Do we need to build a high school
now? Drive By Shooters High School
Water and Fire flow An Urban High School 11-8-96 On November 7, 1996, at 7:30 PM, there was a special meeting at the High Desert Library, devoted specifically to site selection issues concerning Vasquez High School. These were presented at the meeting. The Board had no comment.
Do we need to build a high school
now?
Drive By Shooters High School
Water and Fire flow
An Urban High School
November 7, 1996. The majority of the School Board and Long-Range Facility Master Plan (Duran) committee members are rubber stamps for the SUN political group (funded by William Spears). Duran's committee, run by Duzsick, is recommending a site consisting of 50 acres of a 145 acre site. This site has been referred to as Larwin, Red Rover, or Bank of America (BofA) Site. We will call it the BofA site. Which 50 acres of the 145 acre BofA site the Duran committee has selected, has been keep secret from the public until earlier today.
It has been reported that William Spears, through a group he controls, purchased the BofA site with the insider knowledge that the school wanted the property. Bank of America states that they sold it to William Spears at a lower price because "He was going to give it to the school."
What this transaction has become is 50 acres for the school cut out of the 145 acre BofA site in trade for 50 acres at Wallace Canyon. On the surface it looks reasonable, but consider this:
2. By giving or trading the Wallace Canyon site, the school loses this $950,000 forever and Spears may very well try to get it as site improvements.
The site at Wallace Canyon, while it may be premature as a high school location, is useful for a future school for Agua Dulce. It is one of the closest sites to the Agua Dulce town center that is outside the two mile prohibited airport zone for schools.
$950,000.00 would be a help when the school is built.
If the community thinks the Duran committee's 50 acre site next to the freeway and in a floodway is the right location for a High School, then buy the property for $140,000. This is 1/3 of the appraisal for the total 145 acres. It would be far better to pay $140,000, and keep Wallace Canyon, with its $950,000 commitment, for the future of the community. Duzsick instead will just propose more taxes on you to pay for the million dollars he wants to throw away.
What the Duran committee and this school board is going to do is trade the Wallace Canyon property - throwing away nearly a million dollars - for a small piece of the B of A parcel, mostly flood plain and adjacent to the freeway.
Is this to pay back Spears for the large amount of money he has invested to elect and control four board members?
Bottom line is: Do not allow them to do this
to our community and our kids.
November 7, 1996. The School Board lead by Duzsick have falsely spread the rumor that the school district is growing by leaps and bounds. It has been growing but only because in each of the last four years we have absorbed one high school class.
The district has grown as it added a four year high school.
If you look at the data for K-8, you will see that there is no growth. In each of the last three years, the Agua Dulce School has lost ten to fifteen students from the prior year. Acton is the same way.
The Board's position of rapid growth is wrong. Just look around, do you see any housing tracts going up? Maybe fifteen or twenty homes a year in both communities and that's nice, even a few more would be nice. But, this is not rapid growth.
In addition, there is a substantial "No confidence" vote in this school district coming from the parents who are moving their kids out at an unprecedented rate to private schools.
We are losing about one third of each eighth grade class who do not on go to our high school. They are going into private schools and elsewhere. I do not believe this number will change until something is done about the quality of education at the schools and the lack of supplies and materials.
This district is so deficient in supplies, computers and other educational material, it is laughable. What is not laughable is that we have the highest paid teachers in the county. In fact, Mr. Duzsick and his crew just gave the teachers another 7% raise. They also get a built in annual raise of about 3% for longevity just for being here. That equals a 10% raise.
Did you get a 10% raise this year? I sure didn't.
Their medical benefits are great, 100% prescriptions, 100% paid, no deductible, no gatekeepers, no HMO, private doctors anywhere they choose for them, their spouse and all of their children. It is probably better health benefits than any of us could possibly afford. The average cost per teacher is running close to $6,500 a year. This does not include the retirement plan fully funded by the School, in addition to their salary.
Now the district has State bond funds ($6,800,000), to build Meadowlark Elementary school. That will add capacity for about 400 students. If you add this capacity to the existing capacity at Acton School, Agua Dulce, High Desert and Vasquez, there will be an excess of classrooms. Even if we reduce the class size to twenty for grades one to four we will still have an excess.
What has been proposed is that they float a twenty million dollar bond issue to build a high school to add even more capacity. To reduce excess capacity they will scrap some of the portable buildings that we have paid an average of $10,000 to 20,000 each to install and we will save $4000 per year in rent.
The board will spend the rent savings from the portables on more raises for the teachers.
They plan to place the cost of this expansion on the back of the Taxpayers with money from bonds. If that makes sense to you, then vote for a bond. Personally, I believe that this district will never pass a bond issue until it is shown there is a reason for it. Right now there is no reason, with excess capacity in the schools resulting from the funded construction, to burden us with a bond or tax.
What might work now is a small, voter approved, tax for improvements of the existing schools. Of course, they could have done that had they not given the teachers a $600,000 raise and $400,000 in questionable back pay.
Send a message to this school district, NO ON BONDS until:
Instead, it seems to be let's build another school and equip it with a crummy library, obsolescent computers, and have excess space there so all the parents from the Antelope Valley can send their kids here. If we have excess space, we are required by law to accept transfer students.
Bottom line is: No bonds or taxes
until they spend the money on our kids.
November 7, 1996. Duzsick has said the proposed 50 acre high school site, that Spears is willing to sell or trade us, adjacent to the freeway, is safe for the kids. He claims it is "...Down elevation from the freeway...".
I am sure most of you people who are ex-military or hunters realize the high ground is where you shoot from, not at. The high ground is a perfect place to park on the freeway, (nowhere near an on-ramp) and shoot at the kids and school building and take off before anyone can catch them.
If you feel that is farfetched, so be it. But, what isn't farfetched is the noise and pollution from the freeway. The existing High Desert School is an atrocious location next to the freeway. You cannot even hold a meeting there in the Library with the doors open because the freeway is too noisy. Cars regularly run off the freeway, in fact after the board meeting on October 24th, a car did come off the freeway but it crashed down a little East of the school. Had it been at the school it would have crashed onto Antelope Woods Road.
But again, Duzsick and Duran only have an agenda of paying off their financial backer, Spears, and they do not care about the kids.
November 7, 1996 An issue that is ignored by the Duran/Spears duo, is that the site has to have sufficient gradient to provide on premises fire storage. Basically, fire flow is required by LA County Fire Department and is based on the largest single building on the school site. This controls the amount of flow.
A large Gymnasium that could hold around 1500 audience and a full size court, would require fire flow of around 4000 gallons per minute for 4 hours (960,000 gallons).To connect a twelve inch meter to District 37 because of their facilities charges is $2,450,000. There is some question whether District 37 has the capacity to provide 1 million gallons of water for fire fighting because it's total storage capacity currently is only around 2 million gallons.
If you instead had a grade differential on the site for gravity feed, you could locate fire storage as a buffer along the freeway. The cost to put that in as a water tank (Steel), would be approximately $770,000. An open storage basin, not particularly deep but along the entire length of the property, next to the freeway, would cost about $50,000 and $500 a year for evaporation. It could be shielded by trees on both sides and would serve as a buffer for both the noise and drive by shooters.
It would provide the internal fire storage (not drinking water) needed to extinguish fires at or near the school, even if District 37 runs out of water, which has happened.
To do this we need the majority of the Red Rover property. This would allow us to use a low cost three inch meter to connect the school and use it to fill the fire storage facility. This size meter would cost $200,000.
By having fire storage on site and having it open, saves the $770,000 for the tank and $2,450,000 for the connection charges.
With the full site we save $2,200,000 in water connection fees!
In addition, the original site committee and school design committee came up with a small drinking water storage tank also on campus. This would allow the school to operate independently in case of a failure of District 37 to provide water.
The proposed 50 acre site that Spears is "willing to sell us" and the Duran committee approved, cannot be used for internal storage because it does not have sufficient change in elevation. His site costs the School and the taxpayers an extra $2,200,000.
We need the entire contiguous BofA site to provide fire storage, all the fields we need for our kids and ample room.
November 7, 1996. Duran a planner for L. A. City Unified Schools, is planning an urban high school on a scant thirty acre site. While this may be big by LA City standards, for our community it's tiny. To give you some idea, High Desert School is about half of that size now. He is trading us 23 home sites to house a full high school.
There will be no facilities for adequate fields but just for a minimal urban configuration. They want Spears to make a lot of money by building houses next to the school, and his profit is considered more important than the school.
What is needed is a full rural school and 145 acres would be nice so we could have ten soccer fields, six baseball fields, several football fields, miscellaneous fields and whatever else is necessary to give our kids adequate facilities. These would not be costly because I will bet you that we could get people in the community from these various groups that would be quite willing to donate their labor to help build the fields for the kids.
But, Duran and Duzsick don't give a damn about the kids or the community, all of their decisions are simply based on whatever their patron Spears wants.
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