City Council, GUSD officials meet to discuss expansion of One Glendale program
Teams with One Glendale warm up for a soccer game at Pacific Park, where teams from Glendale Unified prepare and compete on Wednesday, March 2, 2016. This is the first year for the One Glendale program which started in the fall with flag football, then basketball, and now soccer.
In a rare joint meeting last week, school and city leaders discussed working together to expand a new after-school sports program and potentially opening up campus sports fields to the public.
Glendale Unified officials and elementary school principals made their case about how the city-funded sports program, called One Glendale, has boosted the grades and health of students who signed up.
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A parent survey shows that 76% of participants started getting higher marks on their report cards and 84% of them started eating more fruits and vegetables.
“Anytime we can capture the kids that have no place to go … that’s fabulous,” said Nayiri Nahabedian, a school board member, during the meeting held at the Glendale Unified headquarters.
Launched by the city last August, One Glendale is currently offered at four campuses —Cerritos, Mann, Marshall and Edison elementary schools — and the city is looking to expand it to four more — R.D White, Muir, Columbus and Jefferson elementaries.
Carmen Labrecque, principal at Edison Elementary, said one of her students is a diabetic and managed to lose a significant amount of weight to better control the disease.
Each One Glendale session lasts about eight weeks, and students participate after school Monday through Thursday until about 5 p.m. About 30 fourth- and fifth-graders are signed up for each session, and they get to play sports such as volleyball, basketball and flag football.
The Glendale City Council is expected to vote on whether to expand One Glendale during its midyear budgeting session sometime in April.
One Glendale costs $137,956 for four eight-week sessions and is funded by a $55,000 allocation from the city, a $20,000 grant from Dignity Health Glendale Memorial Hospital and $33,000 from the city’s Open Space Foundation.
Soccer fields [are] one of our biggest needs and one of our biggest requests. It’s very difficult for us to find space for them and this is a really great solution.
— Glendale City Councilwoman Laura Friedman
In a separate discussion, the council tried to win support from school board members to allow the city to build soccer fields at two schools — Columbus Elementary and Wilson Middle School.
The idea would be to open up the upgraded fields to the general public after school as a more cost-effective way of creating new open space.
The school board will have the final say on whether to allow the city to move forward with the new park projects.
The city and school district have teamed up before on joint parks, including Pacific Park at Edison Elementary.
“I think it’s a really great opportunity,” Councilwoman Laura Friedman said. “Soccer fields [are] one of our biggest needs and one of our biggest requests. It’s very difficult for us to find space for them and this is a really great solution.”
The projects entail converting grass soccer fields to artificial turf as well as adding lighting and restrooms. The project at Columbus would cost roughly $2.7 million and about $4.3 million at Wilson.
School officials said they were receptive to the city’s proposals.
School board member Armina Gharpetian said there’s a significant need for athletic fields in south Glendale.
“There is no athletic field in the community other than for GUSD students to use,” she said. “ I think these joint projects are wonderful.”
Both efforts would be funded by the city’s development-impact-fee fund, which is estimated to have $16 million by the end of the current fiscal year on June 30. The money in the fund is paid by developers in order to build mixed-use projects in downtown Glendale.
State laws require development impact fee money — when it comes to parks — to be spent only on creating new parks and adding new amenities, not on maintenance.
The council is expected to vote on development-impact-fee allocations by the end of March, said Community Services Director Jess Duran. A discussion on setting up a joint agreement with the school district would follow, he added.
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Arin Mikailian, arin.mikailian@latimes.com
Twitter: @ArinMikailian
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