Grade School Breaks Ground on ‘Dream’ of a Nicer Campus

There was one word that the students, parents, teachers and community members gathered at Mount Washington Elementary School on Friday heard repeatedly. That word was “dream.”

As in, “a dream is finally coming true,” spoken by fifth-grader Raymond Metoyer. He marveled that he and his fellow students soon would be able to eat lunch inside when it rained, perform on an auditorium stage and study in a spacious new library.

As in, “a dream that started in the minds of all of you,” words used by Los Angeles City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa to praise a neighborhood coalition that had struggled for more than 10 years to get a multipurpose facility built on the campus.

Friday marked the groundbreaking for the Jack and Denny Smith Library and Community Center -- a 10,890-square-foot, $6.6-million building that is scheduled to be completed in fall 2005.

It was, however, a bittersweet sort of reverie. Longtime Mount Washington residents Jack and Denny Smith, the Los Angeles Times columnist and his wife, had agreed to allow the building to be named after them “from the beginning,” said Warren Christiansen, the building chairman for the nonprofit group, called the Friends of Mt. Washington.

But neither lived to see Friday’s groundbreaking. Jack Smith died in 1996 at the age of 79; Denny, 83, died Monday.

Instead, their sons, Doug Smith, a Times reporter, and Curt Smith, accepted accolades for their parents’ devotion to Mount Washington and praised the citizens who pushed the school district to build the facility.

According to district officials, this is the first time in Los Angeles Unified’s history that a parents group helped design and raise funds for a project of this kind.

The Friends of Mt. Washington endured years of political wrangling over how to get the building constructed. They even tried to get the project funded through a special, $3-million school bond issue, which was narrowly defeated.

Eventually, they raised $1.5 million and helped convince City Councilman Eric Garcetti to procure a $1.6-million community development block grant. Other funding will come from two school bond measures: BB and K.

“From this seed has grown a movement,” said school board member David Tokofsky. All new schools built by the district now include “core buildings” such as multipurpose rooms, Tokofsky said.

Audree Cabrera, the Mount Washington PTA’s historian and a mother of a third-grader, said students now cram into a space called the “rotunda” for school assemblies. They eat lunch outside on even the rainiest days.

The new building will solve those problems, she said, and also will be an important gathering place for her and her neighbors.