Switch Urged in Burbank to Four-Year High Schools

After a six-month efficiency study, a committee appointed by the Burbank Board of Education has recommended that the district close as many as three schools and change to a system of four-year high schools.

The committee, made up of about 60 Burbank residents, students and educators, offered the board four options to help overcome increasing costs and declining enrollment. One of the choices is to leave the district’s grade-level system as it is, committee chairman Brian Bowman said.

The district now divides pupils into kindergarten through sixth grade as elementary, seventh through ninth as junior high and 10th through 12th as high school students.

The committee’s first choice, however, was to close one of the district’s three junior high schools and convert the other two into middle schools for sixth, seventh and eighth grades, Bowman said.

Under that reconfiguration, the ninth grade would be transferred to the high schools and the district’s elementary schools would be scaled back to kindergarten through fifth grade, Bowman said.

Burbank Junior High

The committee identified Luther Burbank Junior High School as the campus most suitable for closing because it is more expensive to operate than the other two and is affected by noise from jet airliners using the Burbank Airport.

The school would require $750,000 in remodeling to eliminate its noise problem, Bowman said.

Although the committee made no firm recommendation on closing other schools, it suggested that the district could also close the Mingay adult school and Providencia or Roosevelt elementary schools for efficiency.

In one of the options, the committee also said the district could close one of its two high schools.

The school board received the results of the reconfiguration study at its meeting last Thursday. It is not expected to take action immediately to implement its recommendations.

Take Effect in 1987

Supt. Wayne Boulding said the board will probably schedule a series of community meetings for the fall and that the earliest a change could take effect would be the beginning of the 1987 school year.

The board appointed the committee in October to examine three questions: the efficiency of the current configuration in light of diminishing resources and enrollment, the ethnic balance of the schools and the appropriateness of the three-year junior high schools.

The district’s enrollment has declined to slightly more than 11,000 from a peak of almost 17,000 in the 1950s. Based on projections of future enrollment decline, the committee found that the district could have 34 empty elementary classrooms--the equivalent of two schools--by 1989, Boulding said.

The committee did not push for the closing of elementary schools, however, because it is not clear whether some of that empty class space can be used for such non-school activities as child care, Bowman said.

Bowman said the committee’s recommendations on grade-level changes and closing of a junior high school would increase the enrollment of the secondary schools, giving students wider class choices, and provide a better transition from elementary to high school.

However, in spite of the fact that two of the district’s 11 elementary schools are in danger of becoming classified as “segregated,” the committee did not directly take into account the result of elementary-school closings on ethnic balance.

Bowman said the committee was asked to complete its work in four months and quickly determined that the study of ethnic balance would require longer than that.

“The combinations grew so great that, instead of looking at a four-month study, we were looking at a one-year study,” Bowman said.

Boulding said the board will probably appoint a new committee to examine ethnic balance this year.