Bringing Belmont High School “Planning” to the Valley By Jim Parker 11-7-01

 Los Angeles Unified School District has proposed a land swap with California State University, Northridge and is planning to build a high school on the plot of land they acquire from CSUN. Through a few public meetings held at the end of the summer and during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday period, these agencies have pushed ahead with their plans, hoping to have an approved high school plan by Christmas. Though the meetings have been open to the community, few of the local neighbors have been informed of the meetings and many residents who might have a high school built only a block or two from their homes have not yet heard that plan.

A sparsely attended community meeting was held at James Monroe High School on December 4, 2000, only about 10 days after a quickly thrown together committee was selected by CSUN and LAUSD, purportedly representing the neighborhood. Those in attendance were shown architectural plans for the proposed five-story school to be built on the corner of Zelzah and Halsted. Those neighbors in attendance were shocked to see that LAUSD, supposedly on 10 days notice to the architect, had drawn up three plans for the high school. Although community meetings were held during the summer, residents had been told that the school site had not yet been settled, though the Zelzah site was the preferred site by LAUSD and CSUN.

The planning has been fast, and many are concerned that the LAUSD in its haste will repeat many of the mistakes of Belmont High School, a billion-dollar disaster that may never open. Like Belmont, this school site itself is another disaster waiting to happen. 

Where there were toxic substances on the Belmont site that were never fully addressed in the initial Environmental Impact Statement in LAUSD's rush to build, here on the CSUN campus is an earthquake hazard that is significantly greater than in any surrounding area. To the south, about 100 feet away is the former site of CSUN's new reinforced concrete parking structure, which collapsed during the Northridge, quake in 1994. About one-quarter mile away is the site of the Northridge Meadows apartment building which collapsed and killed about 40 residents (about three-quarters of all those in Los Angeles who died in that quake). Down Halsted, the street on which the school would be built, runs a zone of heavy earthquake damage that LAUSD has apparently not yet studied in their rush to build. The new five-story school, like the Northridge Meadows apartments, is to be built over a parking lot. According to engineering studies that have been done since the earthquake, structures built over parking lots are the weakest and most prone to collapse in an earthquake.

Like Belmont, this project is headed nowhere, but fast. The reason for this speed and the apparently great efforts of the LAUSD and CSUN to push this project through with limited public scrutiny are somewhat mysterious. Overcrowding at Monroe High School, a comprehensive high school three miles to the east of the site of the proposed school, has been cited by LAUSD Board member Julie Korenstein as a primary reason to build the school. A question without answer is why 800 to 1200 students from Van Nuys would need to be bussed or driven to a high school three miles away in Northridge, while sites closer to home are ignored. Why the school cannot be built on Monroe grounds is not clear, since that is the community that would be served (while the neighborhood near CSUN in which the high school would be built would be all but shut out of attending). Also not being considered is an apparently suitable site near the Veteran's Hospital, almost next to Monroe High School, and in the community to be served.

Even more troubling are allegations that the LAUSD will offer a gift of public funds to the CSUN in their trade of a ten-acre site two blocks away (with an LAUSD elementary school already built on the site) in return for the six-acre site on which the high school is proposed to be built. That CSUN has great interest in acquiring this ten-acre site is no mystery: their plan is to demolish the elementary school after the land swap and put in a parking lot. 

Rumors have swirled about the project that the site has been in the CSUN master plan as a parking lot for CSUN students since the 1970s, even though the LAUSD then owned and still owns the property. The big question is: what does the LAUSD gain by giving away four acres of public land and a school already built with taxpayer dollars only to get a smaller parcel on which to spend more taxpayer dollars? The suggestion has been made that this will be a teaching academy and that the LAUSD will benefit from the athletic facilities, labs, and teachers in training at CSUN who will volunteer their time in the school. 

Because the CSUN School of Education has a primary emphasis on primary education suggests that any teaching volunteers would be more welcome in the elementary school that the LAUSD would give up and CSUN would demolish. This suggestion is put even further in doubt when one looks at the proposed high school plans and sees that the school is already self-contained with plans for a soccer field, basketball courts and locker rooms: no CSUN athletic facilities are really needed unless they are there to convince a state facilities board that CSUN's vast adjoining athletic fields will be shared by the high school. This might be an important point for LAUSD to make that facilities board believe, since no school can be built unless there are sufficient square feet per student. 

In short, the “shared” athletic fields of CSUN may be a sham to convince a facilities board that the high school property is really a lot more square feet than the six small acres it truly is. And maybe that's where the mystery ends: why the rush to build, why the disregard for student safety when confronted by the possibility of a recurrence of a great natural disaster, why the apparent disregard in examining the pattern of previous local destruction, why the effort to push this project through in the dark. State bond money is fast disappearing for school construction. The sooner the LAUSD gets a plan into place, no matter how flawed, the more likely they might be to tap into that fund. That plan will only work, however, if the specifics of the deal are not known: if that facilities board is unaware of the imminent earthquake damage potential at the site, if they do not know that the shared facility tactic is merely a ruse to inflate the apparent size of the school property. The plan will only work if the local neighborhood is not told of this plan to change their neighborhood at great expense to them with no gain to them in use of the public building, if the taxpayers are not told of the LAUSD give-away of land and school.

Maybe it's time we slowed the process down and shone a little more light on this. Before we build it, let's stop and plan it with all cards on the table. One Belmont was one too many.

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