Letters to the Editor: School bond expenditures, placement of senior living facility on readers’ minds this week

At the La Cañada school board’s meeting last Friday the board made many questionable decisions about the $149-million bond:

— spending nothing, $0, to improve the high school’s parking and drop-off;

— replacing the high school’s pool with another undersized pool, despite the athletic director’s recommendation that it be full size;

— making the JV baseball field unusable by putting the new pool in right field;

— spending $2 million on new football stands with an elevator, despite average attendance of less than 200 at the five home football games each year;

— on a per-student basis, spending three times as much on the elementary schools as on the high school;

— at the elementary schools, instead of replacing old portables with new portables that can be installed during summer break, constructing new classroom buildings at five times the cost, with the two years of construction disrupting the campuses and cutting playground space in half;

— demolishing perfectly good classroom buildings at LCE and PCY, and the outdoor science lab at LCE, to replace them with two-story buildings that overlook backyards;

— adding new classrooms to the elementary schools despite the district’s two-decade continuing decline in the number of students living in the district;

— spending $55 million on new and replacement classrooms, at $1.2 million per classroom, with no net gain to student education since four walls are merely replaced by four nicer walls.

These decisions were made at a stealth special meeting called with 26 hours notice that was so lightly attended I was the only community member present. I fully support the $149-million bond, but any bad decisions by the board now will live with us for decades.

David Haxton

La Cañada Flintridge

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Reader Bob Lang may have been onto something when he wrote that the senior assisted living center should be built at the Town Center.

The Downtown Village Specific Plan contains a Residential District, and a senior citizen multifamily dwelling is one of the permitted uses within the Residential District.

The city of La Cañada Flintridge owns the land where the Montessori school is currently located in the northeast corner of the Town Center. Not much land is required for one of these assisted living facilities: Oakmont Senior Living, which has proposed a 72-unit assisted living complex at the corner of Woodleigh Lane and Foothill Boulevard, built a three-story 75-unit complex in Pacific Beach in San Diego on a small half-acre parcel. The school site makes perfect sense, it’s what our city envisioned, and it is a much senior-friendly location. Perhaps a smaller, more intimate facility would work in this location.

Best of all, the sale of that land to an assisted living developer could help offset the costs of the new City Hall.

Nancy and Bob Antonoplis

La Cañada Flintridge