School district may charge fees for use of its facilities. Nonprofit youth groups that play ball and hold meetings after hours on fields and in facilities owned by the LAUSD may have to start paying.
By Melissa Milios
Daily Breeze
Nonprofit youth groups that play ball and hold meetings after hours on fields and in facilities owned by the Los Angeles Unified School District may have to start paying usage fees under a plan that opponents worry will force some community groups to reduce services.
Providing free facilities to groups such as the American Youth Soccer Organization and Pop Warner Football costs the district about $4.8 million a year — to keep the lights on, pay for custodians and bathroom supplies, administer permits and provide personnel to open and close facilities, said Associate Superintendent John Leichty.
“These are direct costs,” Leichty told the school district’s all-citizen Bond Oversight Committee this week. “I hear ‘fee-for-service’ or ‘trying to enhance revenue’ — it is not. It’s a cost recovery.”
Currently, the district issues about 2,850 permits annually to youth groups, representing about 55,000 free uses of school facilities.
Under the plan, starting July 1 the district would charge youth groups a $78 permit fee each semester, and a $28 hourly fee to use school fields and facilities after 6 p.m. and on weekends. To use football fields with lights, the hourly charge would be $48.
Use would still be free prior to 6 p.m. on school days, and Leichty said campus-related groups such as the parent-teacher association and the Girl Scouts wouldn’t be affected. Neither would nonprofits that operate under the district’s umbrella of after-school youth services.
Adult groups, which the district has been charging for years, would get slight fee raises.
The school board is scheduled Tuesday to vote on the plan.
Leichty said he’s not a fan of charging youth groups, but his Beyond the Bell branch — which provides after-school programs for about 50,000 LAUSD students daily — has been charged with reducing its 2005-06 budget by $5 million. If costs aren’t recouped here, he said, other programs such as the after-school playground — which barely escaped the ax last year — may be sent to the chopping block.
“This is the lesser of two evils,” he said. “I have an obligation to bring this forward, because people have to make decisions.”
Members of the Bond Oversight Committee, an independent body charged with overseeing the district’s $14 billion building campaign, have blasted the plan, saying it contradicts the district’s promise to build schools that would become hubs of civic activity in their park-poor, urban neighborhoods.
“We just have too much chain link and too many gates that are shut too much,” said Scott Folsom, vice president of the Los Angeles 10th District Parent-Teacher Association. Folsom called the charges a “slippery slope” that could ultimately affect groups like the PTA.
Bond committee Chairman Robert Garcia called the fees a civil rights issue that would squeeze out groups that are too poor to pay, and take programs away from children in desperate need of more physical activity.
“The underserved populations passed those bonds in the past several years, they will be asked for another $4 billion bond this year or next, and the first thing they’re going to say is ‘Why do we have to pay to play?’ ” Garcia said.
But Leichty said LAUSD fields were “overused and over-abused” by youth groups from surrounding, wealthier districts that for years have charged to use their fields.
“If you’re a youth group and you live in Torrance, why would you use Torrance High School?” Leichty said. “Go to Carson, you’ll get it for free.”
State law allows school districts and parks and recreation departments to recoup utility and supervision costs, though they’re not allowed to make a profit.
Board Member Mike Lansing said that in his dual role as director of the Boys and Girls Club of San Pedro, he’s sympathetic with the plight of nonprofits to stay alive. But the trick will be balancing the needs of those groups and the district’s budgetary needs. “We want to make sure we don’t kill the smaller groups that are not able to pay the fees,” Lansing said.
“But if we let these outside groups in for free, are we going to have to cut our own programs? We want to continue the discussion to make sure that we’re coming up with what’s most fair.”
Gardena High Assistant Principal Ed Johnson said the youth groups that practice in the evenings on his campus are run on a shoestring budget, and predicted that added fees would present “an extreme hardship.”
“Most of the kids that are part of our track and soccer and football clubs end up coming to our school,” Johnson said. “So that’s kind of our future.”
Johnson added that he saw a “change in dynamics” among the adult groups once the district started charging them to use the school after-hours.
“It ended up being more affluent groups that got to play,” Johnson said.
Kerry McLaughlin, regional commissioner for the AYSO in Westchester and Marina del Rey, said he understands the LAUSD has budget problems.
“But at the same time, we are the taxpayers trying to use the facilities,” he said.
Up to 17,000 AYSO child athletes per season practice and compete on fields at Westchester High and Wright Middle School, McLaughlin said. Each student’s family pays up to $100 for the 10-week season, which would make it hard to pay thousands of dollars in weekly fees, he said.
“We may have to curtail our program a little bit, by either not serving as many kids or cutting back on the number of hours we actually play at those facilities,” McLaughlin said.
