Petitions Battle Over School Move : Education: Parents protest plan to relocate UCLA experimental school in Santa Monica. But some residents are supporting the move.

The controversy over the plan to move UCLA’s experimental elementary school into the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District turned Monday’s Santa Monica school board meeting into a battle of petitions.

Parents protesting the relocation presented a petition with more than 2,000 signatures, stating that moving the Corinne A. Seed University Elementary School into a public school system would compromise research at the school.

A Santa Monica resident also presented a petition to the board supporting the move.

The school, commonly referred to by the acronym UES, is California’s only remaining laboratory school. Free of state education requirements and a local school board, it tests new teaching techniques and philosophies on its students.

The petition said the site proposed for the school, a portion of Los Amigos Park in the city’s Ocean Park area, would result in a loss of irreplaceable open space.

Shayna Roosevelt, 10, and three other UES students read a student petition to the school board, noting that the school’s idyllic nine-acre site at UCLA provides “special places to be alone” and for “talking behind trees.” The students said they fear their teachers will quit if the school is moved.

Consideration of the move started more than a year ago, when UCLA disclosed plans to build a new graduate business school on part of the laboratory school’s site. UCLA announced last month that it will proceed with the move.

The state and the Santa Monica-Malibu school district must approve the plan before the move occurs.

The school board, which will not vote on the move until a contract has been worked out, has assured UCLA that the university would retain full control over UES, Supt. Eugene Tucker has said. Within the next couple of months the district and UCLA staff will issue an “accurate statement of the educational advantages of moving the school,” he said Monday.

Ocean Park resident Anna McDonnell gave the board a petition with 73 signatures supporting the move, which she said had been gathered in one afternoon, and she promised to collect more. She said she was annoyed by numerous flyers that have been left at her door by UES parents.

“The people who’re opposed (to the move) are very organized. . . . (But) it doesn’t accurately reflect the way Ocean Park residents feel,” she said later.

The school board authorized Tucker to work with the UES admissions committee on recruiting 4-year-olds from low-income families in Ocean Park to attend UES at no cost to the parents, regardless of whether the school moves. The laboratory school is interested in enrolling up to 15 such children in September to help diversify its student body, Tucker said.