Monday afternoon, State Senator Gloria Romero (who also happens to be the Chair of the Senate Education Committee) called for a line item breakdown of the money spent on the so-called the Taj Mahal of schools—aka the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex, which at more than a half-billion dollars ($578 million to be specific) is the most expensive public school ever constructed in US history.
Frankly, at this price tag the Taj Mahal, an elegant but unfrilled building, when you get right down to it, seems like the wrong analog. Better to liken the new school complex to the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, or perhaps something ordered up by, say, Mad Ludwig of Bavaria.
I mean we’re talking about a school that has talking benches. Talking benches!
In Christina Hoag’s AP story on the school she pointed out that, “Some experts say it’s not all flourish and that children learn better in more pleasant surroundings.”
And who among us would want to churlishly deny our kids “pleasant surroundings”? But see, to most of us ordinary parent-like folks, “pleasant surroundings” mean maybe nice tall windows that let in lots of natural light, some great science labs, good sports fields, a nice theater, and as many green spaces as humanly possible.
“Pleasant surroundings” do not, however, require insane fripperies like talking benches, and some of the extras that are built into LAUSD’s next most expensive school, the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center (opened in 2008), which has “a dance studio with cushioned maple floors” and “a modern kitchen with a restaurant-quality pizza oven…”
(It isn’t clear whether or not RFK has a restaurant-quality pizza oven. But I’d be willing to take a gentlewoman’s bet.)
Here’s the truth: Children learn better with enough good teachers, an adequate supply of non-trashed text books, and with the presence of at least one accessible school library. Sadly, many of the other schools in the district will NOT have those “pleasant surroundings” because of recent cutbacks.
But, hell, bring on the pizza ovens.
in any case, Gloria Romero has joined Governor Schwarzenegger in asking to see the down-and-dirty figures on this puppy.
By the way, yes, we do understand that all that bond money we trustingly voted to give the district some years back had to be spent on construction, not teachers and other pedagogical type stuff, like books, libraries and art classes . Nevertheless, when we voted to, “spend on construction” we did not count on this drunken sailor routine.
After all, our city’s favorite architectural darling, the freaking Disney Concert Hall (which we adore—and didn’t have to pay for) at $274 million, cost less than half the price of the bloated RFK budget. (And it too has underground parking. But no talking benches. More’s the pity, I’m sure.)
Dear LAUSD: You know that Measure E parcel tax thingy that we didn’t pass in the June 8 election? This kind of sh*t is why.
Anyway, here is the main clip from Romero’s Monday statement:
“The latest news that the Los Angeles Unified School District is spending $578 million on the new Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools campus is baffling. LAUSD doesn’t seem to know the difference between building an excellent school and a Taj Mahal. I cannot imagine Robert F. Kennedy’s legacy being preserved in a manner that puts glitz above service to schoolchildren.
“LAUSD has laid off nearly 3,000 teachers in the past two years and slashed academic programs. The district faces a $640 million budget shortfall, with some schools persistently ranked among the nation’s lowest performing for a decade or longer. LAUSD already has two other schools ranked among the nation’s most costly: Edward R. Roybal Learning Center opened in 2008, costing taxpayers $377 million and Visual and Performing Arts High School opened in 2009 costing $232 million.
“I join the call of the Governor for school districts to release financial data to parents and the public. In these dire fiscal times, we must ensure that students are provided a quality education first and foremost and taxpayers must feel confident about how their tax dollars are spent.”
Yeah. What she said.
PS: So, after all the drama and cost, how does the thing look? According to Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times’ architecture critic, RFK is: “Confused, expensive, and a little macabre all at the same time.”
Lovely.
“LAUSD has laid off nearly 3,000 teachers in the past two years”
Laying off teachers while building a new behemoth eh?
So who will staff this school? Will there be overcrowded classrooms due to the lack of qualified teachers in the district? If not, why is it that some schools in the same district must suffer from the cutbacks while this one doesn’t?
You can bet your last dollar that this was some politician’s and LAUSD administrator’s pet project. Their “legacy” if you will.
Irresponsible/reprehensible doesn’t begin to describe it.
“Dear LAUSD: You know that Measure E parcel tax thingy that we didn’t pass in the June 8 election? This kind of sh*t is why.”
EXACTLY. Couldn’t be said better.
Connie Rice, member of the district’s School Bond Oversight Committee: “Is it a lot of money? Yes. We didn’t like it, but they got it done.”
Who are the “we” that didn’t like it and who are the “they” that got it done?
According to Chris Blatchford, Gloria Romero is a Mexican Mob associate. What a cook.
And of course, “no room” for a charter school, even though we taxpayers passed a Prop requiring OUR public schools to share space with them a full decade ago. Watching an LAUSD meeting is infuriating: since Marlene Kanter left the Board, there’s no one with common sense enough to point this out, that since charters do well with the SAME pupils even in crummy spaces, building big behemoths is no guarantee of student success. However, Jolie Flores, Monica Garcia etc. insist that charters are “elitist” and bang the drums for their arcane system of magnets, which shut out those who apply unless they persist for years and literally make parents crazy (just ask your friend Sandra Tsing Loh). Despite Latinos being 3/4 the school population and whites and Asians together barely 11$, mostly concentrated in a few pockets, they insist that whites/ Asians are somehow privileged and it’s no coincidence that all these schools are on the Eastside. Not even in South L A. (which is heavily Latino too, now). But guess who’s paying the property taxes for the schools and who are grumbling about it? Just look at the militant homeowner Associations on the westside like those who send their kids to the run-down, over-flowing Westwood Charter.
In fact, no sooner were huge buildings like this (Belmont, Broad Performing Arts, Helen Bernstein etc. etc. – many of which, like Belmont and Bernstein, have major structural problems or are on top of toxic waste sites or right next to freeways) approved and funded, than the new mantra is “small schools” within the big buildings, and they have to be re-thought before the paint is dry. The most expensive building program in the country, yet the schools from Hollywood (Hollywood High, Fairfax and feeders) to westside (Uni High, Emerson etc.) are lucky to get a new playing field or redo an auditorium here and there, and are now doing their own private fundraising (especially Fairfax). Meanwhile, billionaire philanthropists like Eli Broad get to have their name on a school downtown too out of the way for most kids, requiring a complicating busing and lottery system, all because he happened to own some land there that he sold at favorable terms to LAUSD, IF I recall correctly.
And the irony is that the message Kanter kept pointing out — big expensive fancy schools don’t make for better education: better, personalized teaching and smaller learning communities do — is lost. These over-priced behemoths don’t even help the kids they’re meant to, at least not significantly enough to justify the price. So what did LAUSD want to do? Raise our property taxes again, of course. What does the L A Times do? Bash the teachers with a heavy brush, even though in truth, they haven’t done enough to weed out the terrible ones who give the great ones a bad name. (Who in turn bash and try to shut out charters). Taxpayers AND the kids lose again and again.
As for Gloria: she’s a termed out Congresswoman trying to make a name for herself anyway she can, by jumping on this caboose of overpriced schools in the wrong areas, now that the train has left the station. She’s been plenty Latino- centric instead of unifying and supportive of rational likely ridership and cost analysis studies by the MTA on issues like WHERE to build extensions of the subways, so I think you give her way too much credit overall.
Hey, sbl, nice to see you. Great points. It’s so, so maddening.
I only disagree with your view of Romero. In my book, she’s already made a name for herself in criminal justice. Honestly, for my money there was no one more knowledgeable and sensible on those types of issues in the entire state legislature. Then she got fed up (and, as you say, was getting termed out) so moved to education. I understand the move, when you start seeing the conveyor belt from school failure to the juvenile justice system, education is a natural place to turn.
I can’t tell you how great she is or isn’t on other issues—like the MTA. On that I bow to your observations.
But on criminal justice and education reform, she’s kicked butt for a while now, and she knows her stuff. I’ve been tracking her on education for the last two plus years.
But of course, admittedly, I like her because she’s generally on the same side of those issues as I take.
Celeste, I’m sure you have indeed been tracking Gloria and that she’s well-informed about the issues you mention, though I can’t speak to that offhand. I was just ticked off when she and her namesake Gloria Molina started playing ethnic politics again when it comes trying to finally finish the light rail and subway lines after decades of this nonsense – joining with their conservative Republican counterparts like Knabe and Antonovich in “ganging up” on the allegedly rich westside again, when the traffic on the westside is largely commuter including from their districts, and the MTA’s done a really good job of identifying where routes should logically go.
In a way, the mass transit projects AND schools have been hamstrung by the same sorts of partisan/ geo-socio-political etc. feuds that have made our city so divided and dysfunctional. We really need more leaders who are brave enough to rise above their narrow regionalism, playing to their local constituencies, instead of the good of the city. If Gloria Romero can rise to that in whatever she tackles in the future, I’m totally open to supporting her.
Perhaps Senator Romero should demand transparency in her own office. She’s already negotiated an astronomically high paying position at a Los Angeles charter-voucher school management organization before her existing term of office is completed. While it was obvious that she was on the CCSA’s payroll the entire time she was in Sacramento, couldn’t she have had the decency to wait before she joined her well heeled friends Burton, Austin, Barr, and Ponce?
Too bad she didn’t call for transparency when she and her staff worked with Green Dot/LAPU’s Ben Austin and the right wing Governor’s staff to sneak the corporate charter trigger language into SB 1 in order to ingratiate herself to Arne “Katrina Schadenfreude” Duncan, and his misnamed “race to the top” legislation — intended to resegregate schools and further grow EMO/CMO market share.
Too bad she didn’t call for transparency when she wrote SB 592, which hands public school property over to private corporations. That’s right, gives the public commons over to the privatizers for free!
Given the obscene money she’s made from the lucrative charter-voucher sector, you’d think she would have no problem seeing children have a clean, new, modern facility to attend classes at. After all, she’s used to luxury on a scale that non of us working people ever get to experience. Clearly he’s complaining because it’s a pubic school run by a democratically elected board, not a charter school with a private unelected board.
Romero has shown her disdain for pubic education and pesky democratic processes time and time again. For her to criticize (however correctly) anything in LAUSD is the upmost in hypocrisy.
http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2009/12/stop-gloria-romeros-corporate-charter.html