LAUSD’s Building Fantasy

Last fall’s announcement that the nightmarishly overcrowded Los Angeles Unified School District expects to complete 85 new schools and expand 75 others within six years should be cause for celebration. As a Times editorial wistfully noted, “We want to believe.” But if the past offers any indication, the district is as likely to achieve that goal as its superintendent is to fly.

My skepticism stems from having seen what happened when the district tried to build just one school--on a site it already owned with funds it had committed. The Community Magnet School, an elementary school on Airdrome just east of La Cienega, is one of the district’s jewels. Its multiethnic students get top Stanford 9 scores. It has enormously dedicated teachers and a flourishing parent association. In 1999, the school was the only LAUSD campus to receive a prestigious National Blue Ribbon award.

Since it was founded in 1977, however, this exemplary school has been squeezed onto a 2.5-acre slab of asphalt surrounded by a chain-link fence. Students are taught in 34-year-old “temporary” classrooms; two bathrooms and the school’s former library were converted to classrooms after mandatory class-size reduction went into effect. The rooms have peeling paint, but no air conditioning or Internet access; two barely have windows. There’s no auditorium, food preparation area, lunch room or covered halls--on rainy days kids eat in class, and when they go to the bathroom, they get wet. Three hundred students share eight toilets.

For years, Principal Pamela Marton begged the district for upgrades. Then, in April 1999, a representative sent by the U.S. Department of Education Blue Ribbon committee toured the school and reportedly told then-Supt. Ruben Zacarias and at least one school board member, “You should be ashamed.” Within a month, word came down that a new Community campus was to be built, on an unused portion of the 9.8-acre site housing Walgrove Elementary School, in Venice.

Community’s neighbor, the equally sterling Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES), cheered--finally, this onetime junior high that now also has a high school could expand and build the sports facility it so badly needed. But parents and staff at Walgrove, an under-attended, dilapidated neighborhood school, were outraged. No one from LAUSD had told them this action was even being considered. They had been in talks with Santa Monica’s Crossroads School founder Paul Cummins, who also wanted to build on their site, and who’d promised massive upgrades to their campus as part of the deal. And Community, most of whose students live well east of La Cienega, didn’t want to move.

The district gave all the same basic reply: Too bad. At a June meeting, the district’s then-project manager presented the plan: The school would be allocated $4.2 million, which would just cover the cost of building a modern campus of pre-fab modular structures, including an administration building, mutipurpose room, lunch shelter and other amenities. (About $1.2 million of this money would come from building-rehabilitation funds that Community was due to receive anyway, from passage of Proposition BB, a 1997 school repair bond measure.) The proposed opening date was fall 2000. If the school rejected this offer, it would be evicted when LACES built its facility and ultimately might be relocated somewhere like Sunland. Amid much grumbling, the parent body voted to endorse the change.

Immediately, school committees formed and went to work preparing for the move. Several parents were architects and focused on building design. Others reached out to the Walgrove community. Over the next six months, dozens of meetings took place, between Community and Walgrove principals and parents, staff and district project managers, and various independent consultants hired by the district. The Playa del Rey-based architectural firm of Martinez Amador Architects Inc. was hired and began designing the new campus.

Meanwhile, Barbara Boudreaux, the board member who’d pushed for Community’s relocation, was replaced by Genethia Hayes. Supt. Zacarias was replaced first by Ramon C. Cortines, then Roy Romer. The district’s facilities division, which oversees construction, was reorganized. By January 2000, Martinez Amador still didn’t have a contract. By March, it was growing clear that $4.6 million for the new school wasn’t enough. “Everyone knew you couldn’t build a school for that price,” says one parent, an architect who has been involved in public construction projects for 15 years. “But we were told to keep going.”

Then, in May 2000, the whole game plan suddenly changed. Kathi Littman, hired earlier that year as the district’s director of new facilities, decided that pre-fab buildings weren’t cost-effective. Community should get a campus that was “stick built”--constructed from scratch. The new budget was just over $6 million. There were dozens more meetings. By September, staff at the Walgrove School was growing upset at the scope of work being proposed for Community while its own rehabilitation needs went unmet. Progress on the new school slowed as the district addressed that problem. Then, in December, local district D Supt. Merle Price was shocked to discover that the school board had never approved giving Community any more than the original $4.2 million. And still, the work went on.

By January 2001, the new Community school had its third project manager--but still no official budget. By April, costs for building the new school were being estimated at more than $11 million. In May, Principal Marton reviewed the district’s master-plan project list for new construction--and Community wasn’t even on it. The district, under fire for its overcrowding problem, had created new criteria for which schools deserved new facilities. Because Community wasn’t on a year-round schedule or busing students, it didn’t meet them. Construction on the LACES sports facility was due to begin, which meant Community would be on the street.

In June of last year, exasperated parents flooded school board members with demands for action. No one seemed to remember what had been promised the school, or why, or even know what was happening. School board President Hayes, for instance, sent one parent an irritated note, saying that the promise to move Community had been “based on inaccurate information and faulty research” and that the Walgrove buildings that would house the school--there weren’t any--had proved to have “major structural damage.”

“I was dumbfounded,” says the parent whose profession is public construction. “Unlike with other institutions, you didn’t get the sense that anyone was in charge or in control of the process.”

Then, in July, the district abruptly informed Community that it would not be moving after all. Martinez Amador was fired, and the project turned over to architect Laurel Gillette, who was designing the LACES sports complex (which now had to be reconfigured to fit in a smaller space). And it quickly became clear that $6 million, once declared enough to build a whole new school, wouldn’t buy much at all.

As the plan now stands, by 2004--five years after the building effort began--Community will have a new multipurpose room, administration building, library and two bathrooms. Classes will continue to meet in the old bungalows, which will be given a new coat of paint, air conditioners and Internet connections. The budget for this improvement includes a whopping $526,000 in “project management” fees, $358,000 for design fees and $70,000-$100,000 to cover “soft costs” associated with the aborted Walgrove move. (The LACES sports project, meanwhile, which was to break ground this month, was suddenly found to be “several million” over budget and is on hold.) The land-poor district is doing nothing with the vacant acres at Walgrove.

How does a school district promise to move a school, offer a plan that meets its budget, expand that plan, then discover there’s no money after all and cancel everything? Kathi Littman--who notes that she and her staff “inherited this effort”--gets an impatient edge in her voice when asked. “This is a grandfathered project, not a priority plan school,” she says.

But the issue isn’t whether Community “deserves” a new campus or not. It’s that, in Supt. Romer’s own words, past district construction estimates were sometimes based on “pure air.” It’s that no one ever is held accountable for such mistakes. And it’s that no one at the district seems to grasp that these mistakes come with a price. Some of it is actual: The district consultants who attended three years of planning meetings were well paid for their time (although parents were not.) A larger part is psychic. The district desperately needs the support of active, concerned, middle-class parents. But when it treats those parents with dismissive contempt, when it wastes their time, when it convinces them that even their most strenuous exertions are futile, it has lost them.

“I hope things move forward, but I’m done,” says a Community parent who was intensely involved in the effort to move the campus and who estimates his architectural firm contributed $15,000 in unpaid labor. “I have no more energy for this. We worked for three years, and designed two new schools, and we don’t even have one.”

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Carol Lynn Mithers is a Los Angeles writer and the parent of a student at Community Magnet School.