Evil Empire Building
Christine Peters, a neighbor, is one of the few people who is fighting LAUSD over a proposed new school in the heaily gentrifiying Echo Park area, which comes to the board again tonight (see press release from Peters after the jump). The LAUSD condemed homes just south of Sunset in order to build a new school even though all the evidence points to the fact that they don't need one there.
The local school has lost half of its attendence in over the past five years. Surrounding elementary schools have lost a lot of students. And there's already a vacant LAUSD school site a few blocks away. Why? Because the hispter professionals are displacing immigrant familes, and hispters can afford not to send their children, if they have any, to public school.
Wrong school, wrong place!
L.A. Unified scheduled to waste more taxpayer
dollars; school board rushing to approve site before
board member David Tokofsky leaves office
The Right Site Coalition, an Echo Park-based
coalition of community groups, will urge the school
board on Tuesday to drop its poorly conceived plan for
a new school in Echo Park -- where elementary school
enrollment has been plummeting for five years.
The Los Angeles Unified School District wants to
build an 875-seat school on Alvarado Street, just
south of Sunset Boulevard, right where rents and
evictions have been skyrocketing.
Gentrification has caused enrollment at three nearby
elementary schools to drop below 300 students. A
fourth -- Logan Elementary School -- has lost over 600
children, or half its students, in five years and has
an ENTIRELY EMPTY BUILDING, on its premises. A fifth
school, Berkeley Avenue Early Education Center is also
vacant just a few blocks away.
To put it another way, Echo Park enrollment has
dropped by more than 2,000 students across six
elementary schools between 2001-02 and the current
school year.
To add insult to injury, LAUSD personnel has begun
talks about closing at least one Echo Park school or
converting it to a charter. "These talks are
outrageous, considering that LAUSD used eminent domain
to force out an entire neighborhood in the midst of a
devastating housing crisis", said Christine Peters,
head of the Right Site
Coalition.
"It's unconscionable for the LAUSD to take the
homes of 50 families for a school and then closing
other school facilities nearby," Peters added. "We
warned the District that the school wasn't needed. And
yet the district keeps throwing money at this
disastrous project."
The Environmental Impact Report for the proposed
elementary school, which goes before the school board
on Tuesday, is sloppy and fails to accurately address
key areas: traffic, loss of housing and pedestrian
safety -- the threat to school children attempting to
cross dangerous Alvarado Street, where car speeds
reach 50 mph.
Even worse, the EIR does not look at redrawing
elementary school enrollment boundaries to fill up the
increasing number of empty classrooms at campuses like
Elysian Heights Elementary, Logan Elementary and
Bellevue Avenue Primary Center. If the district
confronted the plummeting enrollment -- and its past
mistakes -- it would conclude that the "no build"
alternative is the best.
LAUSD hastily rushed this defective EIR to the board
to satisfy the wishes of departing school board member
David Tokofsky, whose last meeting is June 26. Unless
the board changes course, the LAUSD will see another
defeat in court. Furthermore, this ill-fated, poorly
conceived project, and the needless forced removal of
50 families will be Tokofsky's legacy.