Summer Bummer
Summer Bummer
Downtown News
June 25, 2007
Cost of Lifeguards at Miguel Contreras School Keeps Olympic-Sized Pool Off Limits to the Community
by Evan George
Nine months ago city and Los Angeles Unified School District officials cheered the opening of the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, touting the City West project as a state-of-the-art campus that would not only benefit students, but also the surrounding community.
Officials at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex want to open an Olympic-sized pool to the community, but can’t reach an agreement with the city. With summer underway, however, several people have broken in to use the pool. Photo by Magnus Stark.
Now, however, those community benefits have come into question, as one of the prime neighborhood amenities, an Olympic-sized pool, remains closed indefinitely to the public. Officials estimate it would cost between $50,000 and $200,000 to operate for the summer, a fraction of the school’s $160 million price tag.
District officials say they had hoped to allow the community to use the pool during the summer. That requires an agreement with the city to maintain and operate the pool - something it does at a handful of other LAUSD schools.
However, as of last week, more than six months of negotiations between the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks and L.A. Unified had yet to yield results. A budget dispute centered around the number of lifeguards required has kept the city from signing on.
“This is outrageous,” said Robert Garcia, executive director of the City Project, a City West-based group that advocates for urban parks. “The two institutions that serve children the most in L.A. - in terms of places to play and to have fun and recreational activity - are LAUSD and Recreation and Parks. Both are failing the children.”
City officials insist they don’t have the money to open the pool to the entire community as originally planned.
“I don’t picture a huge public pool there. It’s just not going to happen,” said Chris Espinoza, who handles joint-use agreements for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office.
He said the city is considering instead a limited program of children’s swimming classes. That could satisfy district officials, but may not be good enough for Garcia and other community leaders who believe the school’s athletic facilities should be a salve to the chronic lack of recreation in the area.
“It’s all a matter of will,” said Paul Escala, director of joint-use development for L.A. Unified, who asserted that the city has vacillated for months. “Will the city put the resources in now to make this thing a reality this summer?”
But facing an issue as sticky as a public pool locker room, city officials may have begun to rethink their position, Escala said. A hastily arranged meeting was scheduled for Friday so city and district officials could discuss proposals for opening the pool later in the summer.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Recreation and Parks said Thursday that any deal is only in the “talking phase.”
A Disappointing Splash
Back in September, city officials and local leaders gushed over the $160 million campus. They called the school, named for late labor leader Miguel Contreras, a promise made good to an underserved community in need of not just classrooms, but athletic facilities and recreation space that would help keep kids off the street.
One school year later, the expensively maintained swimming pool, which can fit more than 200 people at a time, has been used only by P.E. classes.
District officials say they always intended to open the pool to the general public, but that an initial deal with a nonprofit operator fell through last year. They turned to the city, which operates more than 50 pools.
Together the bureaucracies operate other high school pools, including ones at Roosevelt High, Cleveland High and Venice High. That’s to ensure that costly campus facilities don’t sit unused. Instead, they benefit surrounding communities while accruing funding for the school district.
Officials at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex say they are eager for the neighborhood to access the sprawling facilities as long as the city can ensure they are used safely.
“This community in particular deserves it - it’s a beautiful pool - and they deserve that opportunity and access to the pool. We’re just trying to look at the possibilities and see if that’s feasible,” said Rosie Martinez, assistant principal at the school.
Escala said the district believes it is possible but that the city has wavered because of cost.
“They want to use it, but they don’t want to be responsible for it,” said Escala, who estimated that operating costs could run $50,000 for the summer.
Espinoza, an assistant director with the mayor’s office, admitted the city had gone back and forth on the issue.
“You need a certain amount of lifeguards, you need staff, you need someone taking the tickets… a full-on operation is way too expensive,” he said, putting the seasonal cost at close to $200,000.
More realistic, Espinoza said, would be providing swimming classes to 10- to 12-year-olds, three days a week for two hours. He said $300,000 has been set aside annually for the school’s sports fields, which are already widely used, and some of that money could be redirected to a pool program.
If L.A. Unified agrees, that could cut the cost of operating the pool, but it would also drastically narrow who could use the facility.
It’s a compromise that Garcia called “stupid and unfair.”
“These kids need things to do, they need places to play and places to swim… We are talking about the cost of lifeguards,” he said.
Drop in the Bucket
Although the pool is Olympic-sized, it’s a drop in the bucket of a larger problem for the Downtown Los Angeles area.
A recent survey of urban parks conducted by the City Project found that L.A. Unified’s second district, which includes the Miguel Contreras school, has only 1.1 acres of parks per 1,000 residents. That’s compared to 9.9 acres in District 3 and more than 69 acres in District 6.
Garcia, who served as chair of the LAUSD Citizen’s School Bond Oversight Committee from 2000-2005, said that joint-use agreements between the city and the schools are critical to improving that disparity but continue to fall short.
The oversight committee, he said, “could never persuade LAUSD and the city to work together more successfully on joint-use agreements.”
Whether an agreement on the pool could be reached remained unclear by Los Angeles Downtown News’ press time. But that may not mean the pool goes completely unused: School officials have caught people breaking in to use the pool and have found beer bottles and dirty diapers near it on Monday mornings.
“The community has already spoken,” Escala said. “They’re jumping the fences, they see that thing sitting there.”
Not the Only Graduates
Skid Row Charter Elementary Reaches a Milestone
The CALS Early College High School is not the only Downtown educational institution with an inaugural graduation ceremony this week. Students near Skid Row will also take the walk, albeit with much smaller caps and gowns.
On Thursday, June 28, the Para Los Niños School’s pint-sized ceremony symbolizes not just a coming of age for 14 students; it marks the end of the line for them in the Para Los Niños charter school program.
However, that may not be for long. Sending the students to far larger LAUSD campuses is not preferable, school officials say, and underscores the recently announced intention to open a Downtown Los Angeles Para Los Niños middle school.
“We have provided these young people with an extraordinary education and we’d like to be able to continue with them through their middle school years,” said spokeswoman Elena Stern.
The Para Los Niños elementary school, founded in 2002 to provide educational, psychological and after-school programs to underserved Downtown-area kids, has grown in fits and starts. In five years, the school at 1617 E. Seventh St. has ballooned from three small kindergarten classes to 260 students. With next fall’s incoming class, that number will reach 390 - the school’s capacity, said Stern.
She said a future middle school would likely be within a four-mile radius of the current school, because many of the students’ parents work nearby in the Flower and Garment districts.
The pre-teen grades right before high school represent a particularly formative age, said Stern.
“As we learn more and more about that age group - the middle school age group - we really understand more fully that that is [when] children are making decisions about succeeding or failing.”
Contact Evan George at evan@downtownnews.com.
© Los Angeles Downtown News.
