Re “Burroughs Middle School opens new classroom building,” Oct. 16 issue

Thank you for publishing this update on the massive boondoggle of the Burroughs Middle School modernization. Please note that LAUSD has not been truthful with the community from Day One and has repeatedly given false information to you and the general public.

The first meeting for the Burroughs Middle School Project Advisory Group was on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2016, in the Burroughs Middle School Library, and the initial projection for the entire capital budget was $107 million dollars, significantly [less] than the $277 million you have reported. For those readers who have gone to LAUSD in the last 20 years, that’s a 158.9% budget overrun. As you reported, this is an “important milestone,” yet students are still in modular classroom buildings and the project is still ongoing. Are we to even believe that it will be completed in the middle of 2027 as last we were told?

It will have been a dozen years of consultants, bond executives, architects, administrators all getting hefty fees building a monstrosity that wasn’t needed. John Burroughs was designed in 1924 for 400 students. There are currently barely 85,000 middle school students in the whole district, which has 77 middle schools, and city planners expect a 30% decrease in enrollment by 2030. The LAUSD construction industrial complex is burning through billions knowing that L.A.’s birthrates and out migration are precipitously dropping kids under the age of 15.

Instead of years of construction with kids exposed to asbestos, particulate matter and construction noise, LAUSD could have closed John Burroughs Middle School for one year and two summers and renovated the historic original building to accommodate 1,200 students for one-third the cost. They could have used the other $200 million to renovate numerous other schools in the district.

Dr. Howard C. Mandel

president emeritus

Los Angeles City Health Commission