COLUMN ONE : Tidal Wave Remolds a School : The immigration surge that reshaped the inner city is now transforming the suburban campus. Both parents and officials are reeling.

Early each weekday morning, mothers and fathers throughout Tarzana load their children into tony sedans, wagons and Jeeps and drive off to private schools nearby.

Meanwhile, from inner-city areas miles away, busloads of students who barely speak English arrive at the neighborhood public elementary school, Wilbur Avenue.

“It used to be that everyone in my neighborhood went to Wilbur,” lamented Tarzana parent Julie Engelman, on whose West San Fernando Valley street only one out of five families send children to the local school. “Now, no one goes there. . . . And the more neighborhood kids leave,” she added with a note of frustration, “the more room there is for bused-in kids.”

Despite its reputation as a good school with a fine faculty, Wilbur lost about a dozen neighborhood students to private schools this year. The exodus sent shock waves through Wilbur’s tight-knit parent community, and more parents say they may follow the trend to private schools.

Across the sprawling, 610,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District, parent unrest over busing’s impact on neighborhood schools has become a common theme. Because of a critical shortage of classroom seats and an ever-rising tide of immigrant children, the neighborhood school is undergoing drastic change.

“There are no schools (in Los Angeles Unified) that just have neighborhood kids any longer,” said Board of Education member Roberta Weintraub. “Today, the ‘neighborhood’ encompasses the whole city of Los Angeles.”

The scene is reminiscent of the late 1970s, when massive busing to achieve racial integration brought fundamental changes in the student body at scores of schools and, subsequently, drove thousands of white families out of the public school system. Many families returned when court-ordered busing ended in 1981. But today, parents in Tarzana and other suburban neighborhoods are reeling again, although for different reasons.

The continuing massive wave of immigration to Los Angeles that has transformed the inner city finally is remolding the suburbs as well. And public schools are bearing the brunt of the demographic explosion.

Unlike the children of a decade ago, most of the students being bused today are immigrants who need help in learning English. And they are being bused, not because of a mandate to desegregate, but because their home schools are too crowded to take them.

Districtwide enrollment boomed through much of the last decade, growing by 15,000 pupils last fall alone. Until recently, the burden of overcrowding was shouldered mainly by inner-city campuses, which sacrificed playgrounds for bungalows and switched to year-round schedules to accommodate the flood of new students.

But having exhausted those alternatives--and unable to build new classrooms quickly enough--the district has turned to relief measures that ask suburban campuses to share the load. One such strategy is year-round schools for the entire district by 1991, approved by the Board of Education earlier this month.

The other solution has been busing.

So far this year, 24,000 students--roughly equal to the number of pupils in a district the size of Alhambra or Glendale--are crisscrossing the Los Angeles school system’s 600 square miles each weekday to reach an available classroom seat.

Early in the morning and again in late afternoon, district buses rumble down the freeways, carrying students near and far--from the East Valley to the West Valley, Bell to Bel-Air, South Gate to Canoga Park, South-Central Los Angeles to Tarzana.

Currently, 300 of the district’s 600 elementary, junior and senior high campuses receive students who do not live in the neighborhood, with some filling up to half of their total enrollments with children from overcrowded schools.

Three schools have no neighborhood children, serving exclusively a bused-in student body. They include a regular elementary school in Sepulveda and two “newcomer centers” in Bel-Air and the Crenshaw district that help orient newly arrived immigrant children.

Wilbur receives nearly half of its 700 students on buses from immigrant neighborhoods in downtown and South-Central Los Angeles. But it was so unprepared for the large number of limited-English-speaking children who arrived this year that teachers had to scramble for translators and supplies, students endured multiple classroom changes, and parents panicked.

“It’s a real stress and strain on a school” when more than 50% of the students are bused in from many different areas, said Jack S. Jacobson, a district regional administrator for the West San Fernando Valley. When that happens, parents “begin to feel they are losing their neighborhood school.”

Parents from Wilbur have queued up to speak at Board of Education meetings nearly every week for the last few months, drawing attention to inadequate bilingual help, overcrowded and unsanitary restrooms, classroom disruptions and other perceived shortcomings of the busing. Similar complaints have been voiced in schools from Pacific Palisades to Westchester.

Some district officials view such complaints as racially motivated, or at the least, shortsighted and selfish.

Although some Wilbur parents “show genuine concern for all of the children in the school,” said board member Rita Walters, who represents an inner-city region with many overcrowded schools, “in others, it is more limited.”

“The depressing side of it is that those voices and that energy are not raised to address the problems beyond the boundary of Wilbur Avenue School,” she continued. “The problems at Wilbur are not very different from the problems of the whole district.”

Wilbur parents know that some administrators may view them as racists, but they staunchly reject the label.

“I’m afraid that is what people want to hear, so they can turn us off,” said Garrie Katznelson, who removed her fourth-grade daughter from Wilbur late last year. “Our school has been integrated for years. We’re talking about educational flight. Parents couldn’t sit by and watch an excellent school disintegrate.”

Their chief complaint, the shortage of bilingual teachers and aides, reflects a districtwide problem. But the shortfall is particularly severe in schools that take in students from overcrowded campuses.

A recent district study based on 1986-87 figures showed that more than half of the students bused that year lacked fluency in English and most were sent to schools that had few, if any, bilingual teachers.

At Wilbur, nearly one-third of the students speak languages other than English--largely Spanish, but also Korean, Armenian, Farsi, Portuguese, Hebrew and Cantonese. But the school has only two bilingual teachers fluent in Spanish and English.

Parent Michele Kuznetsky, who has voiced concern over the inadequacy of bilingual help but has kept her son in Wilbur, said she welcomes such cultural diversity. “We want this kind of (integrated) education,” she insisted.

In fact, district figures show that Wilbur has had a significant minority enrollment for years because of a voluntary busing program that brings in black students from the inner city and the growth of Iranian and other immigrant groups in the West Valley.

But the problem this year, Kuznetsky and others say, is that the number of bused youngsters who could not speak English jumped so dramatically--70 arrived on one day alone--that the school’s resources were strained to the limit.

Parents, as well as some teachers, also fear that the trend toward non-neighborhood enrollment undermines Wilbur as a place where parents and teachers all know each other and work together for the betterment of the school.

“We are losing the nucleus of our community,” a veteran Wilbur teacher said.

Even some academicians agree that the issue is a serious one.

“One thing that makes a school operate, that makes a school hum, is a sense of community,” said UCLA education professor Donald Erickson, who specializes in administrative and policy studies.

“But if you simply bus people around at random and you’ve got 15 different languages in the school and parents (of bused youngsters) can’t get involved in school affairs, there is no concept or theme or set of values that people can get together on,” he added.

Thousands of students participate in voluntary busing for integration purposes, and that “seems to work,” Erickson added. But busing purely to relieve overcrowding is, he said, “madness.”

Nestled in a quiet residential area near two country clubs, Wilbur at one time enrolled 1,000 students, all from the Tarzana-Reseda area. Principal Frank Specchierla, who recently left on a sabbatical, said enrollment took a nose dive through the 1970s, in part because of parents’ fears of mandatory desegregation and because sharply rising real estate prices discouraged families with young children from moving in.

Today, Wilbur has a 50-member PTA board--huge by today’s standards. It is the kind of school where parents can throw a wine-and-cheese reception and raise $20,000 to outfit a computer lab, or generate another $25,000 through candy and T-shirt sales to pay for field trips, scholastic magazine subscriptions and other “enrichments” that were cut out of most school budgets years ago.

“If we lose these parents, you can kiss that goodby. And (all of) the kids are going to lose out,” said Dotty Spector, a PTA co-president.

Even parents who have fled the school stress that they remain strong believers in public education.

Katznelson, for example, taught public school for 17 years and attended public schools herself.

“I’m a public-school advocate,” she declared over lunch in a bustling cafe near her Tarzana home recently. “I never imagined my children going to anything but a public school.”

But she changed her mind abruptly when her daughter’s classroom was changed and she was seated next to students who barely spoke English in a class led by a teacher who could not speak Spanish.

The majority of the bused-in pupils arrived after “norm day,” Oct. 6, the date by which schools had to turn in official enrollment counts and finalize their staffing needs, Specchierla said.

Most of the newcomers are recent immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico and other Latin countries. Teachers note that some of the pupils had little prior schooling before immigrating to the United States.

But Wilbur was far short of having enough bilingual teachers, aides or books. So teachers and students who spoke only English had difficulty communicating with the students who spoke mostly Spanish.

“It’s been very hard,” said fourth-grade teacher Donna Quan, whose inability to speak Spanish hampered teaching for half of her class of 29 students. “I have to ask the students who speak some English to help me out. That is frustrating.”

Moreover, classes had to be reorganized several times because new students kept trickling in. Some neighborhood youngsters had to change teachers three times within the first two months of school.

“My daughter cried every day not knowing when she would be moved,” said the mother of a fifth-grader who asked not to be identified.

For Katznelson, the last straw was seeing her 8-year-old daughter’s schoolwork deteriorate. Because the girl’s limited-English-speaking classmates were constantly asking her questions--What did the teacher say? What page are we on? How do you do this exercise?--she didn’t have time to finish her own work, her mother said. Katznelson said her daughter wanted to help them but, in the end, found the situation too exasperating.

So last October, the Katznelsons decided to enroll their child in a nearby private school.

“It was a very difficult decision,” recalled Katznelson, who had been one of the school’s most active parent supporters. “I always felt the finest teachers were in public schools. . . . But the quality of education had gone down. Not because of the teachers--the teachers are outstanding. But I feel they were put in an impossible situation, and it affected everybody, all of the children.”

Malka Tasoff, a leader of the ad hoc group Parents of Wilbur, which has pressured the school board to help the school, said parents would like assurances that no additional children will be bused in next year, to give the school time to adjust to this year’s sudden influx.

“At least let them be bused to a school that is working,” she said. “Don’t chase away the people (neighborhood parents) who make it work.”

Tasoff’s two children continue to attend Wilbur. But she notes that eight of the 11 children living on her street, Pasadero Drive, go to private schools.

“That kills me,” she said. “There ought to be a campaign by the school district to pull these people in. They are an incredible resource for the school. Wilbur is a poor school, but what made it a model is parental involvement.”

Parents acknowledge that conditions are slowly improving. More bilingual aides have been hired and additional bilingual materials finally arrived early this year.

In addition, in part because of the parents’ protests, the district recently established a centralized system for recruiting bilingual classroom aides. Wilbur Principal Specchierla said finding qualified candidates was so difficult in the West Valley that last year he resorted to hanging around a local unemployment office to find a Spanish-speaking aide.

Wilbur parents continue to devote considerable energy to attracting neighborhood children back to Wilbur, however, believing that building up the local enrollment will go a long way toward remedying the school’s problems.

Critics suggest that the parents ought to pay more attention to accepting the idea that inner-city children are, and will continue to be, a part of their school.

Jo Bonita Perez, a multicultural education specialist for the office of the Los Angeles County superintendent of schools, has worked with many Los Angeles-area schools where students are bused in because of overcrowding. Although she was not speaking specifically of Wilbur, she contended that at many such schools, human relations are ignored.

“The kids who are bused in walk in like tourists,” she said. “What is done to make them feel they are a part of the school and belong there? And what is done to help the neighborhood kids feel comfortable receiving and accepting them? Little to nothing, most often.”

Perez noted that at many schools, neighborhood students walk in through the main gate while the bused youngsters arrive through a separate entrance nearer to where their buses stop. “There is division right there at the start,” she said.

At Wilbur, the bused students enter through a gate near the parking lot and walk directly to the cafeteria for the free hot breakfast most are qualified to receive. They also sit together for a subsidized lunch.

And out on the playground, fifth-grade teacher Polly McDowell said, “there is almost total segregation. The black kids have their own little group and the Spanish kids go into their little groups. It’s comfortable for them.”

McDowell said she is concerned about the “isolation” of the bused youngsters. “There are certain things,” she said, “that make you feel inferior.”

Some neighborhood students reach out to the newcomers. Andrew Kim, 10, a Korean-American student in Paul Greenwalt’s fifth-grade bilingual classroom, brings a Spanish-English dictionary to school to help him communicate with his Spanish-speaking classmates.

“When we’re out on the yard, I hear kids say things in Spanish and I look it up. When the teacher says (a command) in English, I say it in Spanish. Sometimes I help Rosa here,” he said, motioning toward a girl sitting across the table from him.

Kim’s classmate, Sonia Martinez, who rides the bus to Wilbur from South-Central Los Angeles, said she likes the school but would rather attend classes closer to home.

“I want to be near my house,” she said, because “if something (bad) happens, I can go home.”

A Guatemala native who has attended Wilbur for three years, Sonia said she feels comfortable at the school; she serves as a bus monitor and cafeteria helper, and is even considering becoming a teacher when she grows up. But she cannot stay late or join in after-school activities because the bus leaves promptly after the last bell at 2:30 p.m.

That is a common lament of students who must ride the buses to distant campuses, and it presents one more barrier between the traveling and the neighborhood students, parents and teachers alike said.

In addition, language differences, work schedules and the long distance between home and school make it difficult for the parents of the traveling students to become involved in school affairs.

Parent leaders at Wilbur say they have tried to reach out to their counterparts in the sending schools, such as through letters home in Spanish about PTA meetings. But so far the response has been discouraging.

A few schools have tried to schedule parent meetings at schools closer to the neighborhoods the pupils travel from, “but I haven’t heard of schools with overwhelming success,” said Gordon Wohlers, the district administrator in charge of overcrowding-relief programs, such as busing. “Obviously, the deterrent is the distance.”

Critics of the district busing program mention those and other problems when they argue that the greatest hardships are being borne by the students riding the buses, not by neighborhood youngsters.

Associate Supt. Paul Possemato, who is studying Wilbur parents’ complaints, said parents who fear that their children lose valuable learning time when they try to help a limited-English classmate may not have a legitimate complaint: “I find that difficult to understand, instructionally. There is tremendous benefit in that kind of cooperative relationship.”

One finding of a recent report by the district’s Program Assessment and Evaluation Branch shows that the academic achievement of pupils bused to integrated schools is much lower than that of neighborhood students.

“We’ve been complaining about these things for years,” said the Rev. Horacio Quinones, who heads the Parent Academy for Quality Education, a grass-roots effort to train Latino parents to be more involved in schools. “The difference now is that the ones complaining are the receiving schools, who say we are lowering their academic achievement. So they’re getting the attention.

“But if you do not deal with the Hispanic community, the end result is that everybody is going to be affected. Our children are not going to go away.”