The story of LA Southwest Middle College HS is literally covered in dirt--
The dirty buildings and classrooms of the early 1990s, the construction dirt that coated us for years while LA Southwest College was built up and we stayed in those dirty buildings, the pile of dirt and rubble to which our buildings were eventually reduced, the semester we spent on the 98th Street defunct elementary school which was coated with a layer of grime--probably from all the jet exhaust from the planes that landed over the campus. Then the piles that surrounded our new campus next to the 105 Freeway--those mountains of dirt that LAUSD officials assured us was, "Clean dirt."
And now, at last, our own mountains of dirt that are the beginnings of our new school building.
During the year of uncertainty--the 2004-05 school year, the year we all had to fight to keep Middle College open--some of us old-timers, especially Mr. Hajjar and Mr. Boucher, kept telling everyone about the building plans for our school, the ones the college had shown our principal and she had shown us back in the late 1990s. I remember Natalie Battersbee sitting behind her desk all smiles on a Friday afternoon faculty meeting--the kind during which we often argued and sometimes slept. Natalie, who had been married to an architect, rolled out those plans and showed them to us as if she'd drawn them. She asked us for suggestions, as if anyone would have listened to us.
In June of that year, as I recall, LASC made its annual change in leadership and the new president apparently dropped those plans.
Dr. Levy, who eventually presided over the attempted eviction of our high school from the LASC campus, said she knew nothing of any plans. She probably didn't. But that wasn't the point. What we were yelling about was that if there had been space for us six or seven years before, why not now?
The answer, we were told, was the discovery of more earthquake faults.
Now, five years later, somehow, earthquake faults and all, they found us a spot.
Guess where those old plans were going to put us?
Same place.
