Remember all that holler a couple months back by parents of students in Huntington Beach's Ocean View School District? School buildings that had undergone asbestos removal and then received clean bills of health were still causing children to get sick, the parents swore, forcing the district to spend $8 million on remediation at three campuses.
Well guess what? The district reportedly says it is so strapped for cash that it can't afford surveillance cameras to stem a spate of recent school burglaries and that it may have to sell some of its properties to avoid bankruptcy.
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NBC4 reports that Ocean View did not spend $165,000 that had been budgeted for security cameras due to the cash shortfall caused by the additional asbestos work, which also required another $50,000 to bus students to different campuses.
Since November, five Ocean View schools have been burglarized of such items as music instruments, projectors and laptops, and to hear assistant superintendent Roni Ellis tell it, help is not on the way as they are bracing for more break-ins.
Why?
“This district is on the verge of insolvency if we don't come up with a plan to take care of an $8 million deficit we have,” Ellis tells the TV news crew.
Thus, Ocean View may sell some properties, including the district offices. Hope they're asbestos-free!
*The original photo with this post depicted the administrative office of the wrong Ocean View School District. The Weekly regrets the error and thanks those helpful folks who pointed that out to us.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.