Pasadena Schools Play Up Diversity to Lure Families

Pasadena public schools are wooing Ben and Colette Porter to enroll their children.

Parents of an infant and a 2-year-old, the Porters recently visited Madison Elementary School after receiving invitations to 32 campus open houses in the Pasadena district. Those receptions are part of a campaign to recruit middle- and upper-income and white families back to the public system, which has mainly black and Latino youngsters among its 23,200 students.

As the Porters, who are white, visited Madison, a children’s mariachi band played and Principal Sandra Macis welcomed them.

“We are revitalizing all of Pasadena Unified School District,” she said. Children “totally feel safe at this school. This school is wonderful.”

The Porters, however, are weighing the issues of public versus private schools carefully. They want their children in public schools because of the ethnic diversity and the free education, but worry about possible danger and academics that could be weaker than in private institutions.

“One of the biggest draws of public education for me is teaching children how to live in a diverse environment,” Colette Porter said. But, she added, the choice of school is a tough decision they have not yet made. “One of the things I worry about in big school systems are safety issues. Are the children going to feel safe and be safe?”

The Porters -- he is co-owner of a telecom analysis company and she is a manager for an affordable-housing agency -- both attended public schools on the East Coast. They said they felt social pressure in Pasadena to bypass public schools.

For example, when acquaintances at cocktail parties find out that she’s looking at public schools, Colette Porter said, they ask: “Are you kidding?”

Over his four years as Pasadena schools chief, Supt. Percy Clark has launched several efforts to change such attitudes and attract families back to public schools: magnet programs, full-day kindergarten and an open enrollment program in which parents can apply to have their children attend any district school. Principals and teachers offer open houses, provide campus tours and host coffee talks.

At a time when most California schools have abandoned integration efforts, Clark said his district was trying to bring the “poor, middle class and rich together.”

So far, the district has had some scattered successes, but there is a long way to go.

The public schools swayed MaryAlice Raabe. She enrolled her first-grader last year in Willard Elementary, a 732-student campus where test scores have risen three years in a row. Its hallways are decorated with photos of children in kimonos, sombreros and Chinese gowns. Her daughter’s best friends now include African American, Ethiopian, Filipino and Russian children.

“The diversity our kids are going to be exposed to, you can’t beat it,” Raabe said. “They have to live in this world and, as educated middle-class families, we owe it not to bail out and go to private schools.”

In 1970, Pasadena became the first district outside the South to be forced by a federal court order to bus students for racial balance. At that time, white students made up a little more than half of the enrollment. But since then, many have fled to private schools, and they now account for about 16%, even though they constitute 53% of the city’s population. In the schools, Latinos make up 54%; African Americans, 26%; Asians, 3%.

The district was released from the court order at the end of 1979 and participated in voluntary desegregation until Clark abolished the busing program in 2002. The move did not shift racial balances, but it fit Clark’s plan to make the district more attractive to families who could afford private schools. Recent research has shown that 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared deliberately segregated schools unconstitutional, many California campuses are still racially isolated.

UCLA education professor Jeannie Oakes, who studies educational equality, praised Pasadena Unified as one of the few districts in California going against the grain in seeking to integrate more. “There’s a spirit there that keeps saying: We want to do this for our kids and our schools,” she said.

Lourdes Anderson, a mother of three Pasadena children, turned down public kindergarten at San Rafael Elementary School for her son last year after she reviewed a copy of test scores and was not happy with them. The campus was rated at 4 -- on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest -- on the state Academic Performance Index.

She enrolled him instead at St. Philip the Apostle School in Pasadena, along with her 9-year-old, who already attended the Catholic institution. Anderson and her husband like the religious basis but also would like to save money.

This year, they enrolled their 4-year-old daughter in kindergarten at San Rafael after meeting the school staff. “It seems to be OK,” Anderson said. But she added, “I am a little uneasy.”

Pasadena Unified officials insist that their schools are safe, and point to rising test scores as proof of improving academics.

“I want a school with the same values, morally and educationally,” Anderson said, also stressing that she had concerns about safety in public schools. For these reasons, the couple decided that they would transfer their daughter to private school after kindergarten.

Fran Scoble, head of the Westridge School for girls in Pasadena and who sits on the board of the National Assn. of Independent Schools, said the district’s advertising efforts had not dented private school enrollment.

“We actually consider us far more in competition with other private schools than we do with the public schools,” she said. Westridge enrolls 500 students, she said, and “we’re full.”

Although attracting middle- and upper-income families to public schools is not easy and the ethnic composition of the district has not changed significantly, some parents are jumping on board.

When open enrollment began in 2003, 28% of applicants were from neighborhoods where the median family income was $69,000 to $110,000, according to district ZIP Code records and U.S. census data. In 2004, that has increased to about 30%.

A rise in kindergarten applicants also indicates that more families are choosing Pasadena Unified, officials said. The district received 627 open-enrollment applications for kindergarten in 2003, and 738 in 2004, an 18% increase even as the size of that age group declined.

Several months ago, Brence Culp -- whose two toddlers have not yet reached kindergarten age -- helped form a group of more than 100 parents from Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre, communities that are within the district boundaries.

Members of that Pasadena Education Network have been observing public school classrooms, meeting school board members and interviewing principals.

They also have teamed up with the superintendent, persuading him to appoint a liaison between prospective parents and the district.

Pasadena Unified “has got some terrific principals, and you can tell when you walk into those schools,” Culp said.

She and her husband said they had decided to enroll their children, ages 1 and 3, in the district after visiting a handful of public and private campuses.

“I’m looking forward to participating in a renaissance of the schools,” said Culp, who is mainly attracted to them because of the diversity. “I think it’s already happening.”