All Spruced Up and No One to Teach--Yet

It was lonely for the staff of Parthenia Street School on Tuesday, the first day of the fall term for most of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Teachers arrived early, finished plans for their first day’s lessons and touched up classroom bulletin boards. Custodians made a last sweep of the grounds, including the newly painted hopscotch grids. The flag was hoisted.

“All we’re missing are the students,” Jackie Harris, the elementary school’s principal, said as she walked the halls, which remained empty all day.

Over the summer, the school--which was closed in 1984 because of declining enrollment in the area--got a fresh coat of paint, about 100 new shrubs and a full complement of teachers and administrators after the school board’s decision last spring to reopen the facility to relieve overcrowding at five nearby elementary schools. The refurbishing cost about $850,000, school board officials said.

But it will take a few days before students begin arriving at Parthenia.

“We had one student show up by mistake this morning” due to a school bus driver’s error, Harris said. The girl was eventually sent to Langdon Avenue School, where she belonged. “The rest will probably start arriving Wednesday after the other schools count the number of their students and send us the overflow.”

Parthenia is the first school in the San Fernando Valley to be reopened to accommodate the district’s growing number of school-age children. Districtwide, officials expect the number of students to increase from the spring semester enrollment of about 595,000 to slightly more than 600,000 students this fall. Officials predict that growth in the district will continue for several more years due to a rise in the birthrate.

Parthenia is the only school in the district to restrict enrollment to students from crowded schools. Students at Parthenia will come from the first through sixth grades at neighboring schools in Sepulveda and Van Nuys rather than from the immediate neighborhood.

The school will accommodate students from Langdon Avenue, Noble Avenue, Plummer, Valerio Street and Hazeltine Avenue schools, which are full, district officials said.

So while teachers at most of the district’s 600 or so schools spent the morning explaining classroom rules and memorizing names, teachers at Parthenia simply waited.

“This is a lot quieter than what you’d expect on the first day,” said teacher Joy Steinhardt--herself a graduate of the school, who was a fourth-grade student the day the then-new school opened in 1958.