Pollution Delays Middle School Opening

It was an answer to the dreams of South-Central Los Angeles parents who put their youngsters on buses every day: a new middle school built in their own neighborhood. But now the planned July 1 opening of Jefferson New Middle School has been postponed indefinitely.

The $54.5-million campus was built on land that once housed a gas station and furniture factories and lies just across the street from a former chrome-plating plant that will soon be added to the state’s Superfund cleanup list. The school and plant properties are contaminated with two known carcinogens, state investigators say.

The delayed opening grows out of the quandary that faces the Los Angeles Unified School District whenever it tries to build in the inner city, where the only open space is often problematic.

Although the district believes all of the pollution on the 13-acre school site lies in ground water 150 feet beneath the surface, it decided Tuesday to postpone the opening and spend the coming weeks testing soil and water for hexavalent chromium and the solvent trichloroethylene before making its next move. As information about the pollution has been provided to the community in recent weeks, pressure has increased for the district to make certain the school is safe.

“We do feel that it’s safe, but we want to make 1,000% sure,” said district spokesman Brad Sales. “We don’t want to open the school prematurely.”

At the California Environmental Protection Agency, unit chief Greg Holmes agreed that the school site probably represents no danger to students and teachers. Evaluating results of more tests to make sure could take several weeks, by which time it would be too late for the district to halt the school’s opening if problems were found.

The delay perplexes parents such as Maurilio Sanchez, who stopped the whir of his industrial sewing machine just long enough to consider the news. Yes, he received a telephone call some years ago about the contamination at the former Hard Chrome Products site just two doors from his house, he said. But the school too? He had hoped that his middle daughter, Blanca, 10, would attend there next year.

“They have to open it. They just have to,” he said in Spanish. “We need schools so much here.”

More than 1,000 students who expected to enroll at the year-round school this summer are to be notified this week about the change of plans, which will land them instead at several crowded local middle schools or on buses headed to South Gate and Southeast Los Angeles. Dozens of teachers, staff and administrators must also be rerouted.

The school district was aware of pollution from the former gas station when it purchased the land in 1991, but believed that the site could be easily scoured. During excavation it found and removed underground tanks where trichloroethylene had been stored, then set about spending state money to build a modern stucco campus intended to eventually educate 2,700 children closer to their homes.

Subsequent tests of soil and water at the site raised “no red flags,” said district environmental assessment coordinator Bill Piazza.

Holmes of Cal/EPA said he became somewhat concerned in late 1995, when he realized a school was being built across East 56th Street from the Hard Chrome Products site. He said he had assumed district officials knew about the ongoing problems next door. But they maintain that they became aware of the possibility of contamination of the school site with the more dangerous chromium last summer, when they were notified of it by Cal/EPA.

A monitoring well dug at the state’s direction found levels of the two chemicals that far exceed health limits. The source of the trichloroethylene in the water is thought to be the two underground storage tanks on district property. The more dangerous hexavalent chromium is believed to have seeped through the ground water from the former Hard Chrome Products, which closed in 1991 and burned during the next year’s riots. The site is now an asphalt lot.

It is not the first time the district has run into problems with toxics at school sites. In 1988 the district closed Tweedy Elementary School in South Gate after children and staff were sickened by fumes from the industry next door.

The problems at Tweedy and Jefferson New Middle School arise in part from what school district spokesman Sales called a “Hobson’s choice of whether to take out residential property or to try and work with commercial property or manufacturing property. Generally speaking, anywhere in that part of town you’re going to have environmental problems.”

On Tuesday, work continued undeterred at the school. The complex of modern salmon and white stucco buildings is a jewel towering over bleak surroundings.

People living there tend to take the saga of Hard Chrome Products in stride. The old-timers remember the company as a good community employer that nonetheless sometimes pumped out so many fumes on a hot summer’s night that they rushed to close their windows.

John Wilbourne has lived all his life next to the site; his brother worked at Hard Chrome for years. He recalled that chemicals were routinely dumped into pits out back.

“I always wondered, ‘Where did it go?’ ” Wilbourne said. “They never brought a truck to suck it out.”

The fact that the company site is just a paved lot now leads landlord Alonzo Ester to question whether that was someone’s idea of cleanup. Ester is outraged to think of the money that would be wasted if the district did not open the school. But another neighbor, Taya Travis, 25, the mother of two young children, didn’t much savor the idea of sharing her days with thousands of adolescents. She does worry, however, whether her children are being exposed to chemicals.