A Northridge Junior High Tells L.A. Unified: Don’t Fence Us In

More than $73 million was spent making Los Angeles Unified campuses safer this school year. But it’s the $300,000 that wasn’t spent on Nobel Middle School that makes students and teachers on the Northridge campus feel secure.

While other schools lined up for money for guards and gates, Nobel -- unfenced for 44 years -- turned back a plan this spring to surround the school with a security fence.

The rejection has some school board members shaking their heads. The district lists Nobel as the only unfenced campus among its 550 schools.

“Sure, the neighborhood around the school is very nice, very safe,” said Donna Smith, an aide to school board member Jon Lauritzen, who proposed the fence. “But would you leave your nice Jaguar unlocked on the street all night? I doubt it. We live in the real world.... Very bad people come through very nice communities too.”

But fences are for locking students in, as well as strangers out.

At Nobel, the students “don’t feel like it’s a prison,” Principal Robert Coburn said. “They feel like we trust them ... and they are very, very proud of that.”

More than 600 students wrote letters and circulated petitions opposing the proposed fence. Teachers and parents also protested. It’s not just about aesthetics, they said, but also about the notion that freedom promotes responsibility, and students rise to the challenge.

The 20-acre campus -- in an upper-middle class neighborhood along a busy thoroughfare, midway between a freeway exit and a shopping mall -- has for years been a shining light in a district under fire for its foundering middle schools.

It has the highest test scores of any district middle school, even though half of its 2,200 students are bused in from other neighborhoods -- some to attend the school’s math and science magnet and others to get away from crowded inner-city schools. Its attendance record is always among the district’s best and there is little crime or vandalism.

Still, district officials are not entirely comfortable with the open campus. “We understand why they like it the way it is,” Smith said. “But the safety and welfare of students and employees is a primary responsibility of the district.”

Smith is a former principal of nearby Chatsworth High School, which added a wrought-iron fence around its campus a decade ago. “We loved the feeling of the open campus too,” she said. “But kids would come over from other schools and cause problems: fights, graffiti.... We realized we couldn’t be out there all the time, supervising every corner.”

Like every Los Angeles Unified school, Nobel is officially a closed campus. Students aren’t allowed to leave without permission, and parents and other visitors are required to sign in at the front office and wear visitors’ badges when they’re on campus.

But unlike other campuses, there is no gate to pass through, no single entrance and exit. Its walkways, lockers and green-trimmed classrooms are open to the street, separated only by a low brick wall, a grassy lawn and a border of assorted greenery: pine trees, roses, oleander bushes, bottlebrush trees and hedges of fragrant rosemary.

“You come onto this campus -- it’s like coming to a park,” physical education teacher Mike Tovey said. “We don’t like to brag about it because we want people to leave us alone.”

Tovey began teaching at the school 38 years ago when Northridge was considered the hinterland -- there was little traffic on surrounding roads and horses were pastured across the street.

Today, that land is a development of million-dollar homes, with swimming pools and tennis courts, and Nobel draws many of its students from nearby gated communities.

Principal Coburn said new parents often are concerned about the school’s layout and its lack of apparent security.

He worried too when he was assigned to the school 14 years ago. “I thought ‘Good grief, there’s no fence. How will we keep kids off campus on the weekend?’ ”

In fact, there are occasional trespassers when school is not in session. “Every once in a while, somebody will come on campus, drive a motorcycle across the grass, make a couple of circles on the eighth-grade lawn,” Tovey said. “But it grows over.”

The unsanctioned visitors are more likely to be parents teaching children to ride their bikes on the wide, empty paths that wend through the campus; skateboarders practicing their tricks in the parking lot; or teachers whiling away a Saturday afternoon in their quiet classrooms.

The school has safety advantages that other campuses don’t.

It’s in a neighborhood with one of the lowest crime rates in Los Angeles, and where hundreds turn out at community meetings sponsored by the police.

The campus is seldom deserted, because local sports leagues use the gym and fenced athletic fields for games and practices on evenings and weekends.

And because it is surrounded by homes, the students have little incentive to leave. “If we had a strip mall across the street, we probably couldn’t do this,” Coburn said. “There’s very little foot traffic around here, no place the kids can go quickly and disappear.”

Neighbors tend to call police if they see unusual activity. Teachers -- many of whom live nearby -- cruise past on weekends. An assistant principal has images beamed to his home from a security camera that surveys the campus.

“It’s a true community school, the old-fashioned type,” Los Angeles Police Sgt. Rick Gibby said. “People moved into that neighborhood because it was a great school for their kids to go to, so everybody takes responsibility.... It’s kind of like Mayberry.”

Physical education teacher Cheree Coyle said teachers “are not naive” about safety risks. They lock their classroom doors, monitor the campus between classes and have emergency walkie-talkies that connect them directly to the main office.

“If someone wacko wants to get on campus, they’ll find a way,” Coyle said. “But when you look at all the things this school needs -- more computers, new PE equipment, a weed-eater because there are so many cracks in the blacktop -- a fence is not on anybody’s list.”

For now, school board officials have dropped the plan. “We know people like that campus. It’s the way things used to be in the past, and people are comfortable with that,” school board aide Smith said.

But every morning, she notes, cars are lined up two deep, unloading children on the sidewalk outside Nobel.

“The parents say ‘We don’t need a fence. It’s so safe around here....’ Then they’ll drive their kids a block or two and drop them right at the door. Because they’re too afraid to let them walk to school alone.”