CHATSWORTH : At Long Last, School Gets Air Conditioners

A months-long fund-raising effort bore fruit Monday when workers cracked the asphalt on the grounds of Chatsworth Park School to lay electric lines in preparation for installation of new air conditioners.

Concerned that classrooms without air conditioning posed a health hazard to children during the blistering heat of late summer, parents of Chatsworth Park students have held a series of rummage sales, carnivals and dinners over the past year. They raised $21,000--enough to install the first three of 11 air conditioners they say are needed at the school.

“It’s very exciting for us, let me tell you, after having lived through summers in this school,” said Barbara Champion, Chatsworth Park principal, after a short groundbreaking ceremony Monday.

“I am still in shock. . . . It’s like a dream come true,” said Michele DeGaetano, who helped organize the effort after working as a volunteer in the sweltering classrooms last year.

“We had one classroom that was 114 degrees, another that was 107,” she said. “Those kids were suffering terribly. . . . You get there at 8 o’clock, and by 8:30 you’d be ready to drop.”

Los Angeles Unified School District has said the district doesn’t have enough money to install air conditioning in the century-old school building. Nearly half the classrooms in the district are without air conditioning.

Vic Craft, a member of the parent group who was recently laid off from his job as a project manager in an aerospace firm, has devoted time to managing the installation project.

He said the total cost of cooling all the Chatsworth Park classrooms without air conditioning will be about $60,000, but the group is hoping that the costs will be lowered through the donation of air conditioners from a local manufacturer.

The school had been on a year-round schedule, but this fall returns to a conventional calendar with summers off. The three classroom air conditioners will be installed in time for school next month, he said.