Two worlds on one campus
By Mitchell Landsberg/Los Angeles Times
On a quiet Sunday in September, a strange scene played out at the school once known simply as Birmingham High. A locksmith strode onto campus, escorted by Los Angeles Unified School District police. They made their way along outdoor corridors to Room G-44, a large classroom wired as a computer lab. The locks were replaced with shiny new ones. Furniture was removed. Mission accomplished, the group left. Thus did Supt. Ramon C. Cortines resolve a dispute over classroom space between two schools now sharing the campus in the San Fernando Valley community of Lake Balboa. Fed up with stalled negotiations over control of that one room, the superintendent said he decided to simply take the room from Birmingham Community Charter High School and give it to the much smaller Daniel Pearl Journalism and Communications Magnet High School, his district's last outpost on a campus otherwise given over to charters. (more...)