New Classrooms Open at PaliHi

Cost more than doubles expectations; Rooms will not be used to lower student-teacher ratios

New classrooms = happier teachers + better students? So far, so good. Hundreds of students came back from Spring Break on Tuesday to 14 new, long-awaited classrooms at Palisades Charter High School. ‘It’s a really big improvement,’ said Gabriela Nunez, an 11th-grader who visited her new classroom for the first time. ‘The desks are more comfortable here than in the older classrooms. And we have air conditioning!’ The school acquired seven trailers, which it calls ‘bungalows,’ from Los Angeles Unified School District last year. And it pushed to make them available to students and teachers, who have complained that the school is stretched to capacity. The 2700-student school has expanded by more than 60 percent since the early 1990s without any additional classroom space or infrastructure. That expansion has left space in high demand at the school. In fact, the school’s library was converted into a classroom. Without their own classrooms, dozens of teachers have had to shuttle from one class to another from period to period. And student-teacher ratios have ballooned. The trailers, each divided into two small classrooms, are an antidote to these problems, say school officials. To make room for the 14 new classrooms, the school moved five older classrooms, giving the school a net gain of nine rooms. Executive Director Amy Held said the bungalows have already reduced the number of teachers ‘traveling’ from 30 to between three and five. ‘I am happy to see traveling teachers get some relief,’ said Marilyn Haese, a Pali parent who was on the school’s task force to acquire the bungalows. ‘But in the long-run, I would also like to see significantly reduced class sizes’at least by five students per class.’ But so far, student-teacher ratios have not changed, and there are now indications that the bungalows will never be used to reduce class size. The school shied away from using the bungalows to lower class sizes this semester because it would have required breaking up students from teachers in yearlong courses. ‘The main obstacle with reducing class size is that it can necessitate hiring more teachers which in turn ends up increasing traveling again,’ said Held. She says the school is committed to lowering class sizes through other means. The school wants to increase the number of students who take some classes at community colleges. PaliHi is also considering staggering the school’s schedule. The school’s board hoped to make the bungalows available to students at the beginning of the second semester in January, but complying with state and LAUSD regulations and slower-than-expected construction delayed the move-in until this week. When the school initially acquired them, the state Department of Education mandated that they could only be used for administrative offices. A group of parents, however, lobbied the state to allow the school to use them for classrooms. Although LAUSD gave the school the seven trailers, preparing the trailers for student occupation has been costly. The board initially budgeted $350,000, but the cost doubled to more than $700,000. The school expected that the cost would, in part, be offset by district bond funding, but the district rejected the school’s application. The school expects to save as much as $180,000 from reusing older bungalows for field houses, which the school no longer has to purchase. ——– To contact Staff Writer Max Taves, e-mail reporter@palipost.com or call (310) 454-1321 ext. 28.