State Fails to Stop Compton Schools’ Slide Into Decay

In the 3 1/2 years since the state Department of Education took control of the debt-saddled Compton school district, many buildings have fallen deeper into decay and disrepair:

Leaky roofs sometimes drive students and teachers out of their classrooms.

Broken windows are left unrepaired for months, leaving textbooks and school materials exposed to the elements and vandals.

Most classrooms have no heating or air conditioning, forcing students to endure cold or sweltering temperatures.

And some restrooms are so filthy and dilapidated that students refuse to use them.

“If these schools were prisons, they would be shut down,” said Maureen DiMarco, Gov. Pete Wilson’s former chief education advisor.

Department of Education officials who control the district’s operations concede that conditions at Compton Unified School District rank at the very bottom of the state’s public school system.

Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin said more emphasis should have been placed on maintenance and renovation during the state’s proprietorship. But she described her department’s efforts as “a triage situation,” saying officials first wanted to fix Compton’s accounting practices and raise test scores.

Now, she said, they are beginning to assess the condition of the 38 schools and siphon more money into repairs. Advisors have urged her to dissolve the district and place its 28,000 students in neighboring schools, but Eastin said she is not yet ready to take that step.

Compton Unified School District holds a special position in California education. It is the only district taken over because of both financial bankruptcy and academic deficiencies, meaning the state holds sway over the purse strings and the curriculum.

When Compton Unified was taken over in mid-1993 as a condition of receiving $20 million in emergency state loans, the district was viewed as something of an experiment. It offered a chance for the state, with its vast resources and teams of experts, to show exactly how an inner-city school district should be run.

But the state’s stewardship instead has demonstrated how difficult it can be to fix an educational institution after decades of neglect.

Under state management, test scores have risen slightly and the district has begun to repay the state loans. State officials have also tried to correct accounting practices that failed to warn the district that it had slipped into debt. But the state’s efforts have been hampered by political infighting, an exodus of hundreds of teachers and rapid turnover of the state appointees who oversee the district’s central office. In the last 12 months, four men have taken turns running Compton schools for the state.

Nothing illustrates the state’s inability to get the district back on track as graphically as the floors, walls, ceilings and grounds of Compton’s campuses, some of which were constructed in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Records show that there is a backlog of 2,400 work orders to fix everything from broken water pipes to exposed electrical wires. While schools have accumulated close to $50 million worth of deferred maintenance work, the district has been slashing its maintenance budget, with only $429,000 put toward repairs last school year.

Applications for state funding to renovate 16 of the neediest schools are frozen in the district bureaucracy, and school officials say they have been forced to scale back plans to renovate 10 other schools.

School board members have sued the state, seeking to regain control of the district, and the trial is scheduled for next month.

Parents, teachers and the local teachers union say their repeated pleas to the state have failed to result in improved school conditions.

“If I had somewhere else for my son to go, I would take him out of there,” said Karen Mackey, who has two children in the district. “It’s really not fair. The majority of them want to be something in life. The kids are feeling cheated.”

J. Richard Whitmore, an Eastin deputy who served as state administrator from July to November, said, “It’s very easy to be critical of where we are today.” He acknowledged that the district has been “slow to respond” to requests for basic maintenance and that inadequate supervision has resulted in poor quality repairs.

Michael P. Bishop, the associate superintendent for business and administrative services, said, “Conditions today are probably the same or a little worse than they were before the state takeover. It probably got worse immediately after and is only now beginning to be addressed.”

Public schools are falling apart all over America. In New Orleans, one elementary school reported that termites had chewed up walls, library shelves and the books on them. In Washington, D.C., poor physical conditions delayed the opening of several schools last fall.

In California, 43% of schools have at least one inadequate building, and 71% of the schools need roof repairs, plumbing, electrical or other work, according to a federal study last year. Many districts have seen their maintenance budgets fall in recent years in part because of a decline in state appropriations.

Compton Unified’s attempts to renovate most of its schools have been thwarted.

Compton had filed applications for state money to modernize 26 of its most decayed schools but, just after the state took over in mid-1993, decided to rescind 16 of the requests. District officials say the plans drawn for the projects were over budget and poorly conceived by the architect, who was later fired.

Plans for the other 10 remodeling jobs were redrawn, leaving the district with less money for construction. Of those, only three elementary schools have been overhauled with fresh paint, new carpets and glass blocks to replace broken windows.

In addition, the architect sued the district for breach of contract and won $400,000, a judgment on appeal.

Even basic maintenance has been left undone at Compton schools.

The district--with annual spending of about $129 million--set aside $1 million for repairs in 1994 but spent only $740,000, records show. In 1995, it cut the budget to $750,000 and then spent only $429,644. Officials said the unspent funds were rolled over into the next year’s budget.

Last spring, district officials touted plans for a $14-million repair blitz, promising that Compton residents “could expect to see a surge in repairs and upgrades at almost every school campus.” But the administrator who made that pledge resigned a few weeks later, and the promised repairs did not occur.

This year, officials dedicated $8.5 million for repairs. About half of the money is earmarked for re-roofing most of the schools this spring, when Compton’s high schools face a review by the state’s accreditation panel. Officials also have pledged to install smoke detectors and intercom systems in schools that do not have them.

“The district has not considered this [repairs] a priority,” said Joyce Brooks, executive director of the teachers union, the Compton Education Assn. “The track record speaks for itself.”

The problems in this relatively small school district have put Eastin, elected in 1994, under political heat in Sacramento. A number of state lawmakers have expressed willingness to repeal the legislation placing Compton under state authority, and the extent of the district’s decay has become a concern in the governor’s office.

One critic is Maureen DiMarco, who ran against Eastin and served as Wilson’s secretary of child development and education until she resigned in November. “The fact that this has continued under 3 1/2 years of receivership is particularly disturbing,” said DiMarco, who toured the district last spring. “There’s something very seriously wrong here.”

Compton’s schools have been in decay since before many of its teachers, let alone its students, were born.

“During the past 15 years, physical maintenance has consisted primarily of stopgap measures to repair damage rather than capital outlays to restore the buildings and sustain their useful lives,” said one study by a Los Angeles County Grand Jury.

That report accurately describes conditions today. But it was written in 1985.

Compton Unified is still a bleak landscape of boarded-up windows, blistered paint, sagging roofs and fetid restrooms. The walls and floors of many portable classrooms are rotted and cracked. Ceiling tiles have fallen in many buildings. And rusty jungle gyms and baseball backstops stand alone in empty fields, like remnants from some forgotten civilization.

When it rains at McNair Elementary School, it rains in McNair Elementary School.

In classroom after classroom, water seepage has caused portions of the ceilings to fall. Desks and chairs are dripping wet. Puddles form on the floor.

District repair workers have come by countless times to survey what needs to be fixed, but even 5-year-old kindergartner Eduardo Santos can size it up: “There’s a hole in our school.”

The rain forces Eduardo’s class to haul its books to the cafeteria, the library or elsewhere.

One recent morning, 12 of the 30 students had been carted home by parents, who pull them out of school on rainy days for fear they will be hit by ceiling tiles or shocked by exposed wiring. Conditions have been this way, teacher Betty Wilson said, for nine years.

Five hours after a reporter visited the classroom, a work crew patched holes in the roof. District officials said the work was done in response to parent complaints.

After a recent night of storms, Principal Carrie Allen arrived at Centennial High School to survey the damage. In the guidance counselor’s office, water had dripped from light fixtures and ceiling vents, soaking forms and reference manuals. Everything in a supply room was sopping wet too.

Some teachers refer to the choir room as “the bird cage” because pigeons and gulls flew in through a broken skylight and left droppings on the chairs and floor. When it rains, water cascades down the stairs.

“We could actually have performances in here if this place were better,” Allen said.

In a student lunch area outside the cafeteria building, graffiti-stained tables and warped metal benches are clustered under a rusting roof. Nearby, students parade on the blacktop that is supposed to offer 11 full basketball courts. All but one have broken hoops and backboards.

Inadequate security has exacerbated the maintenance problem, officials say. The district now spends more annually to repair vandalism and arson damage--$1.06 million in 1995-96, up from $474,982 in 1992-93--than it does to fix aging facilities.

Thieves and vandals plague the campuses, spray-painting windows and walls, breaking windows, stealing lighting and plumbing fixtures, and stripping wire from heating and air-conditioning units to sell for scrap. In October, arsonists torched Emerson Elementary while it was undergoing renovations, causing $300,000 in damage.

In November, the state brought aboard its latest appointed administrator: Randolph E. Ward, a former assistant superintendent from the neighboring Long Beach school district, where he had helped implement a mandatory school uniform policy.

Ward has toured several schools to assess the scope of their deterioration. “I had a hard time understanding how, over the years, schools could be allowed to get this way if you care about kids,” he said. “That brought up a lot of anger [in me].”

District administrators are looking into proposing a bond measure to pay for improvements, although they question whether it makes sense to raise taxes in a city where more than 39% of the residents are reported to be on welfare.

Some experts have advised Eastin to dissolve the district altogether.

“There should be an ultimatum at this point that you’ve got ‘x’ number of years to fix the district, or it will be dissolved, and let that happen,” said Edward Zemla, a former district consultant who now works for the Chino school system.

Eastin said she has considered dissolving the district, which is one of the largest employers in Compton, population 92,000. But she said she wants to allow Ward time to demonstrate improvement before she tries to address questions surrounding dissolution, such as who would assume the remaining debt and how the district’s assets could be divided.

Meanwhile, Eastin is exploring ways to raise additional money for maintenance and construction, including the sale of vacant land and at least one school.

The state superintendent also said she would meet with lawmakers from the Compton area to seek additional repair funds. “The district’s central problem,” she said, “is getting all its ducks in a row. For Compton, where one day they said they were in the black and the next they were $23 million in the red, it is true that a lot of things get put on hold.”

* HARSH REALITY: A tour of Compton High School shows just how bad it is--and just how much is needed. B1