School projects to push health

After decades of simply trying to build classroom space, Los Angeles school officials have embarked on construction projects meant to enhance students’ physical health, well-being and safety outside school hours.

The Board of Education on Tuesday approved plans to install a YMCA on a Westside campus and a Boys & Girls Club at a South Los Angeles middle school and to set up mobile health clinics at dozens of campuses.

The projects attempt forward-thinking in a school system that is still building its way out of a decades-old campus shortage. Voter-approved bonds being used for that effort, as well as for repairing and modernizing hundreds of other Los Angeles Unified School District schools, were also set up to include some money for “innovative” projects.

At University High School, near the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs campus, the district was in a particular bind. The school sits directly over an active earthquake fault, and state law stipulates that no school building can lie over or within 50 feet of such a fault. The district faced demolition of the boys gym, a girls physical education building, the music building and numerous modular classrooms. Replacing these facilities had not been part of earlier school bond budgets.

“This partnership allows us to complete for that school what they didn’t have otherwise,” said school board member Marlene Canter, who represents the area.

Projects such as this one are welcome, but are too little, too late, said David Abel, chairman of New Schools, Better Neighborhoods, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization set up to leverage public and private resources to make schools the center of neighborhood improvement.

“We have only three or four projects coming forward to the school board,” said Abel, who once served as vice chairman of the school-bond oversight committee. “It is somewhat frustrating to look back over eight years, $20 billion and 145 new schools and see so little coming forward. We will look back, in a decade or more, at this building program and say: What a missed opportunity.”

The YMCA collaboration grew out of a geographic consonance in mid-Wilshire. The district had bought land from the Y for a school project, pushing the Y to an adjacent parcel and prompting both parties to contemplate new possibilities of working together. Already the Y provides on-campus before- and after-school programs at about 50 district schools and physical education programs for about 40 schools. It also took part in a five-year South Los Angeles program to teach swimming to third-graders.

For the University High project, the Y intends to spend up to a year raising an estimated $20 million to replace its outdated, undersize building just north of Pico Boulevard. The district’s replacement school buildings will cost $23.8 million, which includes federal funds for seismic upgrades.

“It if works, this could be inspirational and groundbreaking,” said Larry Rosen, president and chief executive of the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles.

The Boys & Girls Club project is at Markham Middle School, near four low-income housing projects and within the territory of seven major gangs.

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office is contributing $100,000 for modular buildings on campus that will house the club branch, and the district will cover the balance. The club in turn is committing $150,000 initially while promising to manage ongoing activities.

The third project, the mobile health clinics, features two sets of outside partners. One group providing free health services is the Allergy and Asthma Foundation of America, working with the county Department of Health Services and County-USC Medical Center.

The other provider will be Little Company of Mary San Pedro Hospital, which is part of the Seattle-based nonprofit Providence Health & Services.

Little Company runs RVs outfitted with two exam rooms and a nurses’ station; they already make regular stops at L.A. Unified schools. The school board’s vote authorizes up to $1 million to build stations at 28 sites. These parking spots are expected to have concrete pads to support the weight of the RV, electrical outlets and Internet access.

“This is more accessible primary care for people who have limited resources,” said Jim Tehan, the nonprofit’s director of community health.

Former school board member Caprice Young said these collaborations “sound like terrific ideas,” but like other sometime critics of the district, she’d like to see more -- especially when it comes to supporting innovations through charter schools.

“Charter schools were explicitly told we would be allowed to compete for these funds,” said Young, who heads the California Charter Schools Assn. “The school district has completely broken that promise. I’m kind of getting used to that.”

Another concern has been that funds for innovations and charter schools would be transferred to the main new-school construction budget, which is running a deficit. The school board filled much of that hole Tuesday with $1 billion in bond money intended for repairing older schools, for early childhood centers and for classroom technology.

Not every collaboration has come off as intended. An early effort involved building a primary center and affordable housing near Gratts Elementary School west of downtown. The housing component has stalled, although the school portion has gone forward, said Guy Mehula, L.A. Unified chief facilities executive.

Critics say the district’s foot-dragging and demands were the obstacle at Gratts.

Mehula responded that making partnerships work can be complicated and lengthy, with money ever an issue: “Help find me partners with resources, and we can do wonderful things.”

--

howard.blume@latimes.com