Schools Reaching Out to Bring Students, Parents Into the Fold

The October PTA meeting of John F. Kennedy High School in Granada Hills was held in an unusual location: 25 miles away from the campus in a vocational center in a tough urban neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles.

The session, held for parents whose children ride the bus to Kennedy under the Los Angeles School District’s Permit With Transportation program, was one of the clearest examples of how PWT has become institutionalized in the San Fernando Valley.

Almost all Valley campuses--153 of 172--receive PWT students. At the average junior or senior high school “receiving” school, PWT students constitute 25.7% of the student body, according to the school district’s most recent figures. At Kennedy, for example, PWT students make up 24% of the high school’s enrollment of 2,500.

Overall, one in eight public school students in the Valley--19,816--come to school as part of the program. At some schools, PWT students make up as much as 30% to 44% of the enrollment.

The ratio of PWT students to resident students has changed dramatically because PWT’s steady growth paralleled a decline in resident student enrollment. The decrease in number of resident students was caused by falling birthrates and the absence of students who were taken out of the public system during the battle over the district’s mandatory busing program.

To the public, the most visible evidence of the voluntary desegregation is the stream of orange buses coming across the Sepulveda and Cahuenga passes. But the buses are only part of a network that seeks to provide PWT students and their parents with equal access to all academic and extracurricular programs. For example:

Prospective PWT students and their parents are often provided bus transportation to Valley schools before the beginning of the fall term so they can experience the bus ride, tour the campus and meet school administrators.

Special buses pick up PWT students one or two hours after school so they can participate in after-school activities ranging from high school football to Cub Scout meetings.

One-hundred-seventy-five bus aides ride to and from school with the students and remain on the “receiver” campuses as support personnel. Each school also has an on-campus coordinator, usually a teacher or administrator, to meet buses, handle any problem that arises from the ride and make sure school officials are notified if a bus is late.

If a PWT child gets sick during the school day and needs to be taken home, the school district provides cars driven by Valley-based PWT liaison personnel. The cars and drivers can also be used to pick up parents from their jobs and take them to Valley schools for emergency meetings with teachers.

Finally, as in the case of Kennedy High, some Valley schools, including a third of the high schools, are scheduling PTA meetings in Los Angeles neighborhoods to encourage parents of PWT students to participate in school organizations.

“We’re going to have these kinds of meetings in this area more often because I can see that the demand is there,” said Jerry Trapp, Kennedy’s administrative dean, after more than 40 black and Latino parents attended the downtown meeting.

The process by which Los Angeles minority students decide to attend Valley schools under the PWT program begins in the spring.

Each year, every student in the school district receives a pamphlet that describes a variety of desegregation programs in the district.

The major programs are PWT, which matches specific suburban and inner-city schools and appeals to parents who want their children to attend integrated schools, and “magnet schools,” which offer specialized instructional curriculums.

Both programs are open to any student in the district, providing that the transfer improves a school’s racial balance, although some magnet programs have academic prerequisites.

By the end of May. The district informs parents and students if they have been admitted to PWT or the magnet school program

Newly enrolled PWT students are assigned to a school either in the Valley, the Westside or the Harbor areas of Los Angeles. The district’s largest PWT receiving area is the southern part of the Valley, from the Santa Monica Mountains to Roscoe Boulevard.

Once a student has entered a voluntary integration program, he or she is considered a member of that school and, upon graduation, goes on to the next Valley school along with resident students. PWT students do not have to reapply each year or reapply on graduation.

Tradition, more than anything else, now governs the “receiver school” that a PWT student will attend. When the program began in 1973, Valley and Westside schools were matched with schools in the Valley, mid-Wilshire, southern and eastern portion of Los Angeles. The matching of receiver schools and “sending areas” was based on distance and in some cases the ethnic makeup of both schools.

Over the ensuing years, even after the mandatory reassignment program was ended, many of these matchups endured. Today, some Valley schools and Los Angeles sending areas have had 11-year relationships. The brothers and sisters of students who were among the first PWT students to go to Valley schools are now following in their siblings’ footsteps.

About four-fifths of PWT students enroll in grades 7-12. In interviews of parents whose children are involved in the PWT program, most said they were more comfortable sending their children to schools 20-30 miles away when they were entering adolescence.

During the 1983 fiscal year, the school district spent $31.5 million on PWT and the remnants of its mandatory reassignment program, $26.7 million of it for transportation costs. Other costs included salaries for bus-riding aides, educational aides and special counselors. The district also gives a receiving school $50 for each PWT pupil. The school then sets up its own budget for programs and services for its PWT students.

Money for the PWT program comes from the school district’s general revenue fund. The state also pays part of the bill because the district is required to run the desegregation program under a state Supreme Court ruling.

How the Feeder System Works Certain neighborhoods of Los Angeles are designated to “feed” various attendance areas of the valley. In this example, which uses the Canoga Park High School attendance area, Permit With Transportation students from portions of South-Central Los Angeles and Hollywood feed into the network of West Valley junior high schools that, in turn, sends students to Canoga Park High. Most of the students enroll in the program while they are in junior high school. Some enroll while still in elementary grades (not shown in this diagram) or as late as high school.