Girls’ Parents Assail School Merger Plan : Education: If Harvard School for boys is combined with all-female Westlake, some parents say girls will be the losers.

Angry parents of students at Westlake School for girls say they oppose the Holmby Hills institution’s decision to merge with the equally prestigious Harvard School for boys in Studio City.

Demanding to know why they were not told earlier about the plan, the Westlake parents Tuesday gathered nearly 200 signatures on a petition asking for a 90-day delay of the merger. At an open house of parents of Westlake junior high school students, the opponents distributed flyers saying, “Save the Westlake School for Girls.”

They are scheduled to meet with Westlake Headmaster Nathan Reynolds tonight. They say they will express a wide range of concerns that have emerged since the merger was announced, without warning, last week. Among them, they say, will be the secrecy surrounding the merger and whether traditions and practices at the 680-student school will be lost.

Despite the concerns of some parents, reaction among alumnae has been mixed, said Vicki Goddard, Westlake’s alumnae director. “A number think it is marvelous and others are, perhaps, sad.”

Students and parents at Harvard support the move, officials there say. And so do some parents who spoke at the open house. Admitting that they may be a “silent majority,” they told Reynolds that they are pleased that the strengths of Westlake and Harvard will be combined.

Some parents opposing the merger said they are angry because they knew nothing about it when they contributed to a campaign last spring that raised $400,000 for Westlake scholarships. Others--especially parents who are Jewish or non-religious--said they worry about how Harvard’s affiliation with the Los Angeles Diocese of the Episcopal Church will influence the merged institution.

Despite the opposition, Alan D. Levy, chairman of the Westlake Board of Trustees, said the decision to operate a single institution on two campuses by 1991 is final. The merged coeducational institution will be Harvard-Westlake School, with grades seven through nine attending classes at the Westlake campus and the upper grades at the Harvard campus.

“This is a decision that was duly adopted by the board,” Levy said. He said the board and the administration will listen to parents’ concerns during the next two years as the schools move toward joint operations.

“We delayed it until 1991, so we can work out as many problems at the front end as we can think of,” he said.

Parents said their first inkling of the merger came when their distressed daughters called them from the school after an assembly last week.

“It makes a drastic change in the lives of 700-odd girls and their families, and no one asks them” their opinion, said Karen Hill-Scott, a UCLA professor with a daughter in the 10th grade.

Louisa Levine, a Westlake English teacher, wrote in a letter to the school’s student newspaper that the decision “dis-empowered” the students and the faculty: “How can we regain the power that has suddenly been taken away from us, and move confidently into our future?”

Several parents, who asked not to be identified, said they would not send their daughters to a school with a Christian orientation, even though the new institution plans to drop requirements for religious studies.

Reynolds said the merged institution would be non-sectarian and would add a rabbi and a woman to the school’s chaplaincy. “Our commitment is to a very, very strong comparative religions and ethics program,” Reynolds said.

He said such a program would be designed to “create a rich and challenging environment where young people come to understand the various religious precepts and beliefs of others.”

The parent critics said educational research shows that girls do better academically at single-sex schools and that boys perform better at coeducational ones.

“The reason we are at the school will seem to be gone when the merger takes place,” said Loretta Ben-Meir, a parent of a Westlake eighth-grader who was attracted to the school because it was not coeducational and has high academic standards.

Harvard will dominate the newly formed board of trustees by a 2-1 margin, according to the merger plan. Harvard Headmaster Thomas C. Hudnut is to be in charge, and the new school’s name is leading Westlake parents to worry that the girls’ school is getting the short end of the stick.

“What did Westlake get out of this?” one parent asked.

“This wasn’t a merger,” another said. “It was a takeover.”

The composition of the new board came about because Harvard had recently elected its board, and the terms of some of Westlake’s board members were coming to an end, Levy said. He said an executive committee of the new 33-member board will be made up of six Harvard representatives and six Westlake representatives.

Reynolds said Levy headed a four-person planning committee that explored the merger. The committee put together a proposal that was approved unanimously by the Westlake board’s executive committee and was voted on by the school’s full board after a six-hour meeting Oct. 2.

Reynolds said secrecy was necessary for the success of the plan. “They would have never gotten as far as they did,” he said of planning committee members, if the process had been open to public scrutiny.

Earlier attempts to merge, one of them six years ago, were stymied by opposition.

Reynolds said the merger was based on confidential information about the number of students expected to attend Westlake in the future. The concern was that if Harvard went co-ed on its own, as it was prepared to do, it would siphon off some of the top girls from Westlake, turning it into a second-rate school, he said.

Reynolds, who attended Harvard and taught there for 10 years before going to work at Westlake in 1966, said it was more important to maintain the quality of the faculty and student body than to continue as a girls-only school. “I’m talking about first-rate education for young women and young men.”

Reaction at Harvard School has been more positive, Hudnut said. “I can empathize with Westlake parents who feel a great sense of loss, but I hope their sense of loss will give way to the conviction that we’re preparing for a better future.”

A coeducational environment is preferable, the headmaster said, “because the world out there is a co-ed world.”