OLG School to add new facilities
Our Lady of Guadalupe School is planning new construction on its east Hermosa campus to provide additional classroom and administrative space.
The plans received tentative approval from the Hermosa Beach Planning Commission last week. The school, which serves 257 students in preschool through eighth grade and is overseen by the neighboring church of the same name, is not planning to expand enrollment, and agreed to a condition capping future enrollment at 280 students as part of the commission’s approval.
The condition was key in reassuring commissioners that the addition would not aggravate traffic and parking issues in the neighborhood.
“We are very near our limit. There is no intention to double the size of the school or add additional grades,” said school principal April Beuder.
Instead, school officials said the expansion is necessary to ameliorate existing facilities issues. Rick Lopez, the project manager for the planned upgrades who is also a parishioner at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, said that the school currently lacks dedicated conference rooms, tutoring space, a health office, and a copy room.
Jimi Hazen, a music teacher at the school, said that there is no space for storage of instruments in the music instruction room. So, Hazen said, every time students practice the ukulele, they have to spend time at the beginning of class grabbing the instruments from a closet, and at the end putting them away. He estimated that these tasks can take up as much as 15 minutes of a 50-minute period.
“We just need the space so we can take our kids to the next level,” Hazen said.
The school and church, which share a city-approved parking plan, fall short of the number of spaces required by the city code. Based on a formula that considers the type of use and the square footage, the school and church would need to provide 225 spaces; they currently have 134, and would provide 139 under the plans, including eight “tandem” spots set aside for teachers.
As is permitted under the municipal code, the school seeks to proceed with the lower number by submitting an analysis showing it will not negatively impact the neighborhood. The analysis, done by a consultant hired by the school, argued that the church and school tend to draw people at different times. Although the church does offer a daily mass at 8 a.m. that overlaps with the school drop-off time, weekend services are more popular.
A city review concurred with the consultant’s analysis, though not all residents did.
“It is a mess for an hour and 15 minutes every Monday through Friday,” said Treva McCarthy, who lives nearby. “There is already not enough room.”
But Commissioner Peter Hoffman pointed out that irritation from parking and traffic is inevitable in a city as dense as Hermosa, especially one with cut-through streets like Prospect Avenue, which runs alongside the school. East Hermosa residents have been complaining in recent years about both speeding and increased traffic on Prospect, suspecting that people are using it as an alternative to Pacific Coast Highway. But, short of “putting up a gate at the border with Redondo [Beach],” Hoffman joked, those conditions will be there regardless of whether the project is approved.
Construction is expected to begin when the school closes for the summer in June, and should take eight to nine months, said Lopez, the project manager. Our Lady of Guadalupe may cancel summer school in 2019, and hopes to complete foundation digging and other heavy work by the time classes resume in the fall.