Partnership’s Goal Is College for Everyone : Education: Brentwood, Palisades schools join UCLA in an innovative program to make all students university-ready.

With the goal of sending every student to college, parents and public schools in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades have formed an educational partnership with UCLA.

Under the open-ended agreement, UCLA will try to fulfill a wish list school officials and parents are drafting. Some of the items the group would like to see included are high-tech instructional methods, role modeling, and advice on teacher training and student affairs.

“We want to prepare kids to be college-ready,” said Pam Bruns, co-chairwoman of the Palisades Complex, a group of parents who approached UCLA with the idea.

The pilot partnership includes nine schools of the Los Angeles Unified School District: Palisades High School, Temescal Canyon (Continuation) High School, and the six neighborhood elementary schools and one junior high that feed into them.

A committee of representatives from the Palisades Complex, UCLA and the schools will first tackle the needs of the high schools, said Gayle Byock, director of post-secondary programs at UCLA and a Palisades parent who helped set up the relationship.

Palisades High School has its eye on a UCLA computer program that helps students improve their writing, Principal Gerald Dodd said.

“We’re hopeful we could initiate it with our own hardware and their software,” he said.

Dodd said he is also interested in having the university open its libraries and language laboratory to his students.

Byock said she hopes contact between students will develop. “Some kids might benefit from tutoring or role modeling (by) college students--especially (kids) who are not thinking of college, or not (thinking of it) as their first option,” she said.

As yet there is no budget for the arrangement, Byock said. Instead, UCLA hopes to encourage staff and students to donate time and expertise.

That, university officials said, should not be a problem. Professors who have reared children, like other parents, are “prepared to be involved in the schools on a limited basis. We’re not asking the faculty to go in (to the schools) every day,” Byock said.

And because public service is one consideration for promotion in the University of California system, many professors already volunteer at community colleges or other outside organizations, said Edward A. Alpers, dean of honors and undergraduate programs for the College of Letters and Science.

UCLA has tutors and student teachers working in the public schools, offers seminars for teachers and has other ad-hoc ties with various schools. The Palisades partnership, though, is more formal and structured, participants say.

When the Palisades Complex proposed the plan to UCLA last fall, the university was attracted by the strong parental support and the chance to work with students from kindergarten through high school, Byock said. “Children have to start thinking of college in elementary grades. Junior high and high school is too late,” she said.

The partnership is not just helping wealthy parents get their kids into the Ivy League, Alpers said. About 60% of the students in the Palisades schools do not live on the Westside but are bused in from crowded areas of the city, he said; many are minorities and are not from rich homes.

Palisades parents are concerned about “all the students” and think that UCLA’s experiences with its ethnically, racially and economically mixed student body may be useful experiences to Palisades schools, he said. UCLA has changed curricula, hired faculty and launched programs to help students get into graduate school in response to its changing student population.

“It’s not intended to serve just some of the students in the schools,” Alpers said of the partnership.

The partnership will be reviewed in November, Byock said. If it is working, UCLA may forge similar arrangements with other groups of schools, Alpers said.