Re “LAUSD meeting on the middle (school),” Oct. 24 issue

Thank you for publishing Mr. Kiszla’s excellent coverage of LAUSD’s gambit to create the West Hollywood-Fairfax Academy, an attempt to decrease the obvious abandonment of residents in the community from attending LAUSD middle schools.

It is interesting to note that LAUSD quotes a range of “5% to 15%” of eligible West Hollywood middle schoolers are currently attending a LAUSD school. Doesn’t the district have the actual number for 2019 or at least 2018? Has the district sent questionnaires or done phone interviews with the parents of the 85% to 95% of parents not sending their kids, or whether they ever would?

With traffic in our community already out of control, if local families do not [send their children to the school], will LAUSD bring kids in from all over the city, worsening that traffic, adding to pollution and squandering the time wasted in commuting [when] those students could be actively engaged in homework, extracurricular enrichment or just plain being a kid?

This is unhealthy for students and their parents. According to the state Department of Finance, Los Angeles County stands to lose more than 161,000 students over the next decade. The demographics of LAUSD are not what they used to be; we are the most diverse school system in America. Approximately 55,000 students in LAUSD are currently driven all over L.A. Almost 100,000 extra car trips are caused by the failure of LAUSD to offer strong academic programs in the local community. At John Burroughs Middle School, students come from over 64 zip codes, bypassing numerous very good middle schools along the way. LAUSD data at achieve.lausd.net shows a 5.4% drop in the total middle school population from 135,553 to 128,581 from this year to 2023.

It is imperative that the Beverly Press continues to cover and address the incompetency of the LAUSD. The district has squandered billions of tax payer dollars with embarrassing graduation and achievement results. The 85% to 95% of parents who live in our community that have abandoned LAUSD want the best for their children, but if they do not respond to this project, once again LAUSD will have wasted tens of millions of dollars.

My suggestion to our community leaders and LAUSD: renovate John Burroughs to accommodate 1,200 students and use the $40 or $50 million in savings to build a state of the art superstar West Hollywood-Fairfax Academy. Perhaps the parents that live in West Hollywood and Fairfax will actually send their kids there.

Howard C. Mandel

Hancock Park