Publications
Summer 2003 Newsletter
Romer Advocates For Smaller Schools To Promote Community Building
With
the recent passage of the state school facilities bond and the
LAUSD school facilities bond, LAUSD is firmly in the midst of
a significant building program. With the funding in place, site
and facility design are now being considered as the program moves
forward. To that end, LAUSD Superintendent Roy Romer recently
traveled to New York to observe the operations of smaller school
facilities. The lessons learned both were instructive and may
have applications in Los Angeles. Likewise, the LAUSD recently
signed an agreement to work collaboratively with the city and
the CRA on new sites for schools and joint-use opportunities.
New Schools Better Neighborhoods is pleased to present this interview
with Los Angeles Unified School District’s Superintendent
Roy Romer in which he discusses the potential for small
schools in LA, joint-use facilities, as well as touching on the
Belmont and Ambassador projects.
Superintendent Romer, after the passage last November
both of LAUSD’s $3.3 billion school bond and the $13 billion
statewide school bond, you have substantial funds to manage, a
bank of resources to marshal with respect to new facilities. Give
us your sense of the mission of the district’s facilities
program and what you’re hoping to accomplish with these
new resources.
It is absolutely essential that we have more space. I’m
impressed every day with how fundamentally important it is to
get more space. So, that is the first assignment. As we build
this new space, we need to think more seriously about relating
it to the total community—using the space in a way that
gives students a more personalized educational experience. In
other words, it’s not just space—schools are very
important institutions in the fabric of a neighborhood.
There’s no developer in Southern California with
as big a challenge as LAUSD. You’re charged with building
100+ new schools and the modernization of hundreds of others.
Tell us about the management challenges of putting a team together
to do that, keeping that team focused, and accomplishing the bold
agenda that you set out above.
I’m very pleased with the leadership we have in our facilities
section, concerning both new construction and the rehabilitation
and repair of our existing schools. The size of our production
is very large, and it will be escalating in the months ahead.
But, I feel very confident in the ability of the team. We now
have very competent professional engineers running our Facilities
Division—people who have built huge construction projects
all over the world. And they’re bringing these projects
in on time and on budget, which is a huge achievement. After not
building schools for so long, the fact that we now have 10 projects
finished and 30 more under construction is something our people
are rightly very proud of.
I understand you recently visited New York, where you
saw the benefits of building and managing small schools. Can you
share with us what you learned on that trip and what its implications
are for facility planning in L.A.?
Our schools are too large. They’re overcrowded, but also
they’re just too large. Students drop out of the system
because they quite often get lost in such large institutions.
We need to give students a more personalized educational experience.
I went to New York to look at some small schools they have been
developing in the last five-to-seven years there.
Ideally, the size of a middle school or high school ought to
be substantially reduced—the target we’re aiming for
is 500-600 students. Now, you may want to cluster two or three
together, around common athletic fields or common facilities such
as an auditorium to get the economy of scale you need to do efficient
construction projects in Southern California. In New York, they
are taking larger institutions and breaking them up into smaller
schools, which is something else we’re looking at. But where
our challenge is more unique is that they are not really doing
a lot of new construction—mainly the conversion of older
buildings.
My observations were instructive, but we would need to adapt
them to L.A.—they’re not immediately transferable.
There’s a lot more thought we need to give to this, but
I think a student ideally ought to be in a learning community
where people know each other and can support each other. Consider
the challenge of managing a teaching faculty over 20 people—that
just becomes unwieldy. So if you have 20 faculty members, with
30 students per faculty, that’s 600 students—or 20
per teacher is 400. This is the range we ought to shoot for.
All of the literature in the country says smaller is better.
Now, the question is how do we get there given our current size
and the economies of scale with facilities.
There are rumors that you are rethinking your approach
to building out the Ambassador site because of your experiences
in New York. Could you comment?
I had some thoughts about the Ambassador site before I went to
New York, which centered on the need to build an elementary, middle
and high school on the one site. I always had conceived them as
separate buildings on one location. The new thought I have about
the Ambassador would be, as we build out the entire facility,
let’s think about creating communities within the greater
campus.
For the sake of argument, let’s say our high school has
1,100 kids. We may want to build it in two groups of 550. Then,
how do you break that size into smaller sizes and truly give the
students an identity as a community? In New York, I observed very
carefully how they developed communities within a large building.
For example, there’s a school there of violin and dance.
That’s a very well defined community. There’s also
an International School, in which the criteria for getting in
is that the student has to have been in the country less than
five years. These means of organization bring people together
with common interests and also with common commitment. That’s
what I’m trying to reach for—not just a label, but
a common culture that people have created for themselves.
Now you participated recently in a press conference on
joint facilities planning with the mayor and Councilman Reyes
at the new Gratts Elementary site in the Westlake neighborhood
of Los Angeles. Is that collaborative, master planning effort
the model you’ve been suggesting will be the approach taken
by the district in phase two?
That’s a piece of it. We have housing needs in this community
along with many others, so we’ll live with our neighbors
and find a way that we can share space with locations that reinforce
each other. It is a collaborative approach. But, what I’m
talking about in the New York model goes beyond that. It is bringing
out of that neighborhood a true engagement into the school. I
don’t think you can educate youngsters unless you also educate
adults. You really have got to reinforce the literacy in the home,
particularly when you’re dealing with English language learners.
We’re making real progress in terms of space acquisition
and in raising the performance of schools. But, we have not made
enough progress of engaging parents and community into the life
of the school.
The district must deal with a number of state agencies
to approve facilities plans and funding. How bureaucratically
complicated is it for the district to build a new school? How
could we make it easier for local school districts?
I know there are many agencies we have to get involved, especially
at the State level, and I would like to see the process shortened
in time, because it is a long process. It takes almost two years
from the start of the process just to get to the ground breaking.
That’s a long time. Now, there are a number of issues in
there, and environmental review is a big part of it. But I wouldn’t
begin to give out a prescription on how to do that — I just
think that we need to shorten that time frame.
There is $80 million in the local bond earmarked for early
childhood education. As a long time advocate of early childhood
education, how is LAUSD going to expend those funds to maximize
their value?
We have much work to do because there is more need than we can
provide. So, we have to identify where is the greatest need and
target those areas for early education. Second, we need to integrate
early education within an existing facility. That begs the question
of how to relate it to an elementary school? How do you relate
it to a K-12 facility, if that is the case?
Let’s just take Ambassador as an example. Should early
childhood be a part of Ambassador? Obviously, there’s a
great need, but you have limited space. The center could be placed
on campus or directly adjoining the campus. There are a lot of
issues to address and we need to examine what resources we have
to meet the greatest need.
Four years ago at a New Schools-Better Neighborhoods symposium
at the Getty, two case studies we offered—one, a charter
school called Pueblo Nuevo Charter Academy, and the other a proposed
school in Cahuenga for LAUSD. Today Cahuenga remains unbuilt.
But, for a year and a half, there’s been an active charter
school at Pueblo Nuevo Academy—in fact are now five charters.
Is the difference the process?
Charter schools do not have to comply with the Field Act. They
do have to comply with code, but there’s a difference. Therefore,
charters can go in and take a conversion of an existing building
and work with it much more quickly. I believe charters are a very
important part of our future and I want us to be wise about where
we locate them. Also, I want us to network charters. I don’t
think it’s really healthy for a charter to sit out there
alone because, in many instances, you don’t have quality
control built in. If you have a network of relationships among
charters, they can benchmark their performance against each other
and assist each other in terms of the kind of management expertise
needed to run a charter.
We can’t do an interview about facilities without giving
you a chance to comment on the status of Belmont. It seems like
it doesn’t go away, and there’s no rational solution
to it. Could you share with our readers your perspective?
As you well know, since I arrived in town two and a half years
ago I’ve been trying to make Belmont work. We really thought
we were on our way until we found this earthquake fault. And,
in an earthquake circumstance, you really shouldn’t proceed
unless you can prove that it’s not active. I couldn’t
get that done, and my board was not going to approve a school
over a fault or sitting right next to a fault.
Just recently, the Board voted to approve the ‘Vista Hermosa’
option, which will place 2,100 students in the existing buildings,
500 students in a separate academy on the other side of the fault,
and a ‘student union’ type building with a cafeteria,
auditorium, and library also just across the fault. Then, we will
work with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to provide the
‘Vista Hermosa’ park on the western portion of the
property.
The recent debate over what to do with Belmont was really an
example of democracy and public policy in action. After much healthy
discussion, the option that emerged was actually better than any
of the original three options that were discussed: the existing
investment in the buildings will be saved without compromising
the educational environment within them, we will be able to continue
our work towards providing smaller learning communities with the
500 seat academy, the community will be able to use the new ‘student
union’ building after hours, and a community that desperately
needs open space will get a beautiful park. And all of this will
be designed in strictest accordance with standards set and approved
by the State Department of Toxic Substances Control.
Let’s close with one last question. A year from
now, if we come back to interview you, how should we benchmark
your progress?
First and foremost, look at the quality of instruction as manifested
by test scores. We need to improve the effective learning of youngsters,
and authentic testing—not high stakes testing, but regular,
diagnostic testing that helps us monitor a student’s progress—is
the best way to know whether you’re really making gains.
Second, look to how we are progressing on creating more space
and building these much needed new schools. Third, look to the
level of confidence the public has in this institution and in
all of its members.
As you know, representing a public institution these days is
very difficult. The public sector is the recipient of a lot of
criticism. But, I have the feeling that we are showing this city,
and the nation, that you can turn around a major institution.
Let me give you hard facts: in the elementary grades over the
last three years, the state has raised its mean score by 70 points
on the API. In that same period, our elementary schools have raised
their scores by an average of 135 points—twice the rate
of the state of California. That’s really good news for
an urban district that everybody gave up for being lost. So, I
would judge us on test scores, schools built, and the effectiveness
of the institution as shown by the morale of its participants
and the community.
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