With the current fiscal emergencies that schools all over the country are facing, it’s hard to imagine any school district spending $578 million dollars on a single campus. Imagining that the more than usually belegured city of Los Angeles would spend that kind of money building a landmark campus with manicured parks and state of the art pools instead of on text books is even harder to imagine. But that’s the budget of the new Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools – a K-12 facility that is build around the infamous Ambassador Hotel, where RFK was assassinated.
While the desire to provide kids with a place to learn that doesn’t feel like a prison is admirable, many critics feel like the Los Angeles school district, which has just opened three new high dollar schools, has bigger fish to fry. “New buildings are nice, but when they’re run by the same people who’ve given us a 50 percent dropout rate, they’re a big waste of taxpayer money,” Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution who sits on the California Board of Education told the Associated Press. “Parents aren’t fooled.”
The Los Angeles School District has three of the most costly schools in the nation, which is a sensitive subject for a district that has laid off 3,000 teachers in the last three years, slashed academic programs to the bone and faces a $640 million dollar shortfall. To add insult to injury, the district also boasts some of the nation’s lowest performing schools.
To be fair, all three projects have been funded by a $20 billion dollar voter approved bond and were planned long before the current budget pinch. They were also constructed during the years when building costs in Los Angeles were at their highest. Good intentions were clearly at work here, but LAUSD clearly could have used that $500 million in different, more useful ways during their current budget crunch. These “Taj Mahal” schools raise the question – how do we make sure our good intentions translate into things our kids actually need, not just impressive but overly complicated ideas?
