2 Programs Battle for School Turf : Schools: Nowhere do tensions between magnet programs and their host schools appear larger than at San Pedro’s Park Western Place Elementary.

It was the day before students were to come back to class at Park Western Place Elementary School in San Pedro, and Principal Albert Stebinger was hosting a lunch for the teachers and staff.

As teacher Sue Block recalls, Stebinger asked the faculty at the Harbor Math/Science Magnet for gifted children, which shares the campus with Park Western, to join in. When they said no because they had brought their lunch, Stebinger suggested they sit in nonetheless.

“He asked them two or three different ways,” Block recalled. “He was very tactful, but we were getting the definite feeling that they didn’t want to join us in anything.”

And so it has been since September on the campus of Park Western, where teachers at the community school and the magnet are feuding about everything from which school gets to use the library at what time to whether the students should eat lunch together to what disciplinary code should govern the campus.

The battle, which both sides say has been festering for years, has become so bitter that some teachers from one side won’t talk to those on the other. Stebinger, who is in charge of both schools, admits that he is caught in the middle.

It has also exposed a glitch in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s new system of “shared decision-making councils,” in which parents and teachers now have a say in some matters, such as discipline and scheduling, that once were the purview of principals alone.

Two councils--one for the magnet and one for the “host school”--were established on the Park Western campus this fall. But they are now locked in a stalemate over the discipline issue.

“It’s a very delicate situation,” acknowledged Frances Nakano, the Los Angeles Unified School District regional superintendent who is overseeing negotiations between the sides. “They’re going to have to come to a consensus, and I hope it doesn’t take all semester.”

Teachers on both sides acknowledge that the dispute is draining the energy they have for their classes. “I really feel like I’m gypping the kids,” said Paralee Hanson, who teaches at the magnet. “They’re wonderful kids, and I’m not giving them as much as I should.”

And that is angering parents.

“Some people are losing sight of what the purpose of the school is,” complained David Russell, whose daughter is a third-grader in the magnet program. “While the teachers are busy trying to reach agreement among themselves on things, that’s time that otherwise would have been spent working with the children. As a parent, I have a problem with that.”

Moreover, some parents say the bad feelings are filtering down to their kids.

“My daughter even has friends that used to go to the regular school and then transferred to the magnet,” said Wanda Rodriguez, whose daughter is a sixth-grader at the community school. “Now, they don’t even talk to each other.”

There are 95 magnet schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District and, although they have different specialties, all operate under a court-ordered mandate to promote integration. Only 22 have separate campuses; the rest must share campuses with neighborhood schools, according to Richard Battaglia, a magnet specialist for the district.

District officials say strife between magnets and their host schools has happened elsewhere. But Battaglia and Nakano said they know of no other school where the dissension is as severe as it is at Park Western.

“It’s obviously avoidable,” Battaglia said, “because not every magnet center in the district is undergoing the same amount of strife.”

At Park Western, the tensions stem in part from socioeconomic differences, differing educational philosophies and disagreements about whether these two programs, each with its own distinct mission, can coexist under the same roof.

With 284 students, Park Western Place Elementary School is classified by the district as a PHBAO school (Predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian and Other minorities). Its pupils come from a primarily low-income neighborhood; many live in nearby Park Western Estates, a government-subsidized apartment complex. And, according to teachers and parents, most qualify for either a free or reduced-fare lunch program.

By contrast, the magnet school draws its 251 students from 56 different school areas throughout Los Angeles. Magnet coordinator Darlene Dye boasts that “our children have over 23 languages spoken in the home. We have Croatian, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Chinese.”

Dye has encouraged an extraordinary amount of parent involvement in the magnet school. Magnet parents say they go to great lengths to raise extra money to provide their children with educational extras, including specialized math instruction and trips to Santa Catalina Island.

But those extras have caused resentment in the community school.

“They have money for field trips,” community school teacher Patricia Ertzman complained. “Our program doesn’t come with anything.”

Although nobody seems to know how the trouble at Park Western began, both sides agree that such grievances have been hanging over the campus for the past eight years, ever since the magnet school moved onto the Park Western campus from the Taper Avenue Elementary School, also in San Pedro.

The dispute finally spilled into the open this fall when the community school, which needed an additional classroom, moved into a room that had been used by the magnet for a math lab. The magnet then moved its math lab into the library, angering community school teachers who said their kids were not getting enough library time.

“They gave us garbage times,” Block complained. “They took exactly what they wanted--prime time.”

But magnet school teachers said the community school has been unwilling to give up an extra room that its teachers use for lunch. Nakano, the regional superintendent, said he is trying to settle the matter by arranging for a bungalow to be moved onto campus.

After holding meetings with parents this fall, Nakano also stepped in and ordered that the two schools adopt a uniform discipline code and that they share lunches, recesses and other activities. “They were doing things in kind of a separate fashion, and I thought they should come together,” he said.

That recommendation did not go over well at the magnet school, where teachers complain that they are being forced to compromise their rigorous program.

“We’re being asked to ignore the fact that there is space available on the campus that we need,” said Linda Ross, who teaches humanities at the magnet. “We feel that a lot of the decisions made do not support a program that really works. We’re being asked to modify the situation here on campus, and it is not one that lends itself to the best that we could do.”

The magnet teachers complain that they have been denied state honors because their students’ test scores are commingled with Park Western scores. The magnet teachers are also pressing for separate lunch periods and recesses, more independence and their own site.

“We really have an identity crisis,” said Dye, the magnet coordinator. “When you’re working night and day to build an exemplary program, it’s really a difficult swallow that you can’t be like the big folks who are doing it in other areas.”

Nakano said whether the magnet can become independent “remains to be seen. . . . If that’s the case, it will have to be a policy decision by the board.”

Dye and her teachers, meanwhile, have been branded as elitists by some community school teachers and parents who say that instead of promoting integration, the magnet is promoting segregation.

A small group of magnet parents agree. These parents, who did not want to be identified for fear their children would be singled out at school, say Dye and the magnet school teachers have blown the dispute out of proportion.

“Walls are coming down all over. But in our school they’re putting up walls,” said one magnet parent. “Our children are being put in an environment of gifted kids only. They’re being told they are different; they are special. If they keep this kind of environment where they’re not getting along with the school next door, how are they going to get along with the outside world?”

Said another parent: “What I think is going on is that the magnet parents are being manipulated by the staff to cause a lot of rigmarole so that we can get our own campus.”

Dye could not be reached to respond to that specific charge, but she and other magnet teachers said in earlier interviews that they are simply doing what they believe is best for their students. They are dismayed that they are viewed as elitists and added that it is essential for them to treat magnet students differently because gifted children have special needs.

“I think these people are saying we want to be elite, we want to be snobs and, honestly, that isn’t the case,” Hanson said. “A lot of people think, ‘Well, that child is gifted, what problems does he have?’ The gifted kids come with a lot of anxieties, a lot of problems. They’re a real minority, and they need to be dealt with.”

Magnet teachers, as well as some magnet parents, said a separate site would enable them to pursue their program more freely. And the separate lunches and recesses are necessary, they said, because the students from the two schools get into playground scrapes that cannot be resolved because of the different disciplinary codes.

The magnet school uses a “magic circle” system of discipline, in which students are not punished but are encouraged to talk out their problems with one another and their teachers. The community school uses more traditional disciplinary methods.

“If there was no strife between the two campuses, and it’s simply a matter of the kids playing together and eating together, I have no problem,” said magnet parent Stephen Cravitz. “If we lived in that kind of school, we would have no problem.”

Cravitz, however, said he is not sure that harmony will ever come to the Park Western campus. “It seems to me that the hurts have gone pretty deep,” he said. “There are people at this point who just plain don’t want to talk to each other.”