The LAUSD’s “high school No. 9” that is supposed to be a jewel of the downtown skyline is really turning out to be a problem for the District. It’s a $242 million school, according to the story in today’s L.A. TIMES, “Discord builds over new downtown arts school; Only months before it is to open, it has no principal and there is disagreement about who should run it and who should go there," by Mitchell Landsberg, April 6, 2009, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/los_angeles_metro/la-me-arts-high6-2009apr06,0,1125806.story?track=rss
I mentioned this project and the growing delays and cost overruns that diverged from the original plans. [see: Part II- New High School ("H.S. #9") for Downtown Area March 26, 2009, and LAUSD Back to the Future High School, HS #9, "parent tours"? on March 7, 2009] How long was the delay? The involved architectural firm included mention of the “2007” original completion date in its own blurb, "Cool school worth waiting for; Coop Himmelb(l)au’s Los Angeles Flagship High School delayed one year," appearing in World Architecture News.com, Monday 19 Nov 2007. http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=1607
So what’s the problem today? The District seems to have a problem in its search for a principal to handle this school with the specialty “arts” function. Furthermore, some of the supporters of the project are now becoming critics. The story points to an idea to turn “high school No. 9” over to charter schools for handling and the billionaire, Eli Broad, is complaining about things. Broad, I remind you, is the one who had a lot of influence in selecting this extravaganza of architecture. He was a pal of Mayor Villaraigosa in the big “Grand Avenue Project” that was planned to run from the Civic Center to Staples Center.
The idea of having a monumental design, with the school to serve as a book end on the north side of the project, was part of this whole notion of self-indulgence. The “Grand Avenue Project” is experiencing it’s own problems now. “L.A.'s upscale downtown delayed; As the economy takes a toll on plans, observers focus their concern on two mega-projects: Grand Avenue and Park Fifth,” By Cara Mia DiMassa, L.A. Times, February 25, 2008 http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-downtown25feb25,0,6053516.story
The "GrandAvenue Project" has a separate history of shadiness beginning with what was presented to get it started, being a lure for the developers in the downtown area, along with tax dollars and tax concessions provided as financial aid. It’s seriously behind in getting going and a few maneuvers to shift taxpayers' money over to help pay for it still continue, but not rightfully. In short, it’s wasting tax dollars of many people for the unnecessary and fanciful ideas of a few.
Why is it that the “private” developments seem to be such a sink-hole for tax dollars? Besides that, you have a lot of politicians totally excited and supportive of these things at the beginning and they really don’t have any liability for ANYTHING when the storm clouds of financial disaster rain down upon it all. Many of these men and women have long departed the scene and moved on to other offices in the meanwhile, too.
If there were really some actual responsibility for spending decisions- any responsibility- you would see a different picture. You would have an entirely different way of handling money and we would not have all the waste and constant rewarding by contracts to the politicians’ “friends.”
In the military, when casualties come from mistakes of fellow military allies, the mistakes are called a result of “friendly fire”- not so “friendly” for the deceased and wounded. In politics they should have some name for that effect, the figurative “killing and wounding” of the taxpayers by serious and continual mishandling by politicians and the contractors who are awarded construction project contracts.
But that’s another story and right now the LAUSD has a very expensive school that Supt. Cortines has to get ready for September classes. I expect that he could get a principal there by just assigning one to the job, but there’s got to be more to it or the job would be done by now. It seems that it would be a prize assignment but then you don't know what strings are attached that may be the downfall of an appointee. If major performance improvement is expected with some rubrics set up to measure that, then maybe the risk is too great for anyone to put his or her career on the line for a constantly changing degree of support that you can't rely on- not to mention turning around the learning style that the LAUSD has typically been known for.
You can see that the charter schools, hungry for facility space, would love to wind up with a brand new school. Charters are public schools in the sense that students can attend them for free and the LAUSD does have an obligation by law to provide some space, but I don’t think anyone really had this, the second most expensive in the country, behind the Beaudry high school financial morass (“Roybal Learning Center”), as one of the available spaces. They haven’t really even tried yet to make this school work.
Another issue is the fact that they are NOT using the school for only arts-interested students. That’s something that I did not have a clear idea about earlier, but it looks like just living nearby to "high school No. 9" will qualify you for an opportunity to attend even if you don’t care about arts or music as an area for study. THAT’s the big mistake of LAUSD, no stranger to mistakes, and if they do not alter that idea, they are in for more criticism, and rightly so. As I said before, you don’t buy a Ferrari to drive it on the daily snails-pace freeway commutes everyday, and you should not have all the “state of the art” go to waste by not having the school fully used to it’s highest capacity and level happens to be.
Supt. Cortines should be better able to handle the situation than his several recent predecessors. But it should never have gotten to this condition, and it’s all because nobody is or can be held accountable, unless there’s been some crime or near-crime that’s provable. What do you think is at stake for Monica Garcia, the president of the Board if things go wrong? Not much. She's just been re-elected to the Board, but running "unopposed," that means only that no one else could finance a campaign against her, not that she is doing any kind of bang up job in solving problems. The political maching is on her side and that's her role. She's a completely political entity, as were her predecessors, and Garcia only needs to satisfy that condition for continued life politically-speaking- meaning here, that keeping her major benefactor, Mayor Villaraigosa content is of primary concern. Any benefit to students or the public would be incidental, possibly better described as "coincidental" to the job of running things harmoniously with the Mayor's preferences.
On that matter, thinking about what behavior passes in politics, we shouldn’t expect much on that basis since the bar on what's “proper” has moved progressively downward over the years- think “limbo lower, now,” here and you get an idea of how far things have come to bring us where we are now.
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