CHILDREN ARE WAITING: LAUSD MUST BUILD MORE CREATIVELY.

Byline: Jefferson Cain

THE Los Angeles Unified School District has not constructed a new regular high school in 30 years. In 1971, at the tail end of suburban Los Angeles' expansion, Kennedy High School in the San Fernando Valley was completed to accommodate thousands of students from surrounding single-family homes.

In the intervening years, the district has grown by nearly 100,000 students - with 30,000 more students expected over the next five years.

Although the district has initiated a building program, school district policy makers must, for the foreseeable future, increasingly rely on the onerous year-round calendar to find classroom space to accommodate the additional children.

Our captains of industry, school reformers, past and current mayors, city attorneys and potential city attorneys, City Council members, school board members, school superintendents and an entire boat load of elected officials in Sacramento are all talking about the need for more classrooms and offering their ideas on how to overcome the space crisis.

So why can't we build new schools or find needed classroom space?

Interestingly, this community has no problem constructing other buildings, large and small.

In the past 10 years Los Angeles has seen a significantly expanded Convention Center, the new Staples arena, the Getty museum and Universal CityWalk. A magnificent Catholic cathedral is well under construction, and the Los Angeles City Hall remodel was just completed at a cost of $300 million. (This was five times its replacement cost and 50 percent more than the projected cost of the ill-fated Belmont Learning Center High School.)

The Los Angeles cultural community has seen sizable improvements in the last 20 years.

The Museum of Contemporary Art built temporary quarters, then permanent quarters, converted the Temporary Contemporary into a permanent annex and this year opened a Westside annex.

A Japanese American Museum was completed in Little Tokyo and the Colburn School of Performing Arts and the soon-to-be-completed Disney Concert Hall will use much of the last space available from the Bunker Hill redevelopment.

There have been building permits issued for 32,233 apartment units and 12,258 houses during the last 11 years in the city of Los Angeles, an area about half the size of the school district. Recorded statistics indicate that 99 percent of these projects have been built.

Not only does this illustrate that small building projects can be completed along with the big ones but that a significant portion of this housing has increased the strain on district schools by making it easier for families with children to move into the area.

Money is always an issue in the building of new schools but certainly it is not the only issue.

In the depths of the Depression, between 1930 and 1942, the Los Angeles school district managed to build 27 new schools. Between 1990 and 2002, excluding the small, easier-to-build primary centers that may contain only kindergarten classrooms, only 10 schools will have been built.

Existing schools compensate to meet the need by being filled to double their capacity. This puts an incredible strain on their infrastructure, such as the restrooms and the cafeterias that were built to serve far fewer students.

Eighty thousand children are now bused outside of their neighborhoods, some by choice for specific academic programs but many because there is no room at the local inn.

California is the richest state in the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world. Why is there a problem building schools in the community that makes much of this wealth possible? Could it be there are other forces at work?

It might be environmental concerns, but standing outside the La Brea Tar Pits contradicts this as the issue.

As you look beyond the bubbling ooze, you can see the recently reconstructed Paige Museum, the Petersen Automotive Museum, the newly annexed Los Angeles County Museum of Art West and the area for a planned new major addition to the original Los Angeles County Museum of Art campus. These buildings prove environmental factors can be overcome by public entities.

And, since all of these county facilities are surrounded by private entity high-rise office towers - and what seems a small town in itself, Park La Brea Apartments - it is obvious that the environmental concerns, such as those condemning the Belmont Learning Center, cannot be the true reason schools are not built.

Some will argue the school district's ineptitude is to blame.

But the school district looks like a model of efficiency, economy and good government compared to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Yet, you can get on a subway in North Hollywood, connect to the light-rail system and get off at the Los Angeles International Airport station. True, the rail line missed the airport by six or seven blocks but at least something was built and it is functioning.

A lack of innovative thinking might be blamed, except this community has shown it is not just locked into what's tried and true.

When the Getty Foundation wanted to build a museum they chose a mountaintop, leveled it and built the longest funicular in the world to transport guests. When Los Angeles wanted to rebuild the Central Library, they sold the airspace, attached an upscale restaurant and office tower and ultimately renamed it after a prominent supporter.

Innovation took a contractual form when, after the Northridge Earthquake, the state hired a contractor to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with an early completion bonus to repair a Santa Monica freeway overpass. Proof to our kids that they come a distant last compared to freeway commuters is that earthquake repair work on the Kennedy High School gymnasium, damaged in the same earthquake, has just begun. After years of discussion, Federal Emergency Management Agency funding was finally secured. The high school project will not be completed until a decade after the freeway was repaired.

The key to building schools is not that complicated. We just need community leaders to follow their rhetoric with action and to rethink our notions of what a school should look like.

Why can't the new Staples Center retail development plan contain a school? Or the new development at the Farmer's Market? Why can't a remote section of the Dodger Stadium parking lot be used for a school and a parking structure built so no fan is inconvenienced?

Why can't a planned supermarket be constructed so that a school is built at one level with access from one street and the market at another level with access from the opposite street?

Why can't sections of big-box retail stores, minimalls and corporate office towers be used for classrooms?

Why can't libraries, museums, parks, courthouses, hospitals, police stations and other civic buildings be built containing sections for schools and then their civic missions integrated with the curriculum?

Every child deserves to be able to attend a good neighborhood school.

Every child deserves to attend school for the optimal number of school days per year. We need to show them that we value schools as much as sports arenas and freeways.

Our community leaders need to teach children by example that after you take advantage of all that this community has to offer, you give something back.

We need to show our children that by working together we can accomplish great things that looked difficult to an individual staring at the challenge. They have already learned that actions speak louder than words.