New Thoughts About That $578 Million RFK Complex

I visited the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex on Monday afternoon and had something of a spiritual conversion.

First of all, the school building—or group of buildings—is….well….quite lovely—but in a pleasantly schoolish and functional sort of way.

Contrary to what I expected based on the price tag—and also based on the view of the place one gets from Wilshire Blvd., which is admittedly a bit palace-ish—the campus doesn’t seem over-the-top or dreadfully indulgent in its design or construction. To the contrary, it’s clean of line and light-filled.

The classrooms seem pleasant enough and well-equipped, but not remarkably so. There are public school classes in wealthy So Cal neighborhoods that are far more crammed with laptops and high tech gear.

In fact, the longer I spent in the school complex, the more weirdly cheerful I became. Maybe it was all that good use of natural light. Or maybe it was the sense of space around the school that comes from having 23 city acres to play with. I’m not sure. But as I explored more of the place, the trajectory of my mood continued to rise. .

Yes, there were a few features at RFK that are a lot pricier than the norm. Mostly notable, was the much talked about school auditorium and theater, built on the site of the old Coconut Grove, which pays homage to many of the Grove’s original features, even retaining one of the walls.

And there’s some expensive artwork, like the two murals by Judy Baca located in the library (which is constructed on the site of the old Ambassador ballroom).

Plus the teachers’ lounge is a lot more fun in its design than is usual. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Oh, yeah, and the pool’s pretty snazzy too.

Yet what truly made it impossible for me to maintain my previous sense of fury at the existence of this most expensive school ever built in the US, was the way the kids I met talked about it—which was consistently, to a person, in tones of proud wonder.

“It gives the kids who go here a different kind of opportunity,” said a sixteen-year-old girl named Cecelia Martinez, her expression both serious and dreamy. Her elementary school-aged brother Alex broke in to say that he intended to go to RFK too. “Because of the opportunities,” Cecilia repeated.

A high school senior named Martin Lorenzo, (above) had the same dreamy look as he gave an after-school tour of the campus to his friend, Samantha Hernandez (also a senior but at the Edward Roybal Learning Center, AKA Belmont) . “Yeah, it’s great!” Martin said. “Everybody felt really good about the school when they came this morning. It’s what this community needs.”

“I wish I went here,” Samantha said looking wistful.

Had I seen the Coconut Grove? they both wanted to know. “I already have my own assigned seat in there,” Martin said. “I can show you where it is!” He said that the administration had assigned seats, in part, to discourage vandalism. “But that’s good,” said Martin. “That way we all have to be responsible for taking care of our school. That’s how it should be.”

In addition to talking to students, I asked multiple faculty members how they felt about the huge price tag attached to the school. Not one teacher or administrator blinked. In fact, no educator I met showed the slightest shred of of ambivalence. “This neighborhood deserves a wonderful school,” an elementary school teacher named Janet Lee said, as if daring me to challenge her. “The kids of these communities deserve 100 great schools like this!”

What about the talking benches? I asked one of the high school teachers. Surely those were an extravagance? “Big deal,” he replied. He explained that the benches were located out in the small public park at the front of the RFK complex and thus were only nominally a part of the school. “And they don’t look that expensive anyway,” he said.

Every other adult I spoke with—from athletic director to security guard—echoed some version of these sentiments. Chuck Flores, who is the principal of the New Open World Academy, one of six schools located on the campus, didn’t waver at all when I tried to get him to concede that the Coconut Grove auditorium/theater, at least, was an extravagance. He said, and I am paraphrasing here, that perhaps the state in general would be better off if we built fewer prisons and put the money toward more schools like this one.

I believe it was then that I gave up all pretense of objectivity and started nodding in agreement.

Now just to be clear, despite my having quaffed the RFK cool-aide in a big way, I still think we need a line-item accounting of how the construction budget was spent in order to determine who was making what kind of profit. No matter how you cut it, $578 million is a whole lot of money.

But on Monday, contractor profits were not uppermost in my mind. Instead, my focus was the incandescent delight I saw on the faces of kids who had discovered early that morning that their very own school was the most beautiful and most historically significant campus in the whole of Los Angeles.

Okay, so here’s my crazy thought for the day:

Maybe we didn’t buy ourselves just another cluster of over-priced school buildings with that preposterous pile of money we paid for the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex. Maybe instead RFK is some kind of much needed gift to the kids of the least-served communities in our city, a sort of symbolic vote of confidence after so many years of educational inattention and betrayal.

Look: Throwing money at the classroom doesn’t help kids learn better. We all know that. But the knowledge that the grown-ups in charge believe that a kid—or thousands of our city’s kids— can succeed….. That can make all the difference in the world.

So if the $578 million spent on RFK can even begin to persuade the kids who have traditionally not—shall we say–gotten the best of our attention, that we get it now; if a glitzy and historic auditorium, skylights and all the rest can whisper daily to those kids the message that they and their futures matter enormously to the rest of us ….. Hell, it’ll be the best investment the LAUSD has made in years.