Planners and Child Advocates Agree: Smart Planning Should Promote Neighborhood-Centered Schools

Gail Goldberg

L.A. Planning Director

My charge when I assumed the position of L.A. city planning director nine months ago was to help facilitate the planning of Los Angeles for the next 20 years.

We are a growing city, we have a wonderful economy; people continue to come, and we continue to grow older and babies continue to be born, and the challenge for all of us in a city like Los Angeles-where we have, for the most part, used up most of the land-is fitting another million people into this already developed city, and doing it in a way that doesn't just keep the quality of our life the same but that actually makes our lives and our children's lives better.

That means creating wonderful places, where people can live and work and play and have access to transit so that we don't have to spend all of our time on the freeways. One of the challenges is taking advantage of opportunities to create wonderful places and create hearts of neighborhoods, where people can come together and enjoy social interaction and get to know each other better. Places where people can shop and walk and have a healthy environment.

The LAUSD has embarked on a building program that is unparalleled in the United States, and the opportunities presented by the building programs that are now underway are phenomenal.

I come to this job with some experience in working with a school district. In San Diego there is a long history of joint use with schools, certainly with parks and recreation, sometimes with libraries. Most of the schools in San Diego serve as joint-use parks and schools. This was a common occurrence in San Diego, but when San Diego began its building program-not as extensive, but still huge-it did not start out well with me.

As the person charged in San Diego with building homes every year to accommodate a growing population, it was not a happy event for me to watch our local school district tear down every year more housing than I could build. This was, I suspect, not an uncommon occurrence throughout California.

This did not engender a wonderful working relationship between me and the school district, but it evolved over time, and in San Diego I eventually did see some wonderful possibilities that give me great hope for the city of Los Angeles' future collaboration with LAUSD.

There are some wonderful examples, not just in San Diego but also in other places, where schools have become literally the center of their communities. A good example is City Heights in San Diego, where a partnership came together with philanthropy, public agencies, the universities, and the school district to re-create an entire community.

One of the major building blocks of this blighted community's transformation was the building of new schools. In City Heights, the siting and design of three new schools-an elementary school that literally was the heart of the redevelopment of that community, together with a middle school and a high school-became models for jump starting the community's revitalization.

Those facilities provided not only education, but also health care and social services-not just for the children who attended those schools but also for the families of those children in a very holistic approach. I think we all can imagine opportunities where schools can be more than simply a seven-hours-a-day, nine-months-of-the-year facilities; and I now believe that the old school model cannot exist in our future.

If we do not plan for schools to be the joint-use centers of our neighborhoods now, we will be forced to address it later and to retrofit later. We do not have the luxury of single-use buildings that do not take advantage of all of their potential. It's not just about land; it's also about the roles these facilities play in enhancing the health of our communities.

The challenge for all of us is to make certain that when new schools are being built they are being built with the understanding that even if we do not have the joint uses together right now, in the future they will become joint-use facilities simply out of necessity.

The opportunity is now for us to join with the school district to make things happen that can create for neighborhoods that core, that heart, that center. LAUSD already is embarking on joint-use activities throughout L.A. They are not, to my knowledge, model schools or really innovative joint-use projects with a lot of different uses. But I think that there is now an awareness of the opportunity because I believe LAUSD is open to the idea of joint use and the idea of providing additional services for the community-more than just classrooms.

Our mayor is very eager for all of us to take advantage of every opportunity to partner with other public agencies, and particularly the school district, to find opportunities for economic development and to use schools as leverage for other community investments, especially in this next phase of building new schools in South L.A., where special attention needs to be paid. We know that in such neighborhoods, smart public investments can change communities and lives for the better.

This is a special opportunity for all of us, and we have been given our marching orders. This is a pledge that we are making for the city of Los Angeles; we expect to partner in every opportunity we can to make our neighborhoods better, and not to replace housing. We have done some of those things in San Diego, and I am hopeful that we can do that here and begin to use schools as an opportunity to rebuild and create wonderful neighborhoods where people can live in a healthy, prosperous environment.

Yolie Flores Aguilar

L.A. County Children's Planning Council

Good morning. My task today is to provide a reaction to the morning speakers and to share my perspective on the issue as raised.

The first thing I want to say is that I am always inspired by the visionary question NSBN poses, which is displayed in front of us: "What if a public school was designed to be the vital, pulsing center of a neighborhood?" I love that question because it pushes our imagination.

I don't know anyone who doesn't have a vision of what it would look like if schools were pulsating places in the community. The most important conversation is how to coordinate across all stages of education, because it starts very early in life, but it continues through a child's educational experience.

I was particularly intrigued with the amount of resources that our previous speaker noted are now available for joint use through bonds, including the $7.3 billion bond that was just passed. He thought we should be happy that about the $29 million that will be available statewide for joint use. My response to that is if we really believe in the visionary question, that amount is sorely insufficient. $7.3 billion, and yet only $29 million statewide for joint use is hardly going to get us to the vision of a pulsating school in a community.

We also must emphasize the importance of community partnerships. Those of you who know me and the work of the Children's Planning Council know that it is the central piece of our work. Creating community partnerships takes resources: coordinating and bringing together parents, residents, and young people, and it is crucial that the resources are available to facilitate this sort of collaboration.

Another speaker noted that preschools are magical places. What's magical is what we do wherever early childhood preschool programs exist, whether it's a school or a church or at grandma's house or Aunt Lupe's house: it doesn't really matter where. What matters are the options that parents have to place children where they're most comfortable and that the highest-quality care be available to them wherever they are. That is LAUP's mandate and commitment-to fulfill that level of quality wherever children are.

In addition to the importance of bringing providers together and the importance of stakeholders, another area that I would focus on is the role of parents. I love the quote that underpins the work of the Annie E. Casey Foundation; their work is based on the belief that children do better when their families do better, and families do better when they live in communities that support them.

But if you think about children, family, and community, in the middle of those three is family. It's rare that we emphasize families when we think about the delivery of services to children. We have worked hard with LAUP to establish a parent-engagement blueprint. If we don't reach the parents while we're working with the kids, we're doing them a disservice.

Our speaker noted two major challenges in his discussion about preschool: the cost of quality, the lack of a good definition of preschool and therefore the lack of information and, of course, the size of L.A. County.

Two additional challenges I would add are 1) diversifying the workforce and 2) closing the supply/demand gap. In terms of the workforce, our diverse communities require that we have a much more diverse workforce. Given the reality that we now live in a global economy, I believe we should be helping children that speak a language other than English to strengthen and maintain their native language as they are learning to speak English. Indeed, all of our kids should be bilingual or multi-lingual.

Another challenge that we continue to face is the gap between supply and demand in terms of available preschool slots. In L.A. County we still have a very large gap, which is why LAUP and First 5 have made such a large investment in universal preschool for all 4-year olds. But disparity still exists.

The latest report of the Children's Planning Council identified that in L.A. County the greatest demand for preschool is in the southeast areas, including the cities of Maywood, Bell, Huntington Park, Commerce, and yet that's where we have the least facilities. We still have a long way to go.

I'll close by underscoring that to reach the dream of providing good care for young children, we have to have resources, we need to engage community, and make sure we continue to make the connection between preschool to success in K-12, and that both are central in our quest for having schools become centers of community.