Miguel Contreras School Pool a Squandered Opportunity Downtown News Editorial
Editorial Downtown News June 30, 2008
Contreras School Pool a Squandered Opportunity
Stakeholders in City West and adjacent communities received dispiriting news last week, when city and Los Angeles Unified School District officials announced that the swimming pool at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex once again will be off-limits to the general public this year. This is a failure from our leaders and the district. Worse, it could easily have been prevented.
This is the second consecutive summer that area children and others will not be able to cool off in the pool that is part of a $160 million high school. A hubbub erupted last year, shortly after the school opened, and officials scrambled to address the problem, finally coming up with a plan to shuttle people to other Los Angeles swimming pools. Still, options were theoretically being explored to open the pool to the public in 2008.
Last year one of the most frequently cited obstacles to opening the pool was the cost of lifeguards. This year, the main cited reason for the closure is a concern about keeping the rest of the school secure. The only ones who will have access to the pool on a regular basis will be students at the school who participate in structured programming such as swim lessons and water polo practice. It is a very limited user base.
The community was long led to believe that area inhabitants would have access to the pool. The rhetoric last summer indicated that officials realized there was a short-term problem, but thought it was fixable. The clear expectation was that by this summer the park- and recreation-starved community would be able to dive into the water.
Unfortunately, it looks like there may never be broad access to the Contreras pool. In a Los Angeles Downtown News article last week, a spokeswoman for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa classified the security situation in lessons-learned terms, stating, “When we build new schools, it’s absolutely essential that we design them to be incorporated into the community. In the future, we need to keep the community in mind.”
There’s a problem with that argument. Well before the opening officials described how the facility by the architecture firm Johnson Fain was created with community participation in mind. The entrance to the well-secured school is positioned so that it can be easily separated from classrooms, allowing access to other features of the school while keeping the instruction area safe. The LAUSD proudly touted this feature extensively before, during and after the school was built.
The district and the mayor’s office have changed their tune since last summer. It is no longer, so they say, an issue of paying for lifeguards and a security team. Unfortunately, we don’t know whether to believe this year’s excuse or last summer’s.
No matter what, it is unsatisfying, especially as the district steamrolls ahead on its $20 billion construction effort and local officials pat themselves on the back for opening new mega-schools while making excuses for problems such as the lack of access to the Contreras pool.
It is easy to say nothing can be done about problems created in the past, so district and city officials should know that the community is closely watching a couple other major (and expensive) school projects: The Vista Hermosa high school and park in City West is scheduled to open this fall (supposedly the park will debut in the summer, though it was slated to open last fall) and the High School for the Visual and Performing Arts will arrive in 2009. Together they represent more than a $500 million investment. We expect area stakeholders will have access to sports facilities, fields and other amenities at these complexes.
No one will be happy if the facilities open and the public is shut out again. Just like this year all they can do is look through the fence at the magnificent Contreras pool.
