New school a symbol of revival

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The gold walls and chrome balconies of Santee High School gleam against a backdrop of warehouses and aging homes.

When it opens this week, the campus in tough South Los Angeles will become the first completely new high school built in 35 years in the area. It’s part of the biggest school construction project in the United States and stands as a symbol of revival for the nation’s second-largest district.

More than 3,000 district students are packed into high schools designed for fewer than half that number. Laboratories are relics from the 1960s, and teachers roam campuses without having a desk of their own.

“You go out in the hallways, and they’re full; you can barely walk,” said David Estrada, 16. “You have to wait for everything, for food, for talking to counselors. Sometimes kids just leave because no one even notices if they’re there.”

Yet Santee, built upon the contaminated site of an old dairy, also symbolizes the challenges the Los Angeles Unified School District faces in building environmentally safe schools in an area where contamination and earthquake faults cut through the earth.

Last month, the state Department of Toxic Substances Control said the school’s developer used tainted rubble as backfill beneath the school. The material contained varying levels of PCBs, lead and other potentially toxic chemicals.

Tests later determined the rubble posed no threat, but the situation has stirred bitter memories of environmental fiascoes. The most notorious occurred at Belmont High School five years ago, when the district spent $270 million on what became the nation’s most expensive public school campus.

Its doors, however, remain closed because it was built atop explosive pockets of methane gas and an earthquake fault just west of downtown.

In the Los Angeles district, where enrollment has reached 746,000, families in heavily minority communities have pushed for decades for new classrooms. But after construction began in the mid-1990s, several highly touted projects became environmental albatrosses.

Some parents remain suspicious.

“It’s not a question of science. Now it’s a question of distrust, of public opinion,” said Margarita Jackson, whose son will attend the new school.

School officials noted that Santee is just one of more than 160 new campuses in the works as part of a $14.6 billion school construction and renovation project funded through bonds.

Superintendent Roy Romer acknowledged that each of the sites has the potential to be a toxic land mine, but added the district has opened 17 new schools in less than five years and will complete nearly 40 more by year’s end. All have been cleared by state environmental officials.

The district’s building boom is one of several large school construction projects under way nationwide. Las Vegas is building 90 schools to accommodate enrollment growth, while New York has 51 schools planned to help house its nearly 1.2 million students.