Audit Requested of LAUSD Approach to School Site Selection

State Sen. Richard Alarcon and Assemblyman Tony Cardenas have demanded an audit of the way the Los Angeles Unified School District notifies residents when it is seeking to build a school in their neighborhood.

The request this week by Alarcon and Cardenas, both northeast Valley Democrats, stems from two recent incidents in which the district failed to inform the public that it was considering sites in Arleta and Panorama City for new schools--a violation of the district’s own policies.

Arleta residents wound up opposing the building of a new high school at a former Gemco department store site after learning belatedly that it was the district’s preferred site, forcing school officials to consider other locations.

That experience concerns Alarcon and Cardenas, who believe “significant resources and time” are being wasted by failing to involve the public from the start. Their request will now be heard by the state’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee, of which Alarcon is vice chairman.

“We feel that the school district needs to have a consistent process to notify the community when they are looking for a school site,” Alarcon said. “Schools are central to the concept of community, and if we are not engaging the community in the site selection process, we are not doing a good job.”

Faced with serious overcrowding, and a class-size reduction program that mandates a maximum student-teacher ratio of 20 to 1 for kindergarten through third grade, the LAUSD is planning to build about 100 new schools. The growing district is already the state’s largest, serving more than 800,000 students.

Bob Niccum, the district’s director of real estate and asset management, said school officials did not follow the usual process with the Gemco site and the Panorama City location--the former Van Nuys Drive-In--because they feared losing the sites to competitors.

Both sites were owned by retailers planning to build stores, and school officials hoped to acquire them quickly before the projects moved forward, using the power of eminent domain if needed.

“We were concerned that if we spent a long time doing the preliminary work, the site would get away from us,” Niccum said of the Gemco site. “So we jumped a step ahead.”

In addition to the process used to notify residents, Alarcon and Cardenas would like the state auditor to determine whether the district follows other procedures in selecting sites, and whether those procedures are “similar to generally accepted practices.”

Niccum said he welcomed the review.

“We will fully cooperate with the audit,” he said. “Our process does very much involve the community.”

School officials met Monday night with about 200 community members to discuss the need for a high school to relieve crowding at Monroe, Van Nuys and San Fernando high schools. Residents were told what makes a good site and asked for site suggestions, officials said.

Some residents have argued, however, that such forums have been far too infrequent. Robert Rouge, who has lived near the Gemco property since 1978, complained before the Monday meeting about the district’s ongoing failure to include the community in its site selection process.

The district “is going to do whatever it wants to,” he said.