[Editor’s Note: Culver Park High School series starts tomorrow.]
It is appropriate that on one of the happiest mornings in modern Culver City times – the double-tiered arrival of the train, at 9 a.m. and at 12 noon – we remember, sadly, the least among us.
My candidate: The wretchedly unlucky students of Culver Park High School.
Because they attend a lowly – hide the silverware – continuation school, the image-minded decision-makers in the School District have told them:
“Ya bother me, kids. Go play in traffic.”
Old-fashioned, homegrown class warfare.
Quite against their will, the 80 students and four teachers of Culver Park High School are being fast-shuffled out of their historic home on the El Marino Language School campus and into a gritty backwater parking lot adjacent to Farragut Elementary.
Why?
To clear room for El Marino kindergarten classes.
The often vulnerable boys and girls of Culver Park are no strangers to wounded feelings.
You may remember the flap of some months ago over not being invited to a prom.
Without fanfare – that would be embarrassing for the august educators of the School District and the School Board who have committed a colossal fumble – Culver Park’s students are being hustled out the back door.
You know, the same way you would dump your smelly, alcoholic uncle into the basement when prestigious company is arriving.
Hopefully, before anyone notices the shabby treatment.
I believe the District’s proud two-tiered commitment is to educate the prestigious children and to allow continuation school students to fend for themselves. They are not going anywhere anyway.
I hear the District has been thoughtful enough to ship a carload of empty boxes to the Culver Park – oops, El Marino – campus accompanied by a terse warning, “Try not to cause a disturbance.”
“Sensitivity” is not the middle name of the School Board or the School District.
My final question: What on earth are they going to do with the handsome stone sign sculpture that greets visitors to “Culver Park High School”?
Wonder how that smart piece of art will look in the cheesy parking lot they have been ordered to call home.
That is what I would do – call home and see if my parents could find a real school I could attend in September.
