Tuesday, September 16, 2003

The price of thinking big in Wiseburn School District

WISEBURN: District opted to raze decrepit schools but budget realities set in after the first cutting-edge campus was built.

By Renee Moilanen

DAILY BREEZE

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A curved canopy tops the entryway to Anza Elementary School. Red and yellow beams crisscross the roof, and splashes of color punctuate the walls. Inside, sunlight filters in through tall glass windows to illuminate a dizzying web of steel beams across the ceiling.

No expense was spared in the building of the Del Aire campus.

From the automated bathroom faucets to the sprawling kindergarten classrooms, the new Anza Elementary School is the jewel of the Wiseburn School District.

And it is, in many ways, a testament to the bravura of this school district, which years ago bucked the trend of patching up old campuses and instead embarked on the South Bay’s most ambitious construction program: razing dilapidated schools and rebuilding them from scratch.

The result has been the most expensive school facilities program in the area, one made possible by shrewd marketing, political savvy and tremendous community support. The average South Bay school district has $7,430 in local bond funds per student — Wiseburn has more than $25,000. Yet its construction vision is so dramatic that even $49.1 million in bond funds is barely enough to get by.

"What we’re doing is more like elective surgery," Superintendent Don Brann said. "We don’t have to do this. We want to do this, because we want new schools for the 21st century."

But six years ago, when Wiseburn passed its first bond measure for $14.1 million, wholesale demolition of aging schools was not on the agenda.

Originally, the district sought a more modest construction program: enough money to reopen Burnett School to accommodate growing enrollment and do some quick fixes at the other three campuses.

A 1997 architect’s report pegged the cost of renovating Burnett at around $3.6 million and figured another $14.2 million for upgrades at the remaining campuses — Anza Elementary, Cabrillo Elementary and Dana Middle School.

At the time, few other South Bay districts had sought bond measures to rehabilitate aging campuses, so Wiseburn ventured largely into uncharted waters. Surveys showed that Wiseburn voters were willing to support a $14 million measure — probably just enough to do what the district needed once it tacked on about $4 million in state funds.

The $14.1 million Proposition W passed overwhelmingly with more than eight out of 10 voters approving the additional property tax.

During the campaign, district officials stressed the money would be spent among the four campuses; this vision would change two years later, though voters in 1997 had no way of knowing.

"I believed then that we’d have to appeal to the whole district to pass the bond," Brann said. "We came up with a menu to attract interest. We didn’t know much at that point. We really didn’t know what we were getting into."

Burnett reopened in the fall of that year after nearly $3 million in renovations, including new carpets, paint, asphalt and plumbing. Made of red brick and the youngest of the Wiseburn campuses, Burnett needed little work to get it up and running.

Anza, on the other hand, was a different story.

The Del Aire campus, wedged between a residential neighborhood and the San Diego (405) Freeway, suffered from nagging infrastructure problems.

The school had settled in its 50 years, causing the parking lot to flood during rainstorms, a drainage nightmare that would have cost more than $100,000 to fix, according to a 1999 architects report. Even more, there was no way to make seismic upgrades or reconfigure classrooms to open up the cramped space.

Soon, an idea began to germinate.

What if Wiseburn forgot about a simple renovation? What if it just tore down the whole school and started from scratch? In fact, what if it just tore down all the schools and rebuilt the district from a blank slate?

No other South Bay district had considered such a plan.

Voters back new vision

"There’s only so much upgrading you can do to older buildings," board member Walt Guerrero said. "We thought, why continue to use this so-called Band-Aid approach? Let’s go to the community, make them fully aware of the needs, and if they pass the bond, we’ll rebuild the schools."

Wiseburn thought it had enough money remaining from Proposition W to rebuild Anza, which was originally estimated to cost from $6.5 million to $8.5 million. But if it wanted to reconstruct Cabrillo and Dana, it needed more money. A lot more money.

The board agreed on a price tag and once again asked the voters for money: The $35 million Measure E went on the June 2000 ballot. Wiseburn had become the first South Bay district to seek a second school bond before property owners had paid off the first.

Nevertheless, the community was strongly behind the new vision, said Gary Parsons, who lives in the Wiseburn school district.

The district "found that when you try to fix up an old school, you have an old school that’s fixed up," he said. "It’s better to build brand-new schools."

At the polls, voters showed their support, albeit less enthusiastically than they had in 1997. Measure E passed with 76 percent of the vote. Wiseburn wasted no time; two weeks after the election, the district went out to bid on the new Anza school. Had the bond not passed, "I would have been stuck after the two schools were done," Brann said.

Perhaps no other South Bay school district has so drastically altered its construction program midstream. Wiseburn voters who passed the first bond measure in 1997 believed the money would be used to fully renovate all four schools, but that didn’t happen.

School districts are required to make good on campaign promises and spend bond money as outlined in the original ballot language. But deciding whether a district has spent the money legally often comes down to interpretation. Wiseburn has spent more than $1.2 million of its bond funds on repairs at Cabrillo and Dana — this may qualify as renovating all four campuses.

Complicating matters, the district is one of the few South Bay school systems without an oversight committee to monitor bond spending. Instead, Brann and board members make key decisions.

"We figured going in that we had a sufficient amount of brain power to best spend the money that we could, according to the demands of the construction needed," Guerrero said.

Strict oversight of the Wiseburn bonds is sure to become a more pressing issue now than it has been in the past, if only because money is tight.

Anza Elementary is now complete, and its final tab — $15.1 million — is almost double original estimates. The 1999 estimates did not take into account architect and inspection fees or $1.5 million in technology tacked on last school year. There were also about $800,000 in change orders, a 7.8 percent cost overrun.

That cuts it close for the remaining projects to rebuild Dana and Cabrillo and add classrooms to Burnett.

As of July 1, Wiseburn had $30.8 million in its construction fund, which included bond monies, deferred maintenance and developer fees. It is due $5 million from the state, bringing its resources to $35.8 million.

The remaining projects are expected to cost at least $36 million.

Brann said the district is hoping to garner a few extra million dollars from interest and developer fees. But he knows that future projects must be less extravagant and better managed than Anza.

At times, Anza more resembles a modern art museum than an elementary school, its brightly colored exterior shockingly visible from the 405 Freeway. The district built the new school, which is 70 percent larger than the old one, away from the freeway and closer to the residential neighborhood.

Exposed steel beams and trellises are there purely as architectural accents. Skylights and windows let natural light spill into hallways, classrooms and offices. Kindergarten classrooms are 1,350 square feet, the multipurpose room is built to withstand major earthquakes and every classroom has 32-inch television monitors.

Budget reality sets in

District officials like to boast that Anza is sure to win architectural awards. Dana and Cabrillo, on the other hand, may not be so lucky. There are no plans for a third bond measure, so the district simply must stay within its budget, board member Jo Anne Kaneda said.

"We won’t sacrifice space in the classrooms, but we may have to be more frugal with materials and more conservative with designs," she said. "It doesn’t mean they won’t be exciting schools that are good to look at and that are well-planned for the educational needs that go on there."

To reduce cost overruns, the district has hired a construction management firm for $3 million to oversee the rebuilding of Dana and Cabrillo, something it did not do during Anza’s construction.

"What we’ve learned (from Anza) is the projects are too big for us to manage, and the construction management company is really the way to go for us," Kaneda said.

Wiseburn plans to break ground on Dana and Cabrillo in June 2005 with construction wrapping up two years later.

"The voters are to be commended," Brann said. "They are getting a huge bang for their buck."

Publish Date: September 15, 2003