Degree in Devastation
Is L.A. Unified’s ruin of an Echo Park neighborhood really necessary?
The former residents have scattered, some relocating to Riverside, where experts hired by the school district assured them they could find comparable housing to that which was taken from them. Some abandoned the area altogether. Relocation checks, required by eminent domain law in California, were sent as far as Ecuador. One woman recently saw her former place of employment – the Ambassador Hotel – devoured by the school district, and now lost her home, too.
“Now we’re looking at an area that’s blighted, empty,” says Mitch O’Farrell, district director of constituent services for City Councilmember Eric Garcetti’s office. “It’s a disgrace.”
One of the project’s early backers, former school board member for District 5, David Tokofsky, thinks so, too. “One thing you can feel free to ream the school district on is the condition of the site today.”
The Numbers Game
In 2004, Tokofsky helped usher in this plan for the contested site, known as site 9A. Armed with new bond money and overcrowded school conditions, Tokofsky and the other board members began the push to build a school in Echo Park.
The goal, he says, was to relieve two overcrowded elementary schools in the area, Rosemont and Union. Voters had passed three bonds by this point, Measure BB, Measure K, and Measure R – worth $9.6 billion. A fourth, Measure Y, would be passed in 2005. To the school district, it totaled a voter-given mandate to continue construction.
“The mayor lost his housing bond, but if you ask people in this town if we should be building schools, they said yes four times,” Tokofsky says.
Maybe, replied the Echo Park community, but only if that school is needed. Opponents of the new school organized themselves into the Right Site Coalition, headed up by Elysian Heights resident Christine Peters and represented by attorney Robert Silverstein. Together with the Echo Park Historical Society and several of the displaced former residents, they went to court to challenge the project.
The coalition recently won an appeal to stop the bulldozing of the abandoned homes and businesses, while the second of two lawsuits continues in court. The project, expected to start in 2005, has been delayed now for more than two years.
“We have argued for the last three or four years that this school project is not needed. And despite the propaganda from LAUSD, we know from LAUSD’s own internal demographic studies that the school age student population is plummeting,” says Silverstein.
The decrease of elementary school-aged students is at the heart of the coalition’s argument. All of the local elementary schools are losing students at a rapid rate, to the point that the principal of Rosemont Elementary was campaigning to solicit new students to fill empty desks and classrooms for the last school year.
According to L.A. Unified, Rosemont lost 487 students between the 2002-2003 and 2006-2007 school years. Union Elementary, another facility that the Echo Park school is meant to relieve, lost more than 738 students. Two more schools close by, Elysian Heights and Clifford Elementary have only 268 and 174 students, respectively. Of Elysian Heights’s 25 classrooms, only nine are in use.
But neither of these underused schools are appropriate relocation choices in the eyes of the school district.
“The idea is to build a neighborhood, not to increase public transportation use or school buses,” Tokofsky says.
If you want a neighborhood school, Tokofsky says, you must put one in the Echo Park neighborhood.
And, although the demographics look as though they’re decreasing now, the problem of overcrowded schools that was so endemic in Los Angeles has not gone away, it’s just not as bad as it was, Tokofsky says. Just because enrollment isn’t as high doesn’t mean it’s low enough.
“It’s like saying less people are being born in Calcutta,” he says. “[Enrollment changes have] decreased from a Rosemont of 1,700 to 1,000. That’s not a happy, bucolic nirvana.”
The school planned for site 9A is meant to relieve five elementary schools in the area: Commonwealth Elementary, Union Elementary, Rosemont Elementary, Lafayette Primary Center and Lake Street Primary Center. Of these five schools, three are on what the district calls a 4-track calendar, meaning that school is in session year-round, but teaching different kids. The district expects elementary enrollment to increase again in the near future, and if that is the case, Rosemont and Lake Street would also be forced back onto a 4-track school year.
The problem with 4-track is simple, Tokofsky says. Kids don’t learn.
A 4-track elementary school system means that the school year is 163 days long versus the usual 180. The lost 17 days are made up by lengthening the school days. The problems spring from the fact that school stops every 10 weeks to allow new students to come in. The schools only have enough books for one set of students at a time, so those students who’ve already had 17 fewer days to retain the information can’t reinforce it at home: They have to turn their books in every 10 weeks.
When the kids come back, they aren’t coming back to the same classrooms, which limits the teachers’ abilities to make a safe, consistent learning environment.
“If you were trying to teach children that everything in life is transitory, that’s a good thing to do. We don’t need to be Bedouins,” Tokofsky says.
Christine Peters spearheaded the Right Site Coalition, and while she agrees that a 4-track school system won’t do anybody any favors, she says that the rhetoric the school district is putting forth concerning “neighborhood” schools contradicts the school-relief plan the district has laid out.
“Union and Commonwealth are in Koreatown. It’s not anywhere near Echo Park,” she says. “There is no way to justify other than through LAUSD logic, how those schools are going to benefit by building a school in Echo Park.”
For that matter, if 1,000-person schools are so abhorrent, why is the Echo Park facility being envisioned to hold over 800 students?
“That’s the thing, the whole jargon of LAUSD. They argue that they want small neighborhood schools for our children,” Peters says. “If you don’t want children going to a 900-seat school, why are you building one in Echo Park?”
Taking on L.A. Unified
The lines that delineate the boundaries of site 9A hew the neighborhood in half. Occupied houses share fences with homes that have been abandoned now for years. From her place on Santa Ynez Street, Gloria Delgado can easily see the shuttered windows. She’s lived there since the 1960s, like many of the residents who were forced out.
“I’m just so glad they didn’t take my home,” she says. “I don’t know what I would’ve done.”
Published: 03/12/2008
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