All Standards will Be In Effect Until the Next Earthquake
“The times, they are a-changin’,” Carlos Gordillo warns via email as we arrange for me to visit his Special Ed English class. Since I talked to him a month ago, one of the small schools on his site has been closed, a charter middle school has made plans to move in, the principal has become site director, one assistant principal has abruptly been bumped up to principal and the other assistant principal has decamped for a job at a place simply called the Office of Instruction.
When Carlos meets me in the sunny administrative office of the sprawling Roybal campus, he shrugs, philosophical, when I ask him to explain. The campus itself is a sprawling complex of gleaming modern buildings occupying 35 acres only a few blocks from downtown. Begun in the late 80’s in collaboration with a prestigious architecture firm as part of a plan to ease overcrowding at Belmont High, a school in a high-poverty community serving mostly Latino and African-American students, whose enrollment had surged beyond 5,000, the LAUSD discovered almost a decade into the plans that the north side of the site had once housed an old oil field and was contaminated with methane and hydrogen sulfide. Because methane in high concentrations can be explosive and hydrogen sulfide, if inhaled, can be toxic, the plans for the new Belmont High stalled.
You would think that when contemplating the relocation of thousands of children, a school district would decide not to expose these children to potentially toxic and explosive gases. You would be wrong. Instead, the project was renamed, a sleight of hand commendable for its sheer ballsiness. Don’t worry about those toxic, explosive gases! Those were at