$1.8-Billion Expansion of L.A. Schools to Be Urged

Los Angeles Unified School District officials Monday will propose a massive $1.8-billion construction plan intended to stave off severe overcrowding.

The proposal, which calls for 51 new schools plus 458 portable classrooms to be placed at existing campuses, is needed to avert an impending crisis in available seats for students, the officials say.

Details of the proposal will be discussed at a board meeting Monday.

An anticipated enrollment increase of 80,000 in the next decade is expected to burst the seams of schools already coping with a record student population in the district.

In addition to adding classrooms, the plan calls for many existing schools to shift to year-round schedules so they can operate at full capacity to ride out the population boom.

The situation is a dramatic reversal of fortune for a district that just a few years ago was shuttering underused schools and using the vacancies at others to promote school choice for parents.

Bruce Takeguma, the district’s assistant director for school management services, said that even four years ago no one would have imagined that enrollment in the district would have risen 45,000 by now.

Supt. Ruben Zacarias distributed the expansion plan to school board members last week, telling them in a memo that it represents “the best collaborative efforts of various divisions and offices within the district.”

The proposal, called the “Facilities Master Plan for Construction,” is based on recommendations that the Board of Education made in December.

The board is not scheduled to vote on the dictionary-thick plan Monday.

The document contains, in addition to the plan favored by district officials, several alternatives, some costing more, others less.

Most expensive would be building enough campuses to allow all students to attend a local school on a traditional schedule. The cost of that alternative was put at a prohibitive $4.9 billion. The least expensive alternative, the plan says, would be to maintain current class sizes and shift any schools with more students than seats to staggered, year-round schedules.

The alternative preferred by district officials includes funding sources for only $1.47 billion of the plan’s estimated cost. That money would come from Proposition BB funding for modernization and new construction and from the state’s matching funds program.

The remaining $350 million needed, the report says, would “have to come from other resources, or project priorities will dictate how available funds will be allocated.”

As if to underscore the need for classrooms, the plan’s unveiling will come on the same day that the number of available seats under the open enrollment program will be released. The figure will reveal a dramatic reduction from four years ago, when the option first became available under California law.

The bulk of the new construction called for in the plan is for elementary schools, 21 of which are proposed to relieve overcrowding in South-Central Los Angeles and the downtown area.

Board of Education member David Tokofsky said there is no question that the time to act is now.

“For the first time in years we actually have money for new construction in Proposition BB,” he said.