40 Years a School for Boys, Serra to Admit Girls in ’91

In a major break from tradition, Junipero Serra High School in Gardena is planning to add pink tiles to one of its locker rooms, romance novels to its library and, most important, girls to its all-male student body.

“Serra Men,” as the more than 4,000 graduates of the 40-year-old Roman Catholic school are known, will become “Serra Men and Women” after the school enrolls its first female students in the fall of 1991.

Principal James Crowell, himself a 1970 Serra graduate, began pursuing coeducation about two years ago when the school’s enrollment began declining significantly and it became clear that Serra was losing potential students to coeducational parochial schools in Torrance and Playa del Rey. From 1986 to this school year, Serra’s enrollment has dropped from 520 to an all-time low of 266.

“An all-boy school is really a holdover from the past,” said Crowell, who spent 14 years at Serra as a teacher and dean before becoming principal last year.

Serra’s boys are enthusiastic about the change.

“The guys are in favor of it,” said Kenny Davis, student body president and a star Serra basketball player. He said it will be strange to return to Serra after graduating this year and “see young ladies walking around.”

Serra already has three all-girl sister schools in Compton, Inglewood and Los Angeles, which provide cheerleaders for Serra games and whose students are invited to Serra dances. But the boys said that having girls on campus all day will be different.

“It will give us a chance to mingle a little bit and not just look at other guys,” said Christopher Rogers, 16, a junior who will graduate before the girls arrive. “I think the guys may be more mature. You can’t act like a fool in front of a girl.”

Not everyone is so enthusiastic about the change.

“There is enough time after they graduate from high school to start mingling with girls,” said Shirley Smith, who heads Serra’s parent-teacher organization. “They’ll be doing that for the rest of their lives. I guess I’m a little old-fashioned about that.”

Smith said she supports the move only because Serra’s future may be at stake.

The new shower tiles and reading material are just a couple of the ideas Crowell has to prepare the school for coeducation. Serra will also renovate four bathrooms for the female students and hold special workshops for teachers and current students to help them adjust to the new arrivals.

Archdiocesan officials have not yet determined whether Serra will admit girls gradually over four years, starting with the freshman class next year, or completely integrate all four grade levels at once. The former option, school officials said, might lessen the impact on area all-girls schools, which could lose students to Serra.

“We’re a girl’s school and we stress that,” said an administrator at St. Mary’s Academy in Inglewood who declined to discuss Serra’s change to coeducation. “If this is the kind of education they want, they’ll go here.”

While acknowledging that coeducation will help Serra compete with other schools, some of the alumni say the change will be hard to get used to.

“It’s been an all-male institution for so gosh-darn long,” said Brian Quinn, athletic director at Loyola Marymount University and a 1959 graduate. Quinn said he considers the change a big plus for the school.

“I have mixed emotions,” said Assemblyman Curtis Tucker Jr., a 1972 Serra graduate. “I would have liked girls there when I was a student. But looking back, we didn’t have all the distractions on campus that coeducation brings. With an all-male environment, we had a special closeness that the school won’t have with women.”

Frank Kretzschmar, who heads the school’s alumni association, said his organization supports the move, although the group leadership was “concerned at first that it would be a culture shock to our alumni.”

But Serra has faced changes before. Since Kretzschmar graduated in 1955, he said, the school’s enrollment has changed from all-white to predominantly black and Hispanic, with whites representing only about 5% of the students.

“We’re open to change,” he said. “Serra’s still going to do the same thing, except now it’s going to produce Serra men and Serra young ladies.”

Serra, which draws its students from south Los Angeles and throughout the South Bay, is not alone in adopting coeducation.

Declining enrollments in Catholic high schools across the nation are forcing more schools to abandon the single-sex format, said Barbara Keebler, a spokeswoman for the National Catholic Educational Assn. in Washington.

“In recent years, it has been a trend to have single-sex schools go co-ed or to merge with another single-sex school,” Keebler said. “If co-ed education is something that the parents and students want, it’s something we have to investigate and respond to.”

Advocates of single-sex education argue that separating the sexes increases educational achievement and self-image, especially among girls. But single-sex schools also split up siblings and are viewed by some as a barrier to the successful socialization of adolescents.

Part of the movement to coeducation is an attempt to better compete in a tight marketplace.

“There was a time when there were waiting lists for Catholic schools,” Keebler said. “Now it’s a different market. Catholic schools have to go out there and show what their benefits are.”

Serra found itself frequently edged out in recruiting by Bishop Montgomery High School in Torrance and St. Bernard High School in Playa del Rey, both coeducational schools. A wing of classrooms was shut down at Serra this year because enrollment at the 20-acre Serra campus, which can handle about 840 students, sank to 266 students.

But there are hints of a rebound both at Serra and at Catholic schools in general.

Nationwide, enrollment at Catholic preschools and kindergartens has increased significantly in recent years, said Keebler, and one focus in the near future will be on retaining those students already in the system.

At Serra, coeducation is already eliciting a response from the families of potential recruits.

“Ever since the word got out,” Crowell said, “the phone has been ringing off the hook.”