1980-1989: SCHOOLS

Claudia Peschiutta

GLENDALE -- Lean times led to much belt-tightening for the Glendale

Unified School District in the 1980s.

With enrollment continuing to fall, the Glendale Board of Education in

1981 held hearings to decide whether to close Dunsmore, Valley View,

Field elementary schools. But parents united to fight the campus closures

and crowded into meeting halls to express their concerns on issues such

as child safety and the future of empty school facilities.

Despite the opposition, Field and Valley View closed in 1981 and Clark

Junior High followed in 1983.

Declining enrollment and the effects of Proposition 13 -- the 1978 law

that limited property tax increases -- forced the district in 1983 to

turn to banks and other financial institutions in order to make ends

meet.

However, the trend of shrinking student numbers soon leveled off and

later took a dramatic turn. By the end of the decade, the district was

once again dealing with overcrowded classrooms.

When Jane Whitaker took over the presidency of the board of education

in 1989, she said “the single biggest challenge of my term will be the

influx of students, languages and cultures from all over the world.”

District enrollment jumped from 19,978 in 1984 to 24,180 five years

later. The school population also became much more diverse and minority

students made up more than 66% of the total enrollment in 1989.

Burgeoning enrollment took its toll on already aging facilities in the

late 1980s and the district wanted to do about $10 to $12 million worth of construction and renovation to update its campuses. In an effort to

offset the cost, the board voted unanimously in 1987 to levy a developer

fee on construction within district boundaries.

Local builders were not happy.

“Education is something that should be a general expense, not a

special tax,” said Les Jensen at a March 1987 public hearing. “This seems

to me to be addressing one particular business because it has a deep

pocket.”

Other issues in Glendale schools also inspired debate, such as the

board’s decision in 1988 to continue allowing invocations at its annual

baccalaureate service after a state appellate court decision from the

previous year that barred schools from sponsoring religious services.

Herbert Hoover High School made headlines in 1987, when the campus

newspaper attempted to publish a public service announcement promoting

the use of condoms. Subsequent efforts by the Glendale Board of Education

to give school officials the final say over what goes into student

publications led to public discussion of the First Amendment rights of

students.

As the decade drew to an end, the district was coping with growing

enrollment by changing school borders and adding new classrooms to

overcrowded campuses.