Students Are Returning to Roomier, Cooler Classes : Education: Three new campuses, and renovations including air conditioning, await as Valley pupils prepare for start of school.

With a rapidly increasing student population, Los Angeles Unified School District officials are welcoming three new San Fernando Valley schools for the 1999-2000 school year while finishing last-minute preparations for the back-to-school rush.

Although one of the new schools will be delayed for a month, officials said they expect Valley schools to open Wednesday and next week with few or no glitches. The past week has been frenetic, with workers painting buildings, laying down asphalt and installing air-conditioning units and portable classrooms.

“We have the green light for opening day,” said Bruce Takeguma, an assistant director of the district’s school management services.

And unlike previous years, when students sweated through the first month of school, district officials estimated that all but a dozen or so Valley classrooms will have air conditioning, with every classroom to be cooled by 2000.

Most of the 708,000 students enrolled in Los Angeles Unified--10,800 more than last year--begin the fall semester Wednesday or Sept. 14, depending on the school’s calendar.

Thousands of students on multitrack, year-round campuses, many concentrated in the East Valley, started in early July.

As the district installed portable classrooms throughout the Valley, administrators expressed excitement last week over the opening of the three new schools--one elementary and two primary centers. Besides providing relief from overcrowding, “the schools are clean and all fixed up,” Takeguma said.

In Reseda, fewer children will be bused to schools outside their neighborhoods when Newcastle Avenue Elementary School reopens Wednesday with an estimated 350 children in kindergarten through fifth grade.

Now renovated, with more modern electrical wiring, classrooms painted in light blue and a play yard of Bermuda grass, Newcastle, opened in 1953, was one of 22 schools the district closed in the early 1980s because of low enrollment.

The surge in student population has hit the Valley particularly hard as the economy has boomed and more families moved into the area after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Adding to the crunch in classroom space is the district’s class size reduction program, which mandates a maximum student-teacher ratio in kindergarten through third grade of 20 to 1.

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To accommodate the younger students, the district will open Monroe and Valerio primary centers, brightly colored mini-campuses. District officials said Monroe Primary Center in Panorama City will open Sept. 14, on schedule, with 220 kindergartners and first-graders.

However, the 300 students enrolled at the Valerio Primary Center in Van Nuys will be temporarily housed until late October at the adjacent Valerio Street Elementary School.

Environmental testing of the soil turned up traces of arsenic, prompting construction delays. Taken mostly as a precaution, soil samples found safe levels of arsenic, a metallic carcinogen which occurs naturally and is common in Southern California soil.

“[The tests] slowed us down a bit,” said Rob Robinson, a program manager for Proposition BB, the $2.4 billion school repair and improvement bond measure approved by district voters in spring 1997. “The good news is [Valerio] is safe.”

Fulton Middle School in Van Nuys was one of several Valley schools expanding last week as workers installed six portable classrooms. Although the extra space offers some relief from crowding, Principal Rudolf Papilion estimated the school will soon reach its capacity of 2,200 students, possibly this year.

He estimated that the school will enroll about 2,069 students--up from 1,820 last year. “It’s a guessing game,” Papilion said.

What isn’t a guess, he said, is the student boom in Valley schools. “It keeps growing.”