UCLA Plan to Relocate Lab School Protested

Moving UCLA’s experimental elementary school from the university campus to Santa Monica and placing it under the jurisdiction of a public school board would effectively kill it, parents have told members of the Santa Monica-Malibu board.

“The goals of the school board just don’t mesh” with those of the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School, said Frieda Fivelson, one of more than 150 parents who showed up last week to urge the school board to reject UCLA’s relocation proposal.

“You’re attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole,” she said, adding that moving the 108-year-old school off the UCLA campus would destroy “an education success story.”

UCLA officials, who say they need the land beneath the elementary school for a graduate school of management, have been negotiating with the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District about moving the internationally renowned school. If it moves to Santa Monica, it would be situated in the city’s Ocean Park section, and would be staffed and run by the university under a 25-year contract.

The school, California’s only remaining laboratory school, tries out new teaching techniques and philosophies on its 450 students, ages 4 through 12. Free of state education requirements and a local school board, it has evaluations and parent conferences instead of grades, as well as team-teaching and multi-age grade groupings of children. Teachers are given time to write their own curriculums.

The school, usually referred to by the acronym UES, was founded in 1882 and moved onto the UCLA campus in 1947. It is situated in a grove of redwoods, in several buildings designed by architect Richard Neutra.

Board member Peggy Lyons suggested to the parents and teachers that their protests were aimed in the wrong direction. It was UCLA that offered the school to Santa Monica in the first place, she noted.

“We didn’t ask for it,” Lyons said. “I’m a little distressed that perhaps you don’t have access to people at UCLA, and you’re taking it out on us.”

The decision whether to move UES is up to UCLA, said Supt. Eugene Tucker, whose own children attended the school.

UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young said he would decide on the move within two to five months. He said that he is discussing with state education officials the feasibility of getting waivers from curriculum, testing, classroom time, teacher credentials and other regulations that UES would legally be subject to if it became part of a public school system.