Belmont's Blues

Roybal Learning Center

There's a pretty good piece in yesterday's L.A. Times about the trials and tribulations of the once-giant Belmont High School. I wrote extensively about Belmont more than a decade ago, opposing the board's decision to replace the 5,000 (mostly Mexican) student school with another humongous school-- the Belmont Learning Complex (now named the Roybal Learning Center), built on a toxic site at the highest cost ever for an American high school.

After years of restructuring, destructing, re-designing and clean-up at a cost of around $200 million, today's Belmont is a trimmed-down community school. While it's lost some of the wonderful tradition of the old neighborhood school, relationships between students and educators are stronger, students feel safer, and measurable learning outcomes have improved. The problem now is that the school is being surrounded by an ever growing number of privately-run charter schools competing with Belmont for scarce dollars and trying to skim off the school's best students.