School, Neighbors Reach Pact

A two-year dispute over a private girls school that pitted the rich against the richer in Brentwood is over--and the winners are the rich.

Homeowners who have fought the move of the exclusive Archer School to the site of a Sunset Boulevard landmark have won major concessions from school operators and will drop their opposition, they said Monday.

Officials of the deep-pockets school have agreed to limit enrollment, pay fines for girls who don’t carpool to class, severely limit school events and shuttle parents in vans for things such as back-to-school night.

In exchange, they will be able to move their 4 1/2-year-old school from its cramped Pacific Palisades campus into the stately Eastern Star Home, which Archer has purchased for $15 million.

The two sides are scheduled to sign a peace treaty today during a meeting of the Los Angeles City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee.

Homeowners and school leaders alike had appealed an August decision by a city zoning administrator to issue a permit for the campus relocation. Residents contended that restrictions imposed by that permit were too weak; school officials viewed them as too restrictive.

The agreement--reached during negotiations led by the area’s city councilwoman, Cindy Miscikowski, and aide Linda Bernhardt--retains strict limits on automobile traffic in and out of the new campus.

But it gives Archer officials authority to schedule more student activities each school year than the zoning administrator had authorized.

“No one got everything they wanted. Everyone gave something,” homeowner Eric Waxman said Monday. “But residents have received additional protection over what we would have had.”

Waxman, an attorney who lives next door to what will become the school’s athletic field, said the agreement promises quiet Sundays at the school and only limited Saturday activities.

Archer School head Arlene Hogan said the campus will be able to offer a full range of activities for its 235 pupils when they move in next fall. But just barely.

“I think we got pounded,” Hogan said. “We have very onerous conditions, including the threat of a reduction in enrollment if we violate them.”

One of the conditions requires an average ridership of three in each car carrying students to school. Another requires that half of all students ride school buses to class.

Still another includes a formula that regulates the number of cars that can be parked on school grounds at any given time.

Other restrictions limit the number of athletic events and outdoor practice sessions to 20 a year and limit the number of special events such as sports matches and graduation ceremonies to 38 annually.

School officials have grumbled that they were being victimized by the fallout from traffic jams in the Brentwood area that followed the opening a year ago of the nearby Getty Center.

But homeowners pointed out that the intersection of Sunset and Barrington Avenue near the 68-year-old Spanish Revival-style Eastern Star Home is near gridlock much of the time. They warned that traffic leaving the campus would extend the traffic jam into what has been a quiet residential area.

Waxman and Hogan credited Miscikowski with steering the two sides to a consensus.

“She was in meetings with us until 10 o’clock at night,” Waxman said.

Bernhardt said Archer School will contribute $100,000 to a “neighborhood protection fund” that will be used to deal with unanticipated problems--for example, speed bumps that residents may decide are needed.

Hogan said Archer School “didn’t have much wiggle room” in the negotiations.

“It’s been a very long battle,” she said Monday. “We’ve turned almost enemies into friends. As we move in we’ll prove we can be good neighbors.”