OAKWOOD : A trailer serves as an auditorium. Classrooms are so cramped that students must attend some classes in a church across the street. Gym classes are conducted in public parks. So why do parents spend up to $7,000 a year to send their children to the Oakwood School in North Hollywood?

Rosie Dochtermann and her husband, Rudy, spend almost $13,000 a year to send their two children to Oakwood School in North Hollywood. Rosie recalled the day that she gave her mother a tour of the facilities.

“My mother couldn’t believe it. She looked around and said, ‘You’re paying how much for this? ‘ “

Although Oakwood has gained a reputation as one of the San Fernando Valley’s most prestigious private schools, its students must attend classes at a cramped, divided campus in North Hollywood. The rooms are tiny--some classes are held in a nearby church--and a converted trailer serves as an auditorium.

School officials have been trying to move their campus from its current location--the lower campus is on Moorpark Street, half a mile from the secondary school on Magnolia Boulevard--to a 17-acre site in the rural hills of Calabasas, but that effort has thrown Oakwood into the middle of a bitter community dispute.

Some Calabasas residents are fighting the new campus. It would be built over the community’s last pumpkin patch--Calabasas is Spanish for pumpkin--and opponents say it would further erode their neighborhood’s fast-disappearing rural character.

Some Favor Relocation

Other residents are hoping to bring the school to Calabasas. They say they want a top-ranked private institution at their end of the Valley.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has stepped in to referee the dispute and is scheduled to make a decision in August.

Meanwhile, parents from all over the Valley are still standing in line--and paying up to $7,000 a year--to get their children into Oakwood, no matter what the campus looks like. Beau Bridges, Henry Winkler, Frank Zappa and Mick Fleetwood send their children to the school. Kindergarten classes typically have 120 or more applicants for 26 openings.

“Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it until I talk to parents at other schools,” said Dochtermann of North Hollywood. “Then I know it is because the teaching is so good.”

The Dochtermann children attend Oakwood’s 2 1/2-acre elementary school campus, where there is no playing field. That’s the school’s good campus. The nearby secondary school is housed on only 1 1/2 acres. There is no gymnasium, no football field. Physical education classes are held at public parks and racquetball courts.

The Dochtermanns and other parents are attracted to the school for its curriculum, not its facilities. At Oakwood, there is a heavy emphasis on the arts and social studies. The school also promotes a concept of moral responsibility that requires students to involve themselves with children beyond their circle of friends and with the outside world.

And, students are given unusual freedom and authority at the school.

Oakwood’s 650 students are on a first-name basis with their teachers. There is no dress code. They are free to interrupt in class by asking questions or challenging a teacher’s assertions. They sit on panels that screen children applying for admission and teachers applying for jobs.

Oakwood headmaster James Astman said he believes that this aspect sets his school apart. Astman recalled that one of his proudest moments came in a conversation with an astronomy teacher at UC Berkeley.

“He said he was giving a test to one of those freshmen classes with 300 kids when someone interrupted the exam to ask about something he didn’t understand. The instructor told me, ‘I always know who the Oakwood students are. They don’t necessarily know the answers, but they haven’t read the rules.’

“The way you engender respect is by making real human-to-human connection,” he said.

Oakwood students are willing and able to do this because they have received special attention in small classes, Astman said.

“Oakwood teachers have four or, at the very most, five classes a day,” he said. “That leaves them free time for students.”

Students and college admissions officers back this claim.

“The teacher recommendations show that they really know the students well,” said Kevin Fox, an admissions specialist at Yale University. “My feeling about the school is it’s a pretty high-powered school for such a small institution. It seems to have an environment that is really conducive to learning.”

Seek Help From Teacher

“It’s such a small school, you can always go to a teacher for help,” said Oakwood ninth-grader Adam Lippman.

Graduating senior Adam Goldberg, who plans to attend Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., started at Oakwood in the seventh grade. He said good relationships with teachers have been the most valuable aspect of an Oakwood education.

“They really helped me quite a bit, especially the last two years when I started taking electives. There really is a lot of individual attention.”

Of course, not everything is running smoothly at the school. In recent years, the concept of moral responsibility to community--a faculty favorite--has become the object of student discontent.

Every grade level does a group project each year to benefit an off-campus cause, and seniors must accumulate 45 hours of individual community service to graduate.

‘Socialist Environment’

“The idea is sort of overdone,” Goldberg said. “We’re being forced to be part of a community. The administration is enforcing a sort of socialist environment.”

Goldberg particularly disliked “advisory groups” that were initiated at Oakwood last fall. Made up of one student from each grade from seven through 12, the groups convened once a month for discussions.

“They wanted us to meet as part of being a community, but none of us had anything to say,” Goldberg recalled. “There isn’t that much to discuss with a seventh-grader. We talked about principally petty issues. It made me angry instead of making me want to interact with them.”

Principal of the secondary school Steve Tobolsky, who is leaving Oakwood at the end of this school year to pursue other interests, said student dissatisfaction with the advisory groups was widespread.

“Part of the reason it didn’t work out was its redundancy,” he said. “Relationships here are so open between students and teachers and students with students that it was contrived.”

The program’s future has not been decided, Tobolsky said.

Another frequent student complaint at Oakwood is an increased workload in sciences and math.

“The school used to be more artsy,” said ninth-grader Lisa Goldsmith. “Now the academic is being emphasized. I think it’s bad because the arts program is what makes this a great school.”

“There’s definitely more academics,” said Kimberly Berman, also a ninth-grader.

“I think it is absolutely true,” Tobolsky said of the complaint. “The expectation of parents is much different today than in the ‘60s or the ‘70s. The tradition of the school is one that stresses the arts, but there’s a lot more concern about academic subjects.”

Tobolsky, who is leaving after two years as secondary school principal, said his one criticism of Oakwood is that students’ attention gets spread too thin.

“There’s a tremendous excitement here, but there’s a price to pay,” he said. “Sometimes it would be better to limit the breadth of activities a kid gets involved in. You might have someone who’s in several honors classes with homework there, and in the play production class rehearsing at night and on weekends, and on a sports team, and maybe on one of our clubs such as OSADD (Oakwood Students Against Drunk Drivers), and maybe on student council where they meet at lunch time, and on a subcommittee planning for the prom. It’s built into the school not to have guidelines to limit that.”

Astman defends the lack of strict limits. Oakwood, he said, has been committed to academic freedom since it was founded in 1951.

“The founders of the school were from the left wing of Hollywood,” he said. “Many of the parents were on the blacklist. They couldn’t say exactly what they wanted for the school, but they could say what they didn’t want, which was achievement at the expense of human character.”

And academic freedom is highly visible in the classrooms.

‘Cabaret’ Staged

The high school drama class last year staged the adult musical “Cabaret.” Other classes took up this lead by studying Germany between the wars, discussing the era’s moral and economic issues.

“I’ll bet there isn’t another high school that has done this piece,” Astman said of the play. “It has a great deal of suggestiveness, almost lewdness, and four-letter words. There were reasons to say we shouldn’t do it or to sanitize it, but it became grist for classroom study throughout the year.”

In the elementary school, students not only study a culture, but also costume themselves in its clothes and play-act its customs. Louie Schwartzberg of Studio City said the concept was central to his decision to send his two daughters to Oakwood.

“Learning the academic stuff is important, but developing a humanistic sense in a child is what comes first,” he said. “The social consciousness of it, to care about people who don’t have so much, it very valuable.”

Schwartzberg was asked if Oakwood children wouldn’t learn more about diverse peoples by attending public school.

Variety of Students

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Maybe these kids are protected, but to throw them into a harsh situation would not be fair.”

Bobbie Wang, director of public relations, said Oakwood tries to admit a variety of students. About 17% of Oakwood’s student body is nonwhite, officials said, and 50% or more is Jewish. There are no ethnic quotas for admission. The school hands out about $250,000 in scholarships a year.

“We want high energy, low energy, high scholastic potential, low scholastic potential,” Wang said. “We want a blend.”

Nearly all of Oakwood’s graduates go immediately to college. Of those who don’t, most resume their educations after traveling for a year, officials said.

Mickey Morgan, head of the secondary school’s social sciences department, said he hears frequently from his former students. Morgan has taught at MIT, Tufts and USC, but prefers Oakwood.

“Because of the structure of the school, you’re able to get very close to the kids,” he said. “They call from college all the time and come back. It’s incredibly gratifying.”