Dear Editor,
If Culver City Unified School District (CCUSD) is an excellent school district, if it’s why so many of us moved to this little village within a metropolis, then shouldn’t we strive to share our high-quality education with more students and their families?
Senate Bills 9 and 10 have been signed by the governor. These will allow the parts of town that were previously exclusionary to house many more people, including families with school age children (exclusionary means it was impossible for many, if not most people to buy or rent in these neighborhoods, because there were too few units, they were on huge lots and they were too expensive). This, without a doubt, does mean CCUSD will be welcoming a growing population of students, perhaps well beyond the 7000-ish we’ve educated for almost the last two decades. And what a joy it will be to produce even more stewards of the earth, citizens of this great world, changemakers, scholars, friends.
However, some folks have expressed reasonable concern about our school facilities and their capacity for a growing student body. Indeed, 62% of our structures are more than 50 years old. Even without a growing population, we are in dire need. How will we ever support enhancements and new construction? Well, we won’t be able to without money. But with development comes funding for school modernization and building (a little more than $4 per residential square foot and a little less than $1 per commercial square foot. Both developer fee rates are set to increase in 2022). As our town, that has been at a stagnant population of 40K for the last 30 years slowly grows (thanks to these new senate bills as well as local, regional and statewide advocacy), so too will the district’s facilities budget get larger to support educating all the babies that come with the new tenants and homeowners (the developer fees will increase even more if our rate of housing construction actually becomes predictive of a rise in population).
So, when you see the fourplex in your neighborhood go up, or even better that 8-unit building close to the train and bus lines, let it please you. These are exciting times for The Heart of Screenland. Those developments will bring children for us to educate and send off to make the world a better place, as well as the dollars we need to do it with!
Dr. Kelly Kent
Governing Board Member, CCUSD
This position is the board member’s, not a reflection of the governing body’s.
Ms Kent, Miss Sugar and Spice and everything nice says let’s share our bounty with more people, so we can look and feel good about ourselves even though we turn our city into another version of Los Angeles and make our schools like those of the LAUSD.
I think Ms Kent has forgotten why Culver City has remained a small, independent city from Los Angeles for over 100 years? Culver City was designed to be a small enclave because it didn’t want to be like Los Angeles.
Ms Kent tells us we should happily kiss the idyllic city goodbye and leave the past that has attracted so many like-minded families to want to move into Culver City in the first place. She wants residents to embrace a progressive future even if it will totally change our city into just another cluttered section of Los Angeles with all its traffic and high-rise density.
Her progressive vision for our city sounds so innocently possible. Just like the beginning of a story written by Rod Serling for his anthology: The Twilight Zone. But, ultimately, we would lose our city and its idyllic, small city charm forever.
This progressive vision is a clear threat to our city’s future. If it is achieved, no one will be able to tell where Los Angeles ends and Culver City begins.
George Laase