More than $73 million was spent making Los Angeles Unified campuses safer this school year. But it's the $300,000 that \o7wasn't \f7spent on Nobel Middle School that makes students and teachers on the Northridge campus feel secure.
While other schools lined up for money for guards and gates, Nobel -- unfenced for 44 years -- turned back a plan this spring to surround the school with a security fence.
The rejection has some school board members shaking their heads. The district lists Nobel as the only unfenced campus among its 550 schools.
"Sure, the neighborhood around the school is very nice, very safe," said Donna Smith, an aide to school board member Jon Lauritzen, who proposed the fence. "But would you leave your nice Jaguar unlocked on the street all night? I doubt it. We live in the real world.... Very bad people come through very nice communities too."
But fences are for locking students in, as well as strangers out.
At Nobel, the students "don't feel like it's a prison," Principal Robert Coburn said. "They feel like we trust them ... and they are very, very proud of that."
More than 600 students wrote letters and circulated petitions opposing the proposed fence. Teachers and parents also protested. It's not just about aesthetics, they said, but also about the notion that freedom promotes responsibility, and students rise to the challenge.
The 20-acre campus -- in an upper-middle class neighborhood along a busy thoroughfare, midway between a freeway exit and a shopping mall -- has for years been a shining light in a district under fire for its foundering middle schools.
It has the highest test scores of any district middle school, even though half of its 2,200 students are bused in from other neighborhoods -- some to attend the school's math and science magnet and others to get away from crowded inner-city schools. Its attendance record is always among the district's best and there is little crime or vandalism.
Still, district officials are not entirely comfortable with the open campus. "We understand why they like it the way it is," Smith said. "But the safety and welfare of students and employees is a primary responsibility of the district."
Smith is a former principal of nearby Chatsworth High School, which added a wrought-iron fence around its campus a decade ago. "We loved the feeling of the open campus too," she said. "But kids would come over from other schools and cause problems: fights, graffiti.... We realized we couldn't be out there all the time, supervising every corner."
