Schools’ Afterlife : Education: People living near closed-down campuses complain about loitering and vandalism. Most would prefer having the facilities rented out or put to some use.

Over the years, neighbors say the worst thing about living near closed-down Hughes Junior High School in Woodland Hills hasn’t been the baseballs, softballs and golf balls that wind up in their yards when people climb the school fence to polish up on their sporting skills. Worse, residents say, was the time 18 months ago when vagrants moved into the empty school auditorium and began practicing satanic rituals on campus.

“One day we couldn’t stand the rumors anymore so my sons and I walked over to the auditorium, found it open and went inside,” said one Woodland Hills woman who asked not to be identified. “Inside there was satanic graffiti scribbled over every inch of wall space.”

The threesome said they also discovered books on devil worship scattered about the floor, a makeshift altar, several blankets, shampoo, shaving cream and Vaseline before quickly leaving the school and reporting the incident to Los Angeles Unified School District police. In addition, the school has been vandalized twice in the past two years by arsonists who have caused $40,000 damage to the vacant junior high, district officials said.

Wesley Mitchell, Los Angeles Unified School District chief of police, confirmed that “there were some vagrants living on campus at that time,” but said he could not confirm or deny that the vagrants were practicing satanic rituals in the Hughes Junior High auditorium.

“We went in and cleaned them out of there,” Mitchell said. “Really, we don’t get too many reports of trouble at the closed schools.”

Neighbors near Hughes Junior High and six other vacant schools say the sites attract gangs, vagrants, mischief-makers and a variety of dangerous activities. Nearly all of them agree that their neighborhoods would be safer if the schools were used in some way.

“Use it or lose it,” said another woman who lives near Hughes Junior High. “But you can’t just let an empty structure just sit there year after year in the middle of our neighborhoods.”

From 1982 to 1984, 21 schools were closed by the school district. Nineteen of them are in the West San Fernando Valley and seven of those campuses remain vacant despite a growing waiting list of more than 1,500 organizations interested in leasing a school site, district officials said.

Of the 21 closed schools, one was sold to a private group and nine are being used for district needs (some for magnet schools, others for office space).

Only four closed schools are being leased to private organizations, each of which signed an initial five-year lease with another five-year option that allows the LAUSD to reclaim the schools on a year’s notice.

District officials say there are many reasons why the seven West Valley schools must remain empty despite neighbor complaints, costly vandalism, the high cost of reopening a school and the waiting list of organizations interested in paying an average of $100,000 per year to lease a site.

“There are no easy answers,” said Gordon Wohlers, administrator of the district’s priority housing office. “It is a complex issue and we have to be careful to keep our options open in case we need that extra space.”

Recently, the district opened two offices in Hughes Junior High to house the district’s Youth Sports Services officials and hired a 24-hour security guard to watch dozens of storage bins. Two other schools that are listed as being used by district officials are vacant except for a handful of offices.

“Sometimes it’s just good to have someone on campus by opening a few offices,” Mitchell said. “That usually tends to keep away the troublemakers.”

In all, there are nine sites that could be leased to private organizations, provided the district could combine offices elsewhere. However, there is currently no plan to lease the schools, said Robert Niccum, director of the LAUSD real estate office.

“The problem is that we have to keep our options open,” Niccum said. “Sure we have more than 1,500 private parties waiting to get into these schools. But they are interested in more than a one-year lease and right now we just don’t know what enrollment figures are going to be a couple years down the road.”

Niccum said his department has been keeping a list of organizations interested in leasing a closed school for more than five years. By now, many of them are frustrated because they have watched sites they are interested in leasing sit empty year after year.

Several years ago, when this interest in leasing school sites was increasing, the district presented the school board with a list of seven schools that should be kept vacant in case enrollment figures increased.

“We wanted to keep our options open on those seven schools,” board member Jackie Goldberg said. “We decided that those were the seven we were most likely to need again in the future so we voted to leave them open.”

These schools--three in Woodland Hills, two in Canoga Park, one in Northridge and another in Reseda--look like miniature ghost towns, especially to residents who have lived near them for seven years or more. Boarded up windows, doors nailed shut and weeds that sometimes grow several feet high mark the places where children once laughed and played and learned.

But now, more than seven years after those seven schools were closed, increasing enrollment is occurring everywhere except the West Valley, where those schools remain empty.

To combat enrollment increases of 15,000 in 1989-90 and another 15,000 this school year, the board has approved year-round classes, the addition of portable bungalows on overcrowded campuses and certain busing schedules. But none of the seven empty schools is expected to be opened in the next year or so, Wohlers said.

Although there are projections for increases in the West Valley because of development in the West Hills area, the numbers have not yet affected enrollment in open schools in that area, according to the district’s priority housing office.

“It’s not really that crowded in those areas where the schools are vacant,” Wohlers said. “For the schools further east, where enrollment is up some, it has been more cost-effective to bring in portable bungalows.”

According to Doug Brown, division administrator of the district’s building section, the cost of reopening a closed school ranges from $200,000 to $1.4 million. The least expensive schools to reopen will be those that are being leased because they are being kept up on a yearly basis, Brown said. It is more expensive to open a completely vacant school and most expensive to open one that is currently being used for district offices.

“In some cases, we have built walls in classrooms to make offices,” Brown said. “A lot of reconstruction would be necessary to turn those campuses back into working schools.”

According to the real estate office, the district is partially using six closed campuses, which means that those would be the most expensive to completely reopen. District officials, however, say there wasn’t enough space at any single site to combine offices, thereby reducing the cost of reopening certain schools.

The cost estimates do not include teachers and teaching supplies but only getting the classrooms ready for use and equipping them with desks. When the schools were closed, they were stripped of every desk, chair, library book and piece of athletic equipment. Most of those items were redistributed to other schools in need of equipment.

“Essentially we have to buy all new equipment for the schools we decide to reopen,” said Shel Erlich, public information officer for the district. “Add that to the cost of reconstruction of vandalism, repairs, painting, cleaning and taking out the moth balls and it gets very, very expensive.”

For that reason, representatives of the 1,500 private organizations on the waiting list are puzzled as to why, for more than five years, the district has been unwilling to lease additional closed schools sites.

It is especially puzzling to the organizations on the waiting list when they consider that the district is making $369,000 annually from the four schools being leased. In addition, the sale of one small Canoga Park elementary school in 1986 brought in $2.6 million for the district.

“It seems like a such a great deal for both the school district and the private organization,” said Glen Kirby, pastor of West Valley Christian Church School that currently leases Haynes Street Elementary School at 6624 Lockhurst St. in Canoga Park. “The setup works so well for everyone involved it seems strange that they don’t lease out the other sites.”

At the four schools currently being leased, the private organizations take care of upkeep, gardening, indoor and outdoor painting, tile repair and any other repairs.

The staff at West Valley Christian Church has recently paid for new carpet and upholstery throughout the auditorium at the Haynes Street School, where the church holds two morning services each Sunday. The church, which has been at the Haynes Street site for nearly seven years, also has a day-care program and a private school for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade that has an enrollment of several hundred students. They use every available classroom.

“This year we went through and painted every classroom, fixed every tile and made some repairs to the air-conditioning system,” Kirby said. “The offices have been renovated and every building on campus has working air-conditioning units. It would have been a shame to let this campus just sit here with no one using it.”

The Kadima Hebrew Academy operates on the district’s Oso Avenue Woodland Hills campus and the staff has made similar upgrades to the site.

“This school is a wonderful place for our academy to operate,” Principal George Lebovitz said. “We’ve leased this site for seven years, and we hope to lease it for several years to come.”

The other two sites being leased are Enadia Way School in Canoga Park, leased by Pinecrest Schools; and Platt Ranch School in Woodland Hills, leased by Le Lycee Francais, a private French school.

Each of the four schools was leased between late 1983 and early 1984 and each is in the final five years of its lease. For that reason, the staff at each private school has made plans to relocate should the LAUSD choose not to renew the lease.

“We’re in the process of buying a piece of land in West Hills where we can build a church, elementary school, secondary school and gymnasium,” Kirby said. “We have an option for when the lease runs out.”

School officials said they cannot be certain that they will be opening the schools in 1994 after the leases on the four schools run out. They are also uncertain about whether any additional sites will ever be leased.

“At some point, yes, we’re going to be reopening those closed schools,” said Brown, who works closely with officials at the priority housing office and the real estate office regarding the fate of the abandoned sites. “But right now the question is: Can we afford to reopen them when the budget has been cut so badly? Or is it a lot more feasible to work crowded schools into a year-round program?”

Brown added that the district would have benefited from leasing more of the campuses back in the early 1980s when the decision was made to lease just four sites.

“Sure, in hindsight it might have been nice to lease out more schools back then, especially from a maintenance standpoint because they’d be better places today. But that’s hindsight now. As for the future, we simply can’t enter into a long-term lease when we don’t know whether we’ll need those sites next year or three years from now.”