Firefighters Demand Safer Exits for Students

Los Angeles fire officials say they will begin citing city schools for potential hazards posed by security grilles permanently bolted over the windows of portable classrooms with one door.

A provision of the state’s health and safety code requires at least one breakaway grille in classrooms that have all the windows barred and only one door leading outside or to an evacuation hallway. The requirement is intended to give students a second way out if the door is blocked or jammed during an earthquake or fire.

Yet Los Angeles Fire Department officials admit that they haven’t been enforcing the provision, which became effective in April 1998, because they didn’t know it existed.

“We just missed it,” said Battalion Chief Michael Bowers, who is in charge of the department’s public safety section.

Now, however, Bowers said he has instructed inspectors on the church and school safety unit to begin writing up Los Angeles Unified schools for grille-related code violations as they conduct their regularly scheduled walk-throughs.

“We’re going to put them [inspectors] on a heightened state of awareness, but I don’t have the personnel to flood the school district” with extra inspections, he said.

News of the impending crackdown took school district officials by surprise late Friday. “We have not been contacted,” said Beth Louargand, the district’s facilities director.

But Louargand added that the sprawling urban district is already committed to installing breakaway screens in one-door portables and is taking a count to see how many need to be retrofitted. Of the district’s 4,400 portables, about 1,700 have only one door, she said.

“We don’t think we have a major problem, and we’ll know more when we survey the schools to see how many portables need to be retrofitted,” she said.

The security grilles have been a source of controversy for some time.

Plagued by vandalism and break-ins, schools have been clamoring for the screens as protection for their classrooms. The district, flush with money from the Proposition BB bond issue, has been rushing to oblige.

But teachers and parents have complained that the grilles create potential firetraps. As a result, the school board passed a March 1998 policy calling for at least one window in every one-door classroom to have an inside latch to open the grille. The district set aside an extra $500,000 to conduct a retrofit program.

That decision, officials say, has forced the district to double back and retrofit 42 of the 102 schools that received grilles under the Proposition BB push. Each window costs $750 to retrofit. Grilles installed since March 1998 include an inside latch in every classroom, said district officials.

The district stepped up its retrofit program two months ago after county fire inspectors--who regulate the 25% of L.A. Unified schools outside the city of Los Angeles--wrote up a few safety code violations for portables with grilles, even if the rooms had a second door.

About the same time, a school activist alerted city fire inspectors about the safety code provision, said Bowers.

Before that, his inspectors had relied on state building code charts that only require two exits for classrooms containing 50 people or more.

Since portables almost always hold fewer people, he said, inspectors considered a single outside door to be sufficient and paid no heed to the grilles over the windows, which they didn’t consider legal exits.

“To be honest with you, we hadn’t recognized the portables as classrooms as such,” Bowers said.

Although Bowers said his staff will now write misdemeanor citations, he downplayed the potential hazards, pointing out that although portables are widely used throughout the state, no student has died in a school fire.

“Yes, they’re dangerous, but again . . . we’ve had them for quite a while and we haven’t had anything happen in them,” he said.

That was of little comfort Friday to Louise Varjian, a first-grade teacher at Valley View Elementary School in Hollywood. She has been teaching for two years in a portable with permanent window grilles that district officials say meets the code because the room has two doors--one leading to the outside, the other into an adjacent classroom.

All the same, Varjian said, she and her class of 19 students are “terrified” about what would happen in an emergency. She said she’s been begging with no results for the district to install a screen with an inside latch.

So just in case, she keeps a 3-foot-long bolt-cutter in her desk.

“I probably won’t be able to use the bolt-cutters to cut open the grill in time,” said Varjian, adding the tool came from a parent. “It would be a slow process and it’s heavy. But I’m going to use them if I need them. It’s better to have them than to have nothing.”

Board member Julie Korenstein, the most vocal advocate for breakaway grills, said Friday that she was “very, very much relieved” by the Fire Department’s change of heart on portables but shocked by its admission that it didn’t know about the safety code provision until now.

“They didn’t know?” she said. “That’s scary. . . . We need those people who enforce it to let us know.”