Legacy of Broken Promises

Interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines appeared startled last week at his first official board meeting when he discovered that district staffers had ignored a July directive to determine alternative uses for the half-built Belmont Learning Complex. The directive, by unanimous vote of the Los Angeles school board, also asked the district’s facilities staff to identify additional places to put students in case the controversial high school never opened. Neither job got done. That kind of business-as-usual will end, Cortines insisted, or those responsible “will not be here anymore.” It’s a promise Cortines will have to keep.

The board has given the same staff a reasonable deadline, 60 days, to do what should have been done months ago. Cortines and his chief operating officer, Howard Miller, are now the enforcers. Their goal must be thorough, reliable answers within an appropriate time.

While the district scrambles to find either environmentally suitable school construction sites or existing buildings that can accommodate students, Cortines and Miller should make good on a proposal discussed in December. At that time, school board members offered to form a committee with Belmont students, teachers and parents. That never happened, despite the obvious benefit in communicating with those most affected by the board’s tough but necessary decision to abandon the $200-million Belmont complex, situated on an abandoned oil field contaminated by methane gas and hydrogen sulfide.

Many questions remain. The most pressing is: When will the Los Angeles Unified School District finally deliver the new high school that has been promised for two decades? At the very least, when will students who are bused far away from the old and overcrowded Belmont High School just west of downtown get a seat in a classroom closer to home? The answers may depend on how many elementary schools can be converted to middle schools, and middle schools to high schools, as new elementary schools are constructed. More than one smaller high school might be built, or high-rise space might be converted to classrooms. Remedies aren’t simple or easy.

The Belmont Learning Complex was scheduled to be opened by now. Instead, construction has been suspended permanently. The board, Cortines, Miller and a staff that can no longer duck the tough questions must now quickly determine what will happen to the expensive, unfinished buildings, to the land on which houses and a church once stood and to the students who wait.