PTAs Go All-Out to Lure Students Back to the Public Schools

This year, the Woodland Hills Elementary School PTA wanted to invite some new faces to the school’s April Open House. The object: to encourage parents with students in private schools to enroll their children at the public school.

So PTA members drafted a letter that enumerated some of the school’s programs--a school orchestra, a speech skills program, a computer lab for all fourth- and fifth-graders--and added a special invitation to parents of private school students to come to the open house.

As an added incentive, if a private school parent missed the Tuesday evening affair, the PTA designated Wednesday as “Visitation Day.” Any parent curious about the school, classroom conditions or the educational program could come and take a look while school was in session.

To get the invitations out, Woodland Hills Elementary students took handfuls of flyers home with them and stuffed the one-page notices into mailboxes as they walked down the quiet suburban streets off Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

Hit by ‘White Flight’

The enrollment effort at Woodland Hills Elementary is representative of student recruitment drives at a number of schools south of Ventura Boulevard. These schools, more than others in the San Fernando Valley, were hit hardest by “white flight” caused by busing, a decline in the birth rate and inflated housing prices that kept families with children out of the area.

Six schools are actively involved in recruiting: Lanai Road Elementary in Encino, Woodland Hills Elementary, Nestle Avenue in Tarzana, Sherman Oaks Elementary, Calabash Street in Woodland Hills and Studio City’s Carpenter Avenue.

Altruism and a belief in the public school system motivate some involved in the grassroots campaign. But many parents realize as well that a school with a large, stable enrollment has less chance of being considered for closure than a school that the Board of Education believes is “underenrolled.” Schools with sizable enrollments also get more money for special programs.

“We all know people who would send their children to public schools if they knew what public schools are doing,” said Julie Simpliciano, president of the Parent Teachers Assn. at Calabash Street School. “We are just trying to get the message out in a concise, clear and organized manner.”

Preschools Targeted

To do this, the parents distributed brochures that spotlight school programs to homes, businesses and public libraries in the hope that interested parents would read the literature and visit the school. They have lobbied merchants to place signs about the schools in store windows.

They have targeted neighborhood preschools as fertile ground to recruit new students. Pamphlets and flyers about neighborhood schools are left at day-care centers. Evening meetings are set up so that preschool parents can meet the principal, teachers and parents from the neighborhood school.

Even the playground fair, with its carnival booths and cotton candy, has been turned into a recruiting mechanism. When Carpenter held its fair recently, guided tours of the library, the computer laboratory and other points of interest were available to parents of private-school students. Teachers also were there to answer questions.

And when the Sherman Oaks Parents Assn. held its second annual school fair on Sunday to raise money for an after-school enrichment program, called “Super School,” classroom tours and teachers were available for private and preschool parents.

Many of the parents acknowledge that selling their neighbors on public schools can be an uphill battle.

“There’s a certain ‘south of the boulevard’ snobbishness,” said James Neagle, a member of Parents for Carpenter. “Here, the question isn’t, ‘Are you going to send your child to private school?’ Rather it is, ‘What private school are you going to send your child to?’ ”

To combat neighborhood elitism, the recruiters make sure that all brochures about their schools describe the computer labs, the after-school enrichment programs, the extended day-care services, the drug resistance education classes, the on-site psychologists, the tutoring programs, the strong showing on standardized tests and the ethnic and economic diversity at each campus.

“There isn’t anything the private school can offer that we don’t offer,” said Anice Luftig of the Lanai Road school.

Private Schools’ Opinion

Administrators at Valley private schools are aware of the public school recruiters but say the movement has not significantly lowered enrollment or decreased the number of inquiries about their schools.

“We have not seen any impact on our enrollment,” said Carolyn Getz, director of the Riveroaks School, a private coeducational elementary school in Sherman Oaks where tuition ranges from $2,675 to $2,950 a year. “If our parents look elsewhere at all, 95% are investigating other private schools.”

“My personal feeling is the role of the public and private school should not be an either/or situation,” said Chris Holabird, director of the Los Encinos School in Encino. “As independent schools, we have the opportunity to do things that public schools have difficulty doing because of funding problems and the bureaucracy.”

Once Anti-Busing Center

The San Fernando Valley’s public-school recruiting movement has developed in the area that once was the heart of the Los Angeles anti-busing movement and around schools where enrollments were riddled by white flight.

For example, in 1977, the year before mandatory busing began, 581 students attended Sherman Oaks Elementary School. In 1981, the first year after the end of busing, attendance at Sherman Oaks sank to 293 students. This fall, Sherman Oaks’ enrollment has climbed back up to 436.

PTA membership was battered by the busing controversy as well. The year before mandatory busing, the 31st PTA District, which includes all of the San Fernando Valley, had 100,881 members. In 1981, the district had only 56,616 members; this year its membership has grown to 76,526.

Many Activists Lost

“Busing scared the hell out of a lot of people and, when they left, we lost of lot of the activists,” said Margaret Pollack, who is involved in the Sherman Oaks Parents Assn., an auxiliary group with Sherman Oaks Elementary School. “That’s who we’re looking at. The parents who left the public schools may now be thinking of coming back.”

Although parents say they are cognizant of the benefits that larger public school enrollments can bring, these are not the only reasons for their recruiting work.

“Almost all of the parents of our generation, and by that I mean parents between the ages of 30 to 40 years old, went to public schools and had good experiences,” said Neagle of Parents for Carpenter.

“We want to re-create that experience for our children, and to do that we just have to get involved.”

Friendships Developed

For Barry Pollack, a member of the Sherman Oaks Parents Assn., an unexpected outgrowth of his involvement has been friendships with adults who have children about the same age as his children.

“I guess you could find a type of camaraderie at a racquetball club, but it just isn’t the same,” Pollack said.

In the upcoming months, many of the parent groups want to use more sophisticated techniques to get the word out on the neighborhood schools. The Sherman Oaks Parents Assn. would like to use direct mail next year, and their targets, according to Margaret Pollack, are parents with children “at Buckley and Oakwood” types of exclusive schools. Other groups are thinking about taking out advertisements in local newspapers.