CHURCH CONVERSION; SCHOOL TO OPEN DESPITE OPPOSITION.

Byline: Karen Maeshiro Daily News Staff Writer

The sanctuary is being turned into offices, the Sunday school into classrooms and the nursery into a probation office as a former church is converted to a county-run school for teen-age probationers.

The Palmdale Community Education Center, which has drawn opposition from neighbors, will open late this week or early next week, serving about 15 Palmdale teen-agers who have been furloughed from county probation camps.

``It's like any other public school,'' said school Administrator Ulysses Chatman Jr. ``Our program provides a transition for them to get a structured class environment, to get the help that they need in areas they are lacking.

``Our key is we truly want these children to have success academically,'' he said.

Plans call for students to be enrolled in the county school for 30 days to 16 weeks, eventually returning to their previous high school.

``We don't keep them more than a semester,'' Chatman said. ``If a kid is not ready, we work at it until he's ready.''

The school will be staffed by two teachers, a probation officer and an instructional aide. A reading specialist, school psychologist and speech therapist will visit once or twice a week.

The students, boys and girls ranging from 14 to 17 years old, have committed such offenses as stealing cars, spray-painting walls and shoplifting, Chatman said.

``They are youthful offenders - that's the legal term,'' Chatman said. ``We're talking about the kid next door, your sister or brother's kid. The demographic is reflective of the demographics of the Antelope Valley.''

The students will attend school from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., with lunch brought in and no recess. Prohibited from driving, the teens will arrive either by public transportation or be driven to school by their parents.

Chatman said staffers will monitor the students when they get off and board the bus and when parents pick them up and drop them off.

Since April 1997, the county has run a community school at Division Street and Avenue K-8 in an industrial area in Lancaster, serving nearly five dozen students.

The Los Angeles County Office of Education will operate the school at the leased church building near 10th Street West and Avenue P-8. The county has signed a seven-year lease for the property owned by the relocated Faith Community Church, and officials say they can't afford to break the $5,450-a-month lease, even though neighbors oppose the location.

The lease was signed in February, after city officials convinced the county not to put the school downtown and after a plan to put it in a shopping center in the 2200 block of East Palmdale Boulevard fell through.

Residents of adjoining Desert View Highlands and other neighborhoods gathered 475 signatures on a petition opposing the school after they found out last July about the county plans.

Opponents say the location is too close to three elementary schools, an intermediate school and the Antelope Valley Mall, and they fear the county school's students would act as a magnet to draw other teen-agers who have had run-ins with the law.

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PHOTO (Color) Administrator Ulysses Chatman Jr. surveys the future site of the Palmdale Community Education Center, a transition school for teens.

Shaun Dyer/Special to the Daily News