PICO NEIGHBORHOOD One of the few dual language immersion schools in Los Angeles County, the Edison Language Academy has long been celebrated for its diversity in both the makeup of its population and curriculum offerings, producing students fluent in both English and Spanish.
But masking the program is a less than picture-perfect exterior, with cracks in the dilapidated facilities and general wear-and-tear taking its toll.
That could all change with the K-5 school slated to receive an entirely new school building under the draft of the Facilities Master Plan, a comprehensive outline of the Santa Monica-Malibu School District’s future over the next 20 years.
As the master plan is assessed for environmental impacts, district officials continue to discuss the order in which its schools receive a piece of a $268 million pie, appropriated under Measure BB, passed by voters last year.
Last week, a consultant presented a rough timeline for construction projects at Malibu and Santa Monica high schools, which could begin as early as next year. Similar projections for Edison have yet to be determined.
“It’s premature to talk about construction schedule going forward with the EIR process and as the board evaluates the projects,” said Tom Tomeoni, program manager for Parsons 3D/I.
A GLANCE AT EDISON Located at 2425 Kansas Ave., between Stewart Street and Cloverfield Boulevard, Edison Language Academy was constructed in the 1950s and designated as a language school more than 20 years ago, according to Principal Lori Orum.
Approximately 420 students are enrolled for the 2007-08 school year — up from 390 last year, despite projections that overall enrollment in the district would continue to decline due to a moratorium being placed on the acceptance on new non-Santa Monica and Malibu residents.
More than half of the students that attend Edison are Santa Monica residents, the remainder of which mostly live in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The school is a dual language academy, meaning the students — who enter speaking either English or Spanish — take courses in both languages throughout their six years at Edison. The goal is to achieve proficiency in reading, writing and speaking through immersion, producing students that are bilingual by the time they graduate from high school.
“I would say by the time our kids are done with high school, most of them are impressive,”Orum said on Tuesday.
The school curriculum utilizes a 90/10 model — meaning that 90 percent of instruction in kindergarten and first grade are taught in Spanish and the remainder in English. The presence of English in the classroom slides up by 10 percent every year until it reaches 50/50 in the fifth grade.
“We’re in such an English language-dominated society that in order to root the Spanish and have a chance of taking off, we really front-load it and that’s for everybody,” Orum said.
Once the students leave Edison, they continue on in the district’s Spanish immersion academy at John Adams Middle School and Santa Monica High School.
Lisa Proft enrolled her son Matthew in Edison, believing Spanish as a second language would be a necessity to have an edge in an increasingly competitive world.
Matthew will be starting the third grade next week, and after a few years at Edison, he can speak conversational Spanish with a fluent speaker his own age, Proft said.
“It’s no longer good to have a high school diploma, you have to have a college degree and even to get into college, you need an interesting background,” said Proft, whose resides in the Grant Elementary School neighborhood. “Hopefully, this will give him what he needs to get into a good college and succeed.”
The proficiency levels of students — both Spanish-and English-speaking — varies immediately following their years at Edison, mainly because they do live in an English-dominated society. For some students, Edison is the only place where they speak Spanish on a regular basis. The English-speaking students usually require more structure with grammar, though their accents are up to par.
On the other hand, Spanish students can typically speak English with ease, but struggle with reading and writing at grade level.
“The truth about immersion is it’s both a language class and content class,” Orum said. “It’s social studies and Spanish, it’s math and Spanish.”
LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD What sets Edison apart from other SMMUSD schools is the fact that more than half of its campus is comprised of portable buildings.
The campus is a collection of mismatched buildings added over the years, seemingly plotted in random locations, Orum said.
The original school contains a dozen classrooms. There are about 20 classrooms total in the school.
The layout of the school seems awkward and inefficient, the fields and playgrounds spread on the north and east sides of the campus, exposed to the 10 freeway. The buildings are clustered to the south and west sides of the school, surrounding courtyards and gardens planted by the parents to hide the proliferating cracks and chipped paint.
Edison is the only school in the district without an exercise track because its field is sloped.
Many of the issues involve the portable units, which are clustered closer to the east side of the campus. Animals pry off the ventilation screens on the bottom of the units, crawling underneath and dying, oozing an unpleasant stench. The wooden ramps leading to the portable units are chipping, as is the paint.
“Keeping up with the wear-and-tear of wood is challenging,” Orum said.
The parents have raised money and volunteered their own labor to beautify the school, recently completing the new butterfly courtyard in the kindergarten area, painting bungalows a sky blue and affixing large wooden butterflies to the classrooms.
“It was way too grim of a place for kinder,” Orum said. Last summer, parents raised more than $85,000 to redo the largest courtyard on campus, adding greenery and commissioning an artist to paint a mural on the buildings.
Under the Facilities Master Plan, it would cost approximately $22.9 million to demolish the current school and erect a new one in its place. The layout of the school would be reconfigured to swap the buildings and the playing fields, the former with its back to Virginia Avenue, easing concerns of children playing in the exhaust of freeway traffic.
Parents said they were surprised, some even upset, when they initially heard the proposal earlier this year, considering they had just dropped thousands of dollars on two courtyard projects.
“We all chose this school in spite of the facility,” said Grace Phillips, whose son and daughter attend Edison.“We came here when the school looked terrible. There’s never a sense of entitlement in needing a new school.”
During a workshop when the proposals were presented, at least one parent spoke out against spending so much taxpayer money on Edison since many of its students are non-district residents.
Some parents are concerned that Edison might get slighted when it comes time to appropriate Measure BB funding.
“My concern is we know we have a pot of money, what’s going to be done first?” Proft said. “Because we all know who gets in there first gets a project.”
One possible change in store for the future of Edison is to transform it into a K-8 school, establishing more continuity for its own students and taking population pressure off John Adams Middle School.
School board president Kathy Wisnicki said Edison is in the greatest need of all the schools because it is comprised of mainly portable classrooms.
“Edison would be one of the priorities that would happen pretty quickly,” Wisnicki said. “It’s not going to be built next year... it’s going to take a while to get through all of the necessary requirements that we have to do whenever we’re doing any kind of building of a school site.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 31, 2007. Read the original PDF.