The Highlander Road Elementary School campus in West Hills has been closed since 1982. Demolition is slated to start next month and at Oso Avenue next week.

*UPDATED

LA Unified will begin demolition Monday at the first of two schools to be razed in the West San Fernando Valley. But no new construction is planned, leaving empty lots in residential neighborhoods.

The Oso Avenue and Highlander Road elementary schools have sat mostly empty for more than 30 years, becoming eyesores and a source of conflict between their neighbors and the district.

The district is exploring the option of building new schools on the sites, but no solid plans are in place and the school board has yet to approve any new construction, said LA Unified Chief Facilities Executive Mark Hovatter. The current plan is to raze the schools but leave the concrete slab foundations which could be used as part of any new construction, he said.

“(Neighbors) have had to live with staring at old dilapidated buildings long enough,” Hovatter said. “I want to make it as amenable as possible to the local neighborhoods and I’m working with the local councils to make sure that what I’m doing is reflective of what they want us to do.”

Demolition at Oso is scheduled to begin Monday and at Highlander on Aug. 20, Hovatter said, at a total cost of $2,337,303.

The schools were closed in the early 1980s as West Valley enrollment declined. In total, 18 schools in the West Valley closed in the late 1970s and early ’80s and six schools have re-opened, according to LA Unified, and others are still in use for other purposes. One is in use as administrative buildings, one was swapped with nearby California State University, Northridge and other was sold. In total, five school buildings remain vacant. Highlander had been rented by a private school for several years in the 1990s and occasionally used for filming.

Hovatter said the district began informing neighbors around Oso about the demolition on Saturday by handing out flyers door to door but has not yet started outreach around Highlander.

Several neighbors of Highlander contacted by LA School Report were unaware the district had plans to tear down the school, which the board approved in May, and were not happy about it.

“This is the first I’ve heard of them tearing it down. I had no idea and I’ve lived across the street from it for 30 years,” said Bonnie Johnson. “It’s kind of hard to say if I like the idea of an empty lot. Right now it is really derelict. It is a fire hazard. It looks like homeless people sleep there. Every now and then someone vandalizes it. It has been a real eyesore. I don’t know how people will feel about an open vacant lot.”

Highlander neighbor Faye Berta, who also was unaware of the coming demolition, said the consensus in the neighborhood has been for tearing down the school only when there are immediate plans to build a new one.

“I am quite taken by surprise. I don’t know which is better, a big empty school surrounded by weeds or a big, empty, ugly lot. We have all kinds of problems with the school,” Berta said. “So they’re going to leave slabs so skateboards can go on it, that’s the plan? They are just really into destroying the neighborhood, aren’t they? I’m not happy either way. I’m not happy looking at it the way it is, and I’m not happy thinking there could be a skateboard park there. Just think of the nighttime thrill that all the drug dealers are going to have, which would then attract vagrants.”

Neighbor Mark Berens said he has been emailing and calling the district for some time to get information on its plans for the school but had never heard back.

“I am surprised, not necessarily that it is happening but that it is happening now. I have asked for a plan and for an outline, and I haven’t gotten a response yet,” he said. “It’s a little disappointing that we don’t have any current communication regarding the project.”

Hopes were raised for new schools on the sites in the last two years as nearby El Camino Real Charter High School, an independent charter school, came forward with a plan to develop the sites and a third closed campus, Platt Ranch, into middle schools and a science center associated with El Camino. Platt Ranch was to be a science center as part of the plan, but it was contingent upon approval of the other two sites. The district has not announced any plans for Platt Ranch, and El Camino’s director of marketing, Melanie Horton, has said they are retooling their plans for Platt Ranch and may come forward still with a new proposal.

The district had long said it had no money or need for new schools in the area, and El Camino officials since 2014 and until recently were working on plans for new schools and conducting community outreach after having been named the preferred developer of the sites by the LA Unified school board.

But the plans came to a sudden halt in late 2015 and early this year, when over a series of meetings the school board denied El Camino’s charter applications for the sites as the district announced previously unknown plans to develop the campuses into two traditional schools directly controlled by the district.

The sudden change angered many Highlander neighbors, who had thrown their support behind El Camino. A group of them confronted LA Unified Local District Northwest Superintendent Vivian Ekchian about the sudden change in March at a West Hills Neighborhood Council meeting.

One of their concerns for the site was the district’s plan for a high school associated with Hale Charter Academy, a nearby affiliated charter school. The school is located in a residential neighborhood and residents preferred an elementary school, as a high school would increase in traffic.

At the West Hills Neighborhood Council meeting, Ekchian made a promise to the neighbors that is was at least a priority for her to have the school torn down. The demolition is a significant budget commitment for the district because the money has to come out of general funds, not bond funds earmarked for construction, because in order to use bond funds the demolition must be part of a new construction project. This was one reason the district had not previously torn down the schools, but Ekchian, who moved to her role in 2015, said it was a priority for her.

“Many community members have contacted me and said this school has been sitting there, it has been an eyesore and a problem for the community for 30 years. And we have met over time with officials from the school district, and there has always been an attempt at demolition it but never has materialized,” Ekchian said this week. “It was important for as a local district to make a commitment by which we stand and to show them that we follow through on our commitments. That’s why this demolition is significant, because it has been over three decades of frustration that is being addressed by us.”

Hovatter said he was not yet sure if he will construct fences around the empty lots, but for the moment he does not want to.

“I believe that it’s been an eyesore long enough. If we go and put a chain-link fence around it, it’s still going to be an eyesore,” he said. “We have included within our budget money to install a fence, but initially I want to see if that is acceptable to the surrounding neighborhood. Ultimately I’m going to end up doing what the neighbors want us to do. But a fence doesn’t really stop anyone from entering the campus.”

*UPDATED to show that five schools remain closed, while others are open or being used for other purposes.

The Highlander Road Elementary School campus in West Hills has been closed since 1982. It is one of three sites for proposed high schools in the West Valley.

Despite the LA Unified school board reversing itself and denying El Camino Real High School’s attempts to develop two long-closed elementary school campuses in the west San Fernando Valley, the leader of the CHIME Institute told LA School Report he is not concerned the board will shut down his school’s plan to develop another closed campus in the area.

“We still are very much pursuing our goal and would like to open as soon as possible,” said CHIME’s executive director, Erin Studer. “It didn’t happen as soon as we liked — we didn’t open in 2016 — but these are big undertakings to launch a highly successful high school program and to redevelop a district campus that has sat vacant for over 30 years.”

CHIME’s effort to redevelop Collins Elementary into a high school goes back to April 2014, when the LA Unified school board named it the preferred developer of the site, which has sat vacant since the 1980s along with three other district campuses in the West Valley. El Camino Real High School was named the preferred developer of the other three sites at the time. All four of the campuses have fallen into disrepair, and most if not all of the buildings would need to be torn down or significantly renovated, district officials have said. Both schools had written up plans in response to a request for proposal from the district.

CHIME operates a K-8 charter campus in Woodland Hills focused on an inclusive model of learning, which puts special needs and gifted students in the same classroom, and was recently named one of the Charter Schools of the Year by the California Charter Schools Association.

The estimated cost for redeveloping Collins is $12 million and would be paid for by funds raised by CHIME and with Charter Augmentation Grants, which is district bond money set aside specifically for charter school development.

For years and as late as last October, LA Unified officials repeatedly said the district had no enrollment need in the West Valley for new schools and no money to build them. But that changed in November when El Camino approached the board for approval of two charters at the closed Oso and Highlander campuses. The district suddenly had found a need for the campuses, and in November denied the application for Oso in favor of a new magnet school and in January denied the application for Highlander in favor of an expansion of Hale Charter Academy, an affiliated district charter school.

The moves by the board were unexpected because LA Unified has no current plans to build any new schools in the district and little bond money to do so. With an estimated $60 billion needed to repair and modernize its existing campuses and only $7.8 billion in available bond funds, the district would need to cancel renovation projects to clear budget room for the new schools, LA Unified Chief Facilities Executive Mark Hovatter told the board in January.

The district has so far run into significant neighborhood opposition with its plans to convert Highlander into a high school, as some homeowners in the area were opposed to the increased traffic and other issues a high school can bring to the neighborhood. So far, three of the four plans for the closed campuses involve converting a former elementary school into a high school. A fourth site, Platt Ranch, is still in development by El Camino but will likely be a proposal for a K-8 school.

Studer said he has closely watched the developments with El Camino but still believes CHIME will be able to move forward and not experience the same reversal of its own plans.

“I certainly watched it and continue to have conversations with our district partners, letting them know that we are still on track and moving forward with our plans, and are hopeful that they remain in alignment with our plans,” Studer said. “I think at the end of the day the district was clear about why they reversed course with El Camino and it was that they wanted to pursue some program growth of their own on those two campuses, Oso and Highlander, in the West Valley, but my guess is if they have sort of taken on launching those two programs, that’s probably as much program growth as they can sustain at this time, so I wouldn’t anticipate them coming up with yet another program that they would add to Collins.”

Studer said CHIME has held two community meetings about the campus and plans on approaching the board for approval of its charter in the late summer or early fall.

“It is a lot of ducks to line up, and we are doing that in partnership with LAUSD, and I think that this is something that at the end of the day is going to be a program and a campus that the charter world is extremely proud of and that LAUSD is extremely proud to authorize,” Studer said.

The Highlander Road Elementary School campus in West Hills has been closed since 1982 and fallen into disrepair.

LA Unified Local District Northwest Superintendent Vivian Ekchian faced an angry and skeptical group of West Hills residents Thursday evening as she presented the district’s plan to redevelop a long-shuttered and dilapidated elementary school into a high school serving 500 students.

The anger stemmed from the school board’s sudden cancellation last month of a plan that had been in development for more than a year by an independent charter school, El Camino Real High School, to rebuild Highlander into a K-8 campus.

Ekchian spoke before the West Hills Neighborhood Council and outlined the emerging plan to convert the closed Highlander Road Elementary School campus into the Hale Academy for Visual and Performing Arts. The new campus would serve as an extension to Hale Charter Academy, a nearby district middle school.

Several residents said they felt that El Camino had been open, responsive and transparent with them through the long process, while the district’s moves came without any community outreach efforts. Residents also said they are opposed to a high school being located at the campus due to the increased traffic and other problems high school students bring to a residential neighborhood.

“El Camino Real has been very straightforward with us. They have been having meetings, they have included us in their plans and this has been going on for about a year and a half,” Matthew Moon, who lives across the street from Highlander, said at the meeting. “And then out of the blue, it is scrapped and this new project is put in. We don’t know anything about it. All we have in conjecture. So if you are going to come to the homeowners and ask for their support, you better bring your A game, because El Camino had their A game.”

Ekchian told the council and audience that until the LA Unified school board approved the Hale plan at last month’s board meeting, she was not able to do any outreach. Several times she promised that her appearance was the beginning of an effort to engage the community.

“There is no way I would make a decision about a school in West Hills without communicating with all of you, who are on the neighborhood council,” she said. “But prior to the resolution going to the board, it would have been highly inappropriate to come to all of you and begin to distribute information that my board had not even seen or agreed to look into. So I apologize if some of you have been offended by thinking that this came to you as a surprise.”

At the meeting, held at de Toledo High School, a private Jewish high school in West Hills, Ekchian outlined her vision for the new school, which is to focus on the arts, and said that a main reason for the plan is to help the district increase enrollment. LA Unified has suffered a huge drop in enrollment over the last decade, in part due to students leaving in droves for charter schools, one of several factors contributing to the district facing giant budget deficits in the coming years.

The Highlander campus has been closed since 1982 and is among three other campuses in the west San Fernando Valley that have been vacant for decades after the area suffered a loss of enrollment in the early 1980s. With the exception of a private school renting the property for a few years in the 1990s, the Highlander campus has remained closed and fallen into disrepair.

The campus is located in a quiet residential neighborhood, and the homes surrounding it are primarily well-groomed, single-family, suburban residences. Two neighborhood residents, Faye Barta and Mark Berens, told LA School Report of the numerous problems the campus has caused, including junk and debris filling the property, graffiti, homeless people camping out there and teenagers frequently jumping the fences to skateboard on the property and the roof.

“It is a blight. It is an eyesore. It is a shuttered school, and it is one that reflects little to no maintenance and a fair amount of neglect. I use the term ‘dilapidated,’ which is probably a very good descriptor,” Berens said.

During a recent visit to the property, teenagers were skateboarding in the parking lot while another group of teenagers in two parked cars played music and smoked cigarettes. Piles of dry leaves and pine needles that appear to have built up over several years fill the parking lot and along the fence line, creating a potential fire hazard. Junk was strewn about, including a discarded couch.

After district officials said repeatedly over the last few years that LA Unified had no money to rebuild the schools nor any enrollment need in the area for them, the district put out a request for proposal for the four closed sites in 2014, and El Camino was later named the preferred developer of three of them: Highlander, Oso and Platt Ranch.

Since 2014, El Camino officials have held a series of outreach meetings and adjusted their site plans in response to community concerns, according to neighbors. Barta estimated that approximately 75 percent to 80 percent of neighborhood residents supported the El Camino plan.

In November during a vote to approve El Camino’s charter applications for Oso and Highlander, district officials announced a sudden reversal. Then-Superintendent Ramon Cortines announced a desire to build a magnet school at the Oso campus, and board member Scott Schmerelson announced that Ekchian was developing a plan for Highlander, although the details, including Hale’s involvement, were not released at the time.

Based on the new developments, the board rejected El Camino’s application for Oso at the November meeting and postponed the Highlander vote until more information on the plan could be presented. In February, the board officially rejected El Camino’s Highlander application and approved $500,000 for Ekchian and the district to develop the Hale plan. (Click here to learn more about the back story of El Camino’s attempt to redevelop the sites and the board’s sudden reversal.)

Previous to the West Hills meeting, Berens told LA School Report he found the district lacked transparency, and he repeated similar comments to Ekchian at the meeting.

“If I were to compare the El Camino process to the LAUSD process, then I’ve got a highly transparent, engaged and collaborative relationship with El Camino, and I don’t have any of those attributes with LAUSD,” Berens said. “I have concerns that the voice of the neighborhood will be lost in this process if the same lack of transparency that was applied to this decision that they made is applied to the exploratory process and then whatever comes of that.”

The LA Unified plan to develop Highlander by spending $50 million of bond money comes as the district is in need of up to $60 billion to fix and modernize its existing schools, while only $7.8 billion in bond funds is available. Other than the new plans at Highlander and Oso, the district has no current plans to build any new schools, and LA Unified Chief Facilities Executive Mark Hovatter told the board last month that in order to free up money for the new schools, other renovation projects would have to be cancelled.

Barta told LA School Report that she does not believe the district has the money to develop the sites, and she repeated those comments at the meeting.

“They don’t have the money to do it. So they are wasting the $500,000 and they are wasting everybody’s time and they are letting that school sit and rot,” she said.

During the West Hills meeting, the roughly 25 members of the council did not express much skepticism or ask hard questions of Ekchian. But several members of the audience, which also numbered about 25, did ask tough questions, and after Ekchian’s presentation, about a dozen local residents joined her in the hallway to ask more questions. Many of the residents were animated and angry.

Ekchian promised she would be responsive the community’s concerns and that the process would be transparent.

“I’m not going to do this without you, because it will be a failure upon arrival if we don’t have the community on board,” she said.

Some residents said they were skeptical of the timing, that just at the moment El Camino’s plan was set to be voted on by the board after a year and a half of planning, the district announced its own plan after 33 years of letting the property sit empty.

“Vivian, what the community is aware of is, if you have had this thought for nine months or six months or however long, why did you string along El Camino?” asked resident Bunny Field. “Why did you string along our community? Why did you put it on hold at the vote in November? Why weren’t you forthcoming with El Camino and all of their efforts and say, ‘You know what, it’s never going to happen, take your marbles and go home’? We feel that this is a fraud that has been perpetrated on all of us.”

Other residents then chimed in with questions, and Ekchian did not directly respond to Field’s question. But during the meeting she had said that despite all appearances it was essentially a coincidence that she came forward with her plan — which she said had been in the works for some time with the Hale staff — just as El Camino’s was set to be voted on.

“There is nothing that we have concocted. I could have brought to you 500 students and teachers and parents who would argue with you that it wasn’t concocted,” Ekchian said.

Barta asked why the district wasn’t interested in using the Platt Ranch site because it is closer to Hale than Highlander. El Camino’s plan for Platt was to develop it into a science center that would not house any full-time students.

“In response to Platt, it is also a part of El Camino’s application process. … I can’t negotiate who gets which school,” Ekchian said. But Highlander was also part of El Camino’s plan, and Ekchian did not address the discrepancy.

LA School Report asked about the $60 billion needed to fix the district’s current campuses. If the reason to expand Hale is to increase enrollment, doesn’t the district’s other neglected campuses, which include failing air conditioners and an array of other shortfalls, also turn off prospective parents and students?

“To me this is an investment. It is not a waste of money nor is it taking away from maintenance and operations, because I have a lot of other schools that require curbside appeal and maintenance. But one does not compete with the other,” she said, despite the fact that Hovatter told the board the new Valley schools would require the cancellation of renovation projects. “Who is to say we can’t find partners? I found with the Oso plans foundations that would invest in that, so if we think narrow and only think about this is what we have right here, we will never be globally competitive.”

Ekchian also told the residents that if the current plan for Highlander did not come to fruition she would advocate for the district to at least tear down the existing structures. But if the district were to only tear down the buildings and not build new ones, it would need to use general funds out of its operational budget and not bond funds. Ekchian told LA School Report she would still advocate to tear the buildings down even if it meant using general funds to do so.

If members of the LA Unified school board agree on anything, it’s the financial threat posed by declining enrollment. The latest evidence: a 7-0 vote last week to oppose the Great Public Schools Now charter expansion plan.

But what to do about enrollment, which is falling about three percent a year, is another matter, the difficulties of which were revealed hours later when the members debated what to do with the long-closed Highlander campus in the western San Fernando Valley. The choices: approve a proposal from El Camino Charter Alliance to build a charter school to serve 525 students, as district staff was recommending, or spend upwards of $30 million in public funds to build a district school, as board member Scott Schmerelson was promoting.

With looming deficits and limited construction bond funds, Schmerelson’s vocal support for a traditional school sparked a vigorous debate that became a vivid illustration of how competing interests often spur conflicting approaches to problem solving. It also raised questions among the members about how to pay for such a large capital project: Some said they liked the idea as long as it doesn’t drain money from their board district, while others were willing to give up money from their district for the greater good of LA Unified.

After a lengthy discussion, a split board voted 4-3 to give the superintendent’s office a month to explain how a new school would be paid for, including what projects would be cancelled as a result.

The Highlander campus, along with three other closed schools in the western Valley, has been vacant for decades. El Camino’s leaders have been working on plans for three of the closed sites — and to pay for them without any money from LA Unified other than bond money specifically set aside for charter schools. The board in November denied El Camino’s request to develop one of the sites, Oso.

After working with El Camino as the preferred Highlander developer for nearly two years, the sudden push to keep the site as a district campus reflected how much the tone regarding charter schools has changed in a short period of time, largely in the face of the Great Public Schools Now plan to expand charters in the district.

The district has roughly $7.8 billion in available construction bond money but still needs $40 billion to repair or modernize existing campuses, with no active plans to build any new schools. The district has also already earmarked all available bond money for approved projects, LA Unified Chief Facilities Executive Mark Hovatter told the board, explaining that if the board were to move to build the new school it will need cancel other projects.

“Not from District 6, you’re not,” board member Mónica Ratliff said when interrupting him, referring to her own eastern Valley district.

Board member Mónica García threw her support behind building the school — as long as it didn’t drain anything from her District 2 in the East LA area.

“If you tell me this is District 3 money, you got no issue,” she said.

Complicating the issue is that Highlander is located in one of the district’s more affluent areas, while Garcia, Ratliff and other board members represent areas with neighborhoods far more economically challenged.

Board member Richard Vladovic represents Distict 7 in the San Pedro and Watts areas, which has some of the district’s  historically troubled high schools, including Fremont High and Jordan High. Still, Vladovic said if the project is good for LAUSD overall then it has his support.

“I believe in the whole district, and if I have to give up my money to increase enrollment, then I will give it up. The only way we re going to save LAUSD is to increase enrollment,” Vladovic said. “We’ve all agreed if we do not increase attendance, bad things are going to happen. We’re gong to go bankrupt or we’re going to break up the district. I’m convinced of that.”

Later, he added, “I’m just disappointed that everybody keeps saying ‘my district.’ So why don’t we just have seven separate districts and not have a unified district?”

George McKenna of District 1 in South LA and Ref Rodriguez of District 5’s Northeast LA also expressed a willingness to offer bond money earmarked for their districts to help get the new school built.

‘We have a responsibility to assist each other,” McKenna said. “We can’t be, ‘This is my money. Leave my money alone.'”

Even with postponing the measure, specific language in the resolution would not have yet allowed the Highlander campus to be developed by El Camino, as the lease details would need to be negotiated and approved later.

Board president Steve Zimmer stayed out of the larger debate of “local interests versus the greater good” but voted along with Schmerelson and McKenna not to postpone the Highlander vote.

“Just because [El Camino] won an RFP, that’s only step one in a five step process. It’s totally legitimate for us to deny this charter because the world has changed since they won the RFP,” Zimmer told LA School Report. “There isn’t a budget crisis; there’s new leadership at every level. That’s the world they’re entering at this particular point.”