LAUSD Looking to Build Community Centered Facilities

There has been a lot of attention in the New York Times and the media around the country about the role of facilities in public education. Talk a little bit about your responsibilities as the now-confirmed chief facilities executive for the Los Angeles Unified School District Facilities Services Division.

The Facilities Services Division has a few very, very specific goals and some operational goals. The first was to provide a traditional calendar for all of our students, in a neighborhood school, without busing. That's a very specific goal that has been in place now for about eight or ten years. We're going to meet that goal handily in the next two to three years. The vast majority of our schools are now off of multi-track. As of this September, only 38 of our schools are on multi-track, and the vast majority of those will be off by September of 2013.

Another very important goal was to modernize our schools, and we spent billions of dollars in modernizing existing campuses-mostly infrastructure, deferred maintenance, utilities, roofs, structures, and asbestos abatement. We did not address the deficiencies in core facilities, access, transportation, or community engagement in our modernization program. The final goal, and the one that I am most devoted to and spent the vast majority of my time on, is maintenance and operations, as well as planning for modernization projects on our new campuses. We face huge challenges in operations during this budget crisis-meaning custodial and managers, as well as maintenance. The challenge and task for the Facilities Services Division, and for me, is to stretch operational dollars and to invest in our existing schools so that they involve not just infrastructure but also education, community, engagement, and the public.

In a monograph that was recently published by New Schools Better Neighborhoods, California Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said the following, "Working to ensure that schools are the centers of our communities couldn't be more timely. With waning state resources to fund critical services-from education to parks, healthcare, and transportation-local communities must be empowered to leverage multi-agency capacity to help families get what they need during these difficult times. Neighborhood schools provide a unique opportunity for these efforts to connect and better address the needs of California's diverse communities." Waning resources is a common theme with the school district and the state, but is there a common goal to build neighborhood schools that are the centers of their neighborhood by intelligent use of their facilities?

Absolutely. Yes, waning resources are a huge topic. However, I'd turn that around and say that we are rich in opportunities. We have at least $7 billion assured by voter-approved bonds. We have a subset of that available through state match programs. We have savings from our current construction program that we can realize in the next six to 12 months. We have an opportunity to invest and leverage school resources with partners in joint-use, programming, and maintenance. This is a great time for the communities-and there are many of them around each of our schools-and the school's leadership to capitalize on a time of crisis. The need can be fulfilled through cooperation and collaboration. Those are not just empty words; we need folks to realize that inside of that fence-line is an underutilized resource.

What are some of the specific timetables for facilities and projects that the Facility Services Division and the school district are focusing on that will come into play over the next year?

We have awarded 22 master planning contracts to local and national architects. We have awarded 17 survey contracts to local and national architectural and planning firms. We have completed 16 complexes-physical surveys of the spaces, square footages, and uses of around 100 schools-and we are now master planning all the secondary schools and creating a priority list of projects for all the elementary schools. We have started meetings with community members, parents, teachers, and administrators, and we have also worked closely with our bond oversight committee to get their guidance on how to invest in these schools. We have much left to do.

What are you finding through these efforts so far? What opportunities and desires are these schools and communities articulating?

The communities want access to playfields, pools, auditoriums, libraries, play yards, and after school activities. They are willing and able to provide some level of supervision, programming, volunteerism, some level of financial engagement, and, certainly, help in the design and programming of these facilities and prioritization of projects. That being said: there is no partner out there with pockets as deep as ours. We have the financial resources, and we have the physical resources. That promotes a behavior in bureaucracies that needs further engagement.

The New York Times on Aug. 19 ran a feature piece called "Don't Drop Out of School Innovation," which talked about drawing upon the Harlem Children's Zone and Promise Neighborhoods from the federal administration project and rising achievement goals for students and piecing them together as an overarching strategy to improve results. It's one of the first times there has been an integration of teaching, facilities, and neighborhoods. What was your reaction to that piece or like pieces that have been written on the subject?

It's interesting that people are starting to take a much more holistic approach to the educational process. It's not just the teachers; it's not just the students, it's not just the parents; it's not just the health of the community. Facilities are a factor, if not a deciding factor, in academic performance. This is not new. Educators and community members have always said that there needs to be a universal approach to education and educational reform. As a facilities director, I'm challenged to crystallize these notions of improvement and collaboration into actionable instructions for my staff, in the form of instructions for projects, operations, scheduling, or staffing. It's frustrating that we all want to do the right thing, and we all want to do it now, but there is a lack of specific clarity as to what operating and supporting divisions like facilities can do to improve educational performance.

What can you expect in the next six months from your efforts working with the architects, planners, and others in LAUSD to link facilities improvements to performance?

We have been in close contact with the Mayor's Office, as well as with city council offices and board offices, to ensure that their constituents have a seat at the table. In the next three months, we will go to the board for recommendations and action on an allocation model for future funds. Simply put, that is the $8 billion or so that we anticipate in the future needs to be allocated among the 57 or 58 high school complexes. After which time the priority list for projects will get funded and then we will start procuring and hiring architects, designers, and contractors. It's very exciting. Within the next six months you're going to start to see new projects roll out.

More important than that, I have asked our community outreach department to put together a strategy to engage more closely with the school communities, the surrounding communities, and the parents and teachers at each of our schools so that they have much, much more visibility on what's happening with facilities and schools. Substantive things include new projects, allocations models, reorganization of savings, new contracts for architects and contractors, and design-build as well as design-bid-build projects. We have already been advertising and will be executing here in the next six months.

What civic resources have come to assist the school district and you to achieve these lofty and needed goals?

I have had virtually no additive engagement thus far-nothing substantive in terms of simple, reasonable, and achievable criteria. We have not had an engagement from any of our cities. We have not had civic groups come and bring us actionable recommendations. We've had lots of discussions on what they would like to see. We've had lots of requests for engagement, requests for information, and requests for special favors. What we really need at this point are honest partnerships with folks who want to make the long-term commitment to the schools and the communities. It's going to take us years to plan and execute these projects. At the end of that period of years, we need someone who's going to be there with us. That's very, very difficult for us right now.

What has the district done in the last nine years to add the needed seats that were plaguing the district for more than two decades?

We've completed 96 of 131 new schools. The vast majority of remaining schools are in construction or just about to go into construction. We have completed 19,000 modernization projects, with billions and billions dollars. We have taken hundreds of schools off of multi-track; as I said earlier, we had only 38 left at the end of this school year. We have reduced busing to just 950 students still using involuntary busing. That is absolutely phenomenal. Kids are not spending two hours each way on the bus anymore. The new schools program has been a resounding success. People are going comment about cost and comment about opportunities and comment about optimization. Those all have merit, but I'm going to say that in conjunction with that, it's been a resounding success.

If we interview you a year from now, what will we talk about?

We will talk about the first six or 12 high school complexes, each approximately $100-150 million, having been advertised and awarded. More importantly, I will talk about a protocol-a policy and a strategy-to include goals that are not strictly educational in the programming, design, and implementation criteria for facilities projects.