Magnet School Avoids ‘Honor’ It Didn’t Want : Education: Brentwood parents learned that theirs could be the first school west of Fairfax to have a year-round, multitrack schedule. They fought against it, and won.

Brentwood Science Magnet elementary school was nearly cornered into becoming the first Los Angeles public school west of Fairfax Avenue to go to a multitrack, year-round schedule, until a group of parents found a way out: moving its sixth-graders to an “annex” at a nearby junior high school.

Although controversial, the option was favored more than 5 to 1 by the 815 parents, teachers and administrators who voted on ways to increase enrollment by 23%, as mandated by the Los Angeles Unified School District board in February.

The debate included many of the key issues facing the giant school district today: local decision-making, parent involvement, teachers’ feelings of disenfranchisement and, finally, the children’s best interests as defined by adults.

Resistance to multitrack scheduling among Brentwood parents, as in much of the Westside, is profound. Brentwood Principal Beverly Tietjen said: “Westside parents have more difficulty identifying with the year-round process because they don’t identify with their schools being overcrowded.”

As parent Joe Levine saw it, there is no upside for Brentwood’s becoming a multitrack year-round school. Overcrowded schools that have adopted multitrack year-round schedules reaped a benefit, Levine said, because families whose children would have been bused to emptier schools away from home could now attend neighborhood schools.

That does not apply to Brentwood, whose student body voluntarily comes by bus from all over the city because of the science program.

The whirlwind decision-making process at Brentwood was emotional and divisive, according to some of the participants, and in the end not everyone was pleased. One group of faculty members and parents lobbied for multitrack, saying that dividing the school and putting the sixth-graders into a junior high atmosphere, even if segregated from older students, would be detrimental.

“We were always very isolated because we were looking at a very unpopular choice,” said Terry Baldwin, a leader of an ad-hoc group that researched the multitrack option.

Going multitrack would have meant that three-quarters of Brentwood’s students and faculty would end one school year in June and start right back up again in July, with only two months’ notice.

It would also have put Brentwood out front on what many school watchers feel is inevitable: multitrack year-round schedules for all Los Angeles public schools to alleviate the citywide shortage of classrooms. The board has been criticized for implementing year-round schools only in predominantly minority areas. All schools will be on year-round schedules in the 1991-92 school year, either single- or multitrack.

Westside board member Mark Slavkin, parents and the principal concede that some faculty members are unhappy with the vote to move the sixth-graders, which was approved by the school board Monday. None of the teachers contacted agreed to be interviewed about their views.

“Teachers are the ones who have to make it work, but their vote basically didn’t count,” said Tietjen, a veteran principal.

For the group that won, the vote represented the potential of parental involvement. “This is a real good example of what parent involvement can do,” parent Helen Fallon said. For those who lost, particularly some faculty members, the decision was cause for gloom, a logistical disaster that would isolate sixth-graders from the program, to their detriment.

Among next year’s sixth-graders, many students were reportedly happy with the prospect of going to a junior high campus one year early, according to parents.

That Brentwood, on Gretna Green Way at San Vicente Boulevard and Bundy Drive, was included in the list to increase capacity at all was a surprise to the staff and parents. They had clung to the belief, apparently with some signals from the district, that they would be bypassed this year.

The successful magnet school was already filled to the brim with students from more than 300 schools around the city. Its polyglot student body was featured last month in a Time magazine article on America’s future as a multi-ethnic society. Brentwood is, in other words, widely viewed as a bright spot in a city shadowed by criticism of the public school system.

When reality set in and with the deadline and multitrack schools looming, Brentwood parents turned to Slavkin’s office for options.

Brentwood was precluded by the board from choosing a popular option of placing portable bungalows on its campus because it has more than 1,000 students.

Parents were put in touch with a group of activist parents in the Palisades Complex. Parents involved in the Palisades Complex had come up with a plan to create space by reconfiguring under-used Paul Revere Junior High School for grades six, seven and eight and moving the ninth grade to Palisades High School.

(Ironically, Palisades elementary schools will wait a year before going forward with the junior high plan, which they and Slavkin view as educationally sound and perhaps a better configuration for sixth-graders.)

Although technically Brentwood, as a magnet school, is not a part of the complex, which includes all grade schools whose students matriculate to Paul Revere and Palisades High, the complex invited voters to consider the sixth-grade option.

A group of PTA parents studied the “annex” option, giving it glowing, and some say unrealistic, rave reviews. Parents and teachers in the other camp argued that sixth-graders would have to be bused back and forth to use the special science labs at Brentwood. The gifted program, in which students are taken from their classrooms for special programs, would be truncated. And there were questions about the logistics for school assemblies.

United Teachers of Los Angeles President Wayne Johnson said teachers around the district were generally unhappy with the board’s decision to give teachers one vote each and parents one vote for each child in the school.

At Brentwood, this translated into fewer than 50 votes for the faculty and the potential for more than 1,000 for the parents, including those whose sixth-graders were going on to junior high school next year. The turnout for the vote was 65%.

“It limited (the teachers’) participation and voice to an almost inaudible level,” Johnson said.

Fallon said the voting ratio was appropriate. “I don’t see on something that important, that it’s the teachers’ right to decide for 30 families.”

Slavkin, who said his interest was in giving each school the most choices, responded that the union failed to intervene at the right time. “Now, after the fact, the union is expressing misgivings about the process,” he said

Both factions describe the choice as a lesser of two evils. Meetings were heated, time was short and how the parents would vote remained a mystery until the vote was counted. In less than two months from first exploring the option of housing the sixth-graders elsewhere, it was chosen by a wide margin.

“We were really lucky to have neighbors who had looked ahead and seen what the problem would be and looked for solutions,” said Fallon, one of the parents who spearheaded the “annex” option.

Now it is up to the school’s teachers and principals to implement the vote. “We want to be make sure the sixth-graders still feel like part of the Brentwood family,” Tietjen said. “It’s a challenge for us. I think the teachers are used to challenges. I think they’ll rise to the occasion.”

A GLOSSARY OF SCHOOL TERMS The Los Angeles Unified School District has decreed that all schools must change to a common year-round calendar by July 1, 1991. As an interim measure, 109 elementary schools, including Brentwood Science Magnet, were required to increase their capacity by 23% by July, 1990.

Options for most schools included portable classrooms, increasing class size or going to staggered scheduling. Here are the commonly used terms and their meanings: Common Calendar: The common calendar is the 90/30 calendar, which means that students attend classes for 18 weeks (90 school days) and vacation for six weeks. This cycle is repeated twice during the year.

Multitrack: The multitrack 90/30 calendar divides the school’s enrollment into four groups (tracks) that are in session on a staggered schedule, with three tracks attending school at any given time.

Single-Track: A single-track is one of the four tracks of the multitrack. When the schools refer to the single-track calendar, they mean Track A.

Track A: All schools that choose the single-track option must choose Track A of the 90/30 calendar. Track A is the only track that provides about six weeks of vacation in July and August, therefore most closely approximating the traditional school calendar.