First L.A. Grade School in 18 Years Started

With considerable fanfare, Los Angeles school district officials broke ground Wednesday on its first new elementary school in 18 years.

The future Montara Avenue School in South Gate, scheduled to open in July, 1988, will not go far, however, in solving the problem of overcrowding, district officials said.

“It’s a wonderful day,” said school board President Rita Walters, after watching local kindergarten students and community officials turn the first shovels of dirt on the South Gate construction site. “It gives us the feeling we’re doing something to solve the problem. . . . And yet, it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the need.”

The new South Gate school--one of 18 on the district’s drawing boards--will provide 800 new seats in an area that buses 1,000 students to South-Central Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. The busing occurs despite the year-round operation of every school in the district’s southeast region.

The new campus probably will be placed on a year-round schedule too and will not have a seat to spare, a district official predicted. Officials have said the district needs $1 billion worth of new schools between now and 1991 to accommodate an anticipated 80,000 additional students--enough to fill 100 schools the size of the Montara Avenue facility.

According to Byron Kimball, who oversees district building, the last time a new elementary school opened in the district was 1968, when Castlebay Lane School in Northridge was completed. The last high school was Kennedy in Granada Hills, which opened in 1972.

The district was prohibited from building schools during the 1970s, when it was under a court order to desegregate. Building a school in a predominantly minority neighborhood could have been construed as an act of segregation, officials said.

District officials were not able to proceed with new schools until the desegregation order was lifted in 1981. Meanwhile, enrollment in many minority neighborhoods began to rise.

Because of a long state approval process, it has taken the district four years to begin construction in South Gate. Kimball said construction of the $10.5-million school will take 15 months.

The southeast part of the district, which includes South Gate, Maywood, Cudahy, Bell and Huntington Park, is the most crowded of the district’s eight administrative regions, primarily because of increased immigration and high birthrates.

Crowding is also severe in schools in the east San Fernando Valley, East Los Angeles, downtown and along the Wilshire corridor.

22,000 Students Bused

The overcrowding problem has spilled over to other areas, too. The district buses 22,000 students from the crowded neighborhoods to schools on the Westside, in the South Bay and the Valley. According to a recent district report, 10,500 more will be bused next year because of overcrowded neighborhood schools.

Because of an overflow of kindergarten students in some areas, the district plans to open two novel centers exclusively for kindergarten youngsters in February. The centers, which will each serve about 500 pupils, will be in Silver Lake and Cudahy.

Other interim solutions being considered by the board include putting bungalows on crowded campuses, changing the integration ratio to allow certain schools to accept more minority children and converting as many as 78 elementary, junior and senior high campuses to year-round schedules next year.