The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the U.S. with 750,000 students, had literally run out of space and couldn't figure out how to accommodate its exploding school-age population. The symbol of the district's failure was backpack-laden kindergartners boarding banana-colored buses shortly after dawn for the long ride to schools far from home.
When LAUSD did try to catch up, much went wrong. Perhaps most infamous is its Belmont Learning Complex, an $87-million high school facility partially built on a site later found to be fouled with methane and chemicals. The incomplete structure was abandoned in January 2000. Neither the public nor the press believed the district could be an effective builder. The same problems that plagued LAUSD operationsa large, unresponsive bureaucracy and a highly politicized school boardseemed likely to doom its major construction program as well.