Concrete Action--Finally

It’s hard to know whether to cheer or cry at news that the Los Angeles Unified School District will break ground later this month for a new elementary school in Van Nuys.

Any new school is worth cheering, of course, given the district’s severe overcrowding. This particular kindergarten-through-fifth-grade campus, slated for the corner of Vanowen Street and Columbus Avenue, will absorb the 500-plus students who are now bused from nearby bursting-at-the-seams schools.

Parents who once had to send their kids across the San Fernando Valley--with siblings sometimes going to different schools--will now be able to go to a school in the neighborhood. A missed bus won’t mean hours of class time lost; parents and children alike will be able to be more involved in their community.

Sure, the new school will be crowded from the moment it opens, and sure, it will barely dent the need for additional seats, but at least it’s a step. And a public increasingly frustrated with the LAUSD welcomes any concrete sign--concrete as in an actual construction site--that the district is finally doing something about the school shortage crisis.

So what’s there to cry about? In this case, the district could have taken this step years ago. The new school is being built on land the district already owned, land that it had studied--studied, while children were bused--for five long years.

Ask LAUSD officials how they came to be 100 schools short of enrollment projections, and they’ll answer you in one word: land. Trying to find empty parcels of land to buy in built-up Los Angeles has proven next to impossible, they say. Condemning property in residential neighborhoods raises an outcry from homeowners. Building on commercial or industrial property carries the risk of toxic substances. Even if land can be found, even if NIMBY neighbors don’t try to block construction, environmental assessments can drag on for years.

But those excuses can’t be applied to the Van Nuys site because the district already owned the land. Blame the bureaucracy, blame a lack of leadership for the fact that district officials hemmed and hawed and tried to decide what to do with this site while nearby schools became ever more crowded and children were bused clear to West Hills.

District leadership has changed, or at least the faces have, with new Supt. Roy Romer and a new real estate team put in place last January by interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines. In June, Kathi Littman, the district’s new director of building and planning, told members of the San Fernando Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. that she and others like her had left the private sector to join the district team because they were just as frustrated with the delays as everybody else.

But the new team knows it has to do better than blaming earlier administrations for years of indecision. Only concrete action will stem the public’s skepticism. And only additional schools will end the crisis. When the Valley sees not one but multiple schools going up, then--and only then--the public will cheer.