Anything Goes in Bid to Enroll : Education: The number of students looking for spots in top schools is growing, and competition is becoming intense.

They were standing in line at four in the morning. From a distance, they might have looked like college students trying to get tickets for the Rolling Stones tour. But they weren’t. They were parents. And they were seeking admission for their children into Cindy Bean’s kindergarten class at Colfax Elementary School in North Hollywood.

“For at least four years now,” said the school’s principal, Elisabeth Norton-Douglass, “parents who’ve been here by 6 a.m. or so on the first day of enrollment have gotten their children in.” Bean has been in such demand that the school has set up a first-come, first-served policy for her class.

Parents eager to enroll their children in a highly desirable school are willing to do more than stand in line in the wee hours of the morning. They’re offering to donate money to schools even before their children have been admitted, joining synagogues and churches to improve their children’s chances for acceptance in an associate school, and even getting involved in the local public school before their children are old enough for kindergarten.

Why the crunch? Why the intense--and some say insane--competition?

Those involved in public and private schools offer a wide range of explanations for the frenzy they’re seeing, especially in the preschool, kindergarten and early elementary school grades.

Nancy Tookey, director of admissions at the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks--where annual tuition for 3- to 4-year-olds is $5,450--sees the intense competition as a result of the population explosion in Los Angeles and the fact that the baby boomers’ babies are coming of school age.

“It’s mind-boggling what’s happening,” she said, “and there just aren’t enough preschools and good elementary schools to go around.” The Buckley School, which goes from preschool through 12th grade, usually gets about 450 to 500 applications for 80 slots, said Tookey, and the application glut is hitting primarily the classes for 3- to 5-year-olds. “It’s so competitive now. It’s tough. Very tough,” she said.

At Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, Brother Charles Beutler, the registrar, said he thinks most Roman Catholic schools and other private schools downsized in the ‘70s when the demand for elementary and secondary education decreased. “Now it’s tough to get in because the population is expanding, especially in the lower grades,” he said.

Steve Bogard, headmaster at the Valley Beth Shalom day school in Encino, said the problem is clearly one of decreased supply and increased demand.

“All the non-orthodox Jewish day schools in the San Fernando Valley have almost no openings,” he said. “Now, parents are getting real panicky. Only people who are starting early enough--at age 2 1/2 to 3 1/2--are having less trouble,” he said.

Bogard also claimed that the hot pursuit of the right elementary schools is being fostered by preschools that educate parents on how to find the perfect educational setting for their children through parent seminars and flyers. “So when a parent finds the right school, he feels more intensely about it,” he said.

One father recently offered to give the school enough money to pay the salary of an extra teacher, just so there would be room for his child. “I couldn’t accept the offer, because I would need more space--another classroom--if I did have another teacher,” Bogart said.

Buckley’s Nancy Tookey said parents are often anxious to help support the school financially, even before their children have been accepted, but the school’s policy is to allow only their currently enrolled students’ parents to contribute. She said, “A lot of people have offered us large sums of money. They call up and say, ‘How much do you want?’

“But we do accept letters of recommendation,” Tookey said, adding that knowing someone who can “supply us with more information to evaluate and understand the child is always helpful.” She said she has had families say they know someone on the board of directors of the school, or that they’re going to go directly to the headmaster to gain admission. “Luckily, I have support from the headmaster and the board, and they don’t overturn my decisions,” she said.

Sharon Lowenstein, who coordinates the after-school kindergarten enrichment class at Sherman Oaks Elementary--which, like Colfax, is a public school--said she was offered a new outfit by a father who wanted his child in her program, which costs $360 a semester. Lowenstein said she could never accept a bribe, but that she has also been offered money in exchange for admittance into her program.

Lowenstein’s classes have a waiting list of 93 students for 46 slots, and her class for 1990-91 is already half full. Some of the children on her waiting list are just over 1 year old, and they come from as far away as Reseda. They won’t be starting kindergarten or her after-kindergarten class until at least 1993.

Robin Little, a Sherman Oaks parent, found out about the waiting list for Sherman Oaks Elementary’s enrichment program by accident when she couldn’t get her oldest son, David, into the program. She teasingly told Lowenstein to put her then 2 1/2-year-old on the waiting list and was shocked to hear that the list for the child’s future class was already forming.

Some parents volunteer their time rather than gifts or money. Nancy Pollack has decided to volunteer at both Sherman Oaks Elementary and Dixie Canyon Elementary School to learn something about the schools and to improve her chances of getting her child into the one she prefers. Neither school is in her assigned area; her neighborhood school is Chandler Elementary.

“My bottom-line feeling is if I sat down with the principals, I wouldn’t know what was going on,” Pollack said. “Being in the rooms volunteering will give me more of an employee’s point of view.” Pollack’s son, Kevin, is only five and won’t start kindergarten until next year.

Now, he’s at nursery school at Temple Adat Ari-El in North Hollywood. The Pollacks joined the temple--something she said they probably would have eventually done, but not then--to improve their chances of getting Kevin admitted. “And now, even being a member isn’t enough,” Pollack said. “Some members can’t even get in , now.”

Like Pollack, Jim Nagle got involved in the public schools before his son graduated from nursery school. He and his wife had scouted Valley schools, looking for good test scores, and moved into Studio City because they liked the neighborhood and the potential they saw at Carpenter Elementary.

But when Nagle looked at the school more closely, he was astounded by the lack of parent participation and the school’s climate. “We went to a PTA meeting of five people talking for over an hour about spending $36. That’s when we decided to do something,” he said.

Within a year, Nagle led the school in staging a community carnival to raise money and in urging administrative changes there.

Now, six years later, Nagle said that Carpenter is in demand. There are 800 neighborhood children attending the school as opposed to only 400 five years ago. He has three children, aged 6, 8 and 10, who attend the school, and Nagle said he’s glad he jumped in when he did. He’s thinking about getting involved at Walter Reed Junior High, two years before his daughter will be a student there, he said.

Sarah Howard’s 3-year-old daughter, Lindsay, had been on the waiting list at Sherman Oaks Nursery School in Van Nuys since Lindsay was one. “I started early, because we had just moved to Sherman Oaks from New York and I felt it was crowded and competitive here,” she said. Even before Lindsay was accepted by the preschool, Howard went to an open house and gave the director her husband’s business card with the offer that she could donate office products to the school. She also offered to volunteer her time.

But by March, Howard hadn’t heard from the school, so she went there to find out where her daughter stood on the waiting list. “I didn’t want to get lost in the shuffle,” she said. Lindsay got in.

Father Allen DeLong, president of Chaminade College Preparatory in Chatsworth and West Hills, said applications there have increased over the last few years. When people apply to the school, “they talk about getting involved and supporting the school,” he said, but DeLong hasn’t had any offers of financial support. “We’re in the midst of a capital campaign right now, and I would have noticed it if we got any offers to donate.”

Even more than the willingness to contribute, some admissions directors are shocked at the intensity of the parents applying on behalf of their youngest children. Said Buckley’s Nancy Tookey, “We hear parents asking how they can prepare their 2 1/2-year-old for their assessment interview, and, as an educator, that raises an eyebrow.”

She’s also amazed to look at what parents fill in on a 3-year-old’s application for admission under extracurricular activities. “I see, all on the same application, piano, jazz, ballet, trips to Europe. The parents feel they need to give these little kids all this experience, and then they feel they need to put it all down,” Tookey said.

If applying to schools sounds tough, imagine getting the rejection letters. Said Tookey: “Not only is it incredibly stressful for the parents, the children experience a sense of failure as a result. It’s unfortunate kids this young have to go through such competitive admission processes.”

So what’s fueling the panic-driven selection of schools? According to David Rapkin, Ph.D, a Santa Monica clinical psychologist and an assistant clinical professor at UCLA, the race for the right school is happening partly because parents realize that their children will be part of an intensely competitive world.

“Today, there’s a heightened awareness of consequences of a bad education,” he said, “and a feeling that since many of us can’t afford the houses we grew up in, that maybe, if we had only had a better education, we could be doing even better.”

Parents now realize that they can’t passively trust the system to educate their children--they can’t just happily send their kids to the neighborhood school and count on getting a top-quality education, he said. “The Southwestern and Western states have always had a tradition of anti-intellectualism. You didn’t need a real good education to do well. That’s over now, and parents know it.”

The pressure to find the right school may make getting a rejection letter even harder to accept. Campbell Hall in North Hollywood, an Episcopal $5,700- to $7,525-a-year school for kindergarten through 12th grade, sends out four different response letters, said Alice Fleming, director of admissions. There are acceptance letters, which she said most frequently go to children of school alumni, faculty and staff. (This year, 33 of the 50 who were accepted were in this category.) There are the “wait-pool” letters, to people they want admission but for whom there just isn’t room. Then there are the “wait-a-year” letters for those who just have not been accepted.

“Sometimes people are surprised to learn they haven’t been accepted,” Fleming said. “After all, everybody thinks they have a genius. But most people are very gracious.”

Those whose children do not make the cut into the school. or class of their choice, shouldn’t feel too forlorn, said Margo Long, principal at North Hollywood’s Oakwood School, a $6,500-a-year elementary and secondary school. “It’s getting to be a lot like colleges, and we’re lucky that there are a lot of choices in Los Angeles. But these are adorable little babies--4- and 5-year-olds--and they don’t have SAT scores.”