PBS Newshour (4/12, Knapp) reports on its website that California investigative journalism group California Watch has released a report stating "that hundreds of California's public schools do not meet the legal construction codes for earthquake safety. In the On Shaky Ground multimedia series, investigative reporter Corey Johnson and the California Watch team lay out systematic failures in the construction and inspection of public schools. The three-part series shows that lax oversight of school construction, poor judgment in hiring building inspectors and inability for schools to access renovation funds have all contributed to the tens of thousands of public schools that fail to comply with the Field Act, which laid out building safety codes after 70 schools collapsed in a 1933 earthquake."
The San Francisco Chronicle (4/12, Johnson) publishes a California Watch article which reports that California "has made it virtually impossible for school districts to access a pot of money set aside for urgent seismic repairs on more than 7,500 school buildings that have been listed for nearly a decade as potentially unsafe." Noting that over the past five years, California has set aside billions of dollars for seismic repairs, the article adds that "As the Schwarzenegger administration decided how to dole out a limited amount of money, it worried about a rush on the funding" and therefore "set a high bar for schools to qualify. Instead of thousands of schools vying for the money, about three dozen buildings - at school districts in Alameda, San Benito, Humboldt, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Los Angeles counties - met the requirements."
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