Valley Surge to Put Squeeze on High Schools

The San Fernando Valley will lead an enrollment boom in Los Angeles secondary schools over the next decade as a population bulge of elementary school students moves through the higher grades, according to a school district report released Monday.

Twelve of the Valley’s 17 high schools are expected to swell by more than 1,000 students each by the year 2007. Three other high schools are expected to grow by up to 1,000 students.

An influx of children of immigrants and the grandchildren of baby boomers accounts for much of the increases districtwide, administrators said.

The growth will occur over a wide swath of the Valley--from Pacoima to Canoga Park--and affect the most crowded areas where schools lack enough classrooms to meet the anticipated demand.

The influx will be felt most in the crowded east and central Valley, where high schools will be hard-pressed to house the coming wave of students, according to the report. Administrators attributed the surge of growth in the east and central Valley partly to the conversion of many single-family home sites to apartment buildings after the Northridge earthquake.

In addition to the Valley, growth will be concentrated in the Pico Union area, downtown and the southeast “hub cities,” including South Gate and Huntington Park, administrators said.

They said the Los Angeles Unified School District will need to build eight or more high schools to accommodate such growth, and that three of the campuses could be located in the Valley. A detailed plan of new schools is expected at the end of the month.

“From the Valley’s point of view, there’s going to be a continued discussion” about local school construction, school board member David Tokofsky said after the report was presented to the board Monday.

“Is there enough land to build?” school board member George Kiriyama asked as school district staffers made their presentation. “How are we going to buy homes and condemn homes? It is important that we start thinking way ahead of time. We have to start looking now.”

Said board President Julie Korenstein: “We’re always somewhat behind and I don’t know how we catch up. I just want us to be prepared.”

The report affirms predictions of record growth for the Los Angeles school district. The district will continue to swell, peaking in the 2005-2006 school year with an additional 43,000 students over the 1996-97 enrollment of 667,624, said Rena Perez, a district demographer who helped prepare the report.

The Valley, which has about one-third of the district’s enrollment, accounted for 46% of the new 13,881 students this year.

“We’re growing by leaps and bounds,” said school board member Victoria Castro. “We’ve been talking about this for years.”

High school campuses, which served just under 160,000 students in grades nine through 12 last year, are expected to gain the most students, reaching nearly 200,000 total within seven years, the report says.

The district grew to a record 681,505 students this year, with the majority of the 13,881 new students in elementary school.

School district administrators said they presented the report and that the board members will ultimately have to make the politically delicate decisions on what to do.

The report envisions all middle schools and high schools operating on year-round calendars. It also assumes that the more than 11,000 students now bused from crowded campuses in South Los Angeles and elswhere, primarily to Valley schools, will in the future attend their neighborhood schools.

School board members will have to decide where to build more schools, whether to keep students in their home schools instead of busing them, whether to take campuses off year-round schedules, or a combination of measures.

Board members raised several pressing questions, asking how the district will pay for new schools or find large enough building sites, given that the need is greatest in the district’s most crowded neighborhoods.

The school district has $900 million in funds from Proposition BB, the school repair bond passed by voters last April, to build new schools. District officials hope to gain matching funds from the state. Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed four $2-billion bond measures over the next eight years to pay for school construction.

“The critical area will be the cost to do this,” Assistant Supt. Gordon Wohlers said. “We need seven to eight new high schools. The cost for them is enormous.”

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Enrollment Boom Ahead

The San Fernando Valley will lead an enrollment boom in Los Angeles secondary schools over the next decade, as the grandchildren of baby boomers move through the system.

ENROLLMENT IN LOS ANGELES SECONDARY SCHOOLS BY LEVEL (in hundreds of thousands)

Source: Los Angeles Unified School District