'Is My School Safe?' San Leandro Unified Says “Yes”

If the big one hits, are San Leandro schools safe?

That's one question that will likely be on the minds of parents here and statewide as they read the results of a 19-month California Watch investigation released Thursday. The series, which will be published in various media outlets over the next few days, uncovered holes in the state's enforcement of seismic safety regulations for public schools. 

The says it took measures to make sure school buildings were safe long before other districts were even thinking about it.

“We’ve been very proactive at the district around disaster preparedness,” said Gerhard Grotke, principal of and former disaster preparedness coordinator for the district.  

Still, no one’s completely safe in the seismic Bay Area.

An interactive map developed by California Watch shows local schools located within a ¼-mile of an earthquake-related hazard (near a fault line or landslide zone, for example), and schools with potentially dangerous seismic hazards based on two sets of state data.

Not surprisingly, all of San Leandro’s schools are located within an earthquake hazard zone. All or nearly all of the city of San Leandro is located within a liquefaction zone, in which a violent earthquake could loosen water-saturated soil, essentially turning that soil into quicksand.

The map also identifies four San Leandro schools that appear in two databases: one that includes schools with building projects that never received a final safety certification from the Division of the State Architect (DSA), the state entity that oversees school construction projects; and one that includes schools deemed as requiring a detailed seismic evaluation under a 2002 report by the state Department of General Services. 

No schools in the San Lorenzo Unified School District that are located in San Leandro were identified on the map as listed in either database.

The data, however, is messy and difficult to equate with information provided by the San Leandro Unified School District, which insists all its schools are seismically sound.

One school, James Madison Elementary, appears on the map as having a building project that never received final safety certification from the DSA. However, the school district provided documentation indicating that the building project was officially cancelled in February 2011.

Michael Murphy, director of bond projects for the district, said the building referred to in the database is the portable occupied by the federally funded Head Start preschool program. No building project was ever carried out by the district on the portable, he said, and its inclusion in the database appears to be out-of-date.

The three other schools – , and schools — appear on the map as requiring a detailed seismic evaluation based on the 2002 state report, called Seismic Safety Inventory of California Public Schools. That report was a requirement of Assembly Bill 300, authored by Senator Ellen Corbett, which mandated an inventory of all California public schools built before 1978.

Murphy provided letters from the district indicating that seismic upgrades had been completed at all three schools and signed off on by the DSA.

Patch has included all of the letters provided by the district with this article.

The discrepancy between the district’s information and the state’s data compiled by California Watch appears to be a paperwork issue. In 2008, the Division of the State Architect sent lists to school districts of their buildings deemed a potential risk under AB300, according to Eric Lamoureux, spokesperson for the DSA.

He said the DSA was trying to get districts to notify the state if they had completed retrofits on those buildings.

Murphy said San Leandro Unified may have received such a request, but may not have bothered to respond because “we knew in our hearts we had done it all.” He also cited mounds of paperwork related to building projects, and minimal staffing at the district.

In fact, San Leandro Unified began retrofitting its schools to improve seismic safety years before AB300 was passed. In 1997, local voters approved a $53.8 million school facilities improvement bond, Measure A, and leveraged another $33 million in matching funds from the state.

Measure A paid for a district-wide seismic study and a number of health and safety upgrades, including seismic retrofits at nine schools, and voluntary seismic upgrades at Roosevelt Elementary School and Bancroft and Muir middle schools.

Senator Corbett said she was inspired to author AB300 based on her experience as a San Leandro city council member and mayor who worked closely with the school district.

“San Leandro city and San Leandro school district have been very much in the forefront of disaster preparedness and ensuring that things were seismically safe,” Corbett said.

Murphy, the director of bond projects, said the DSA may have cast too wide a net in its survey of potentially vulnerable buildings, not taking into account seismic retrofit work that had already been done or was in the works.

“It’s like pink-slipping all the teachers in a district just to be fair,” he said. “And that's not fair to the people who have done all the work.”

This story was produced using data provided to Patch by California Watch, the state's largest investigative reporting team and part of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Read more about Patch's collaboration with California Watch.