out there, have assemblies, exercise,” she said. “Then, they come home, using raised voices because they’re used to talking over the noise. That’s a level of stress that continues.”

Acoustical studies show that ambient noise above federal standards of 52 decibels inside classrooms and 67 decibels on the school grounds may impair speech perception, interfere with learning to read, cause annoyance and aggravate hearing problems in children. One study likened 67 decibels to the noise generated by an old car idling.

Recent district tests at Soto revealed that noise in one classroom is louder than is federally accepted, while in several others it is near the maximum standard. On the playground and outside the school buildings, several spots had readings higher than the federal standard, the tests showed.

David Lubman, a Westminster-based acoustical engineer who is working to lower federal noise standards inside the nation’s classrooms, said the ability of non-English-speaking children to adapt to a new language is also hindered by such excessive noise.

In predominantly immigrant areas such as Boyle Heights, “it’s especially important for children who are just learning to speak or read to be in a quiet environment,” Lubman said. “There are some phonemes in English that are not in Spanish. If you can’t hear these phonemes, then you can’t speak them. If you don’t learn them when you’re young, the chances are poor you’ll learn them when you’re older.”

Propelled by such assertions, the parents and teachers have proposed several steps to deal with the problem, but with little success so far.

They were recently joined by district officials in a campaign to persuade state transportation officials to extend a $7.2-million sound wall project to a Pomona Freeway offramp that runs less than 20 yards from eight bungalow classrooms at Soto. Currently, the only barrier between the offramp and the classrooms is a chain-link fence.

But officials at the state Department of Transportation say an extension is unlikely.

Neighbors and area legislators are already urging Caltrans to move up the start date in 2004 for sound walls along portions of the Golden State and Pomona freeways surrounding Soto.

But Caltrans spokesman Eusebio Viajar said: “They no longer qualify for the sound wall program.”

After the Pomona Freeway onramp was built next to Soto Street Elementary in the 1960s, the agency tried to muffle the noise by paying to install double-paned windows, air-conditioners and heaters in classrooms, he said.

Trucks Make Thin Walls Vibrate

The eight bungalow classrooms--installed to accommodate a swelling student body while meeting lower student-teacher ratios mandated by the state--were not there when the improvements were made, Viajar said.

Equipped with often unreliable heaters and air-conditioners, those rooms have thin walls that tend to vibrate when heavy trucks lumber by and do little to muffle the car and truck horns, teachers said.

District officials added that Caltrans still has a responsibility to help muffle the noise at the school, as well as in the surrounding neighborhood.

“Had this been in a suburban community, they would have fixed the problem already,” said Fabian Nunez, an L.A. Unified government liaison who has urged Caltrans to build a sound wall near Soto Street Elementary.

Students call the din frustrating.

“When they do the noise outside, they don’t let us do our homework,” complained Jimena Rosa, a second-grader. “It makes me mad. Then I go home and there is more noise. Then I stop doing my homework.”

During a recent morning writing lesson inside fourth-grade teacher Augustin Gonzalez’s bungalow classroom, students occasionally glanced at a rattling window that Gonzalez had covered with a black “Writing Process” diagram.

“Pay attention,” he warned, before the window and diagram quivered again.

The school has other problems as well, teachers say.

Gonzalez is among several teachers who have been helping parents circulate a petition demanding that the district build a cafeteria or auditorium at Soto. Walking door-to-door with their kids, the parents have collected more than 400 signatures so far.

The students explain to their neighbors that they eat their lunches beneath a recently constructed outdoor pavilion that offers little protection against foul weather, blowing dust or birds looking for leftovers.

When it rains, they take their lunches inside the classrooms, which teachers say has caused a rodent problem. During bimonthly assemblies on the school playground, speakers equipped with bullhorns must compete with the traffic speeding nearby.

“If you’re forced to go outside for any type of announcement and can’t hear what’s going on, that’s not right,” said Don Toliver, a fifth-grade teacher who has been at Soto about 20 years.

School orchestra concerts held outside are “useless,” he said.

But, with an already small playground and little space for anything else at Soto, a new cafeteria or auditorium seems unlikely, said L.A. Unified administrator Geri Herrera, who oversees elementary and middle schools feeding into nearby Roosevelt High School.

“Our highest priority has to be in terms of seats available at the school,” she said.

While the adults work it out, Jimena said she and her friends will continue to throw their food away whenever they find that dust or other debris has blown on their lunches.

Although the 7-year-old admitted she later gets hungry, she shrugged and uttered a Spanish word familiar to working class children in the area: Aguantamos, or “We bear it in silence.”