UCLA Drops Plans to Move Elementary School Off Campus

UCLA has backed away from a controversial plan to move its highly touted experimental elementary school off campus and into the Santa Monica public school system, university officials announced Monday.

The plan was abandoned in the face of intense protests from some parents and faculty from the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School, who lobbied state legislators and officials to oppose the move, generating enough political opposition to kill chances that the plan would receive the required state approval.

“One of our concerns all along has been to guarantee (the school’s) integrity and independence,” said UCLA Assistant Vice Chancellor Carlotta Melon. That would have required legislation to allow the school to maintain its independence while part of a public school system, she said.

“Without the support from the state, we have no choice” but to drop the plan, Melon said.

The decision was a major victory for the small group of parents and University Elementary School officials who had opposed relocation of the historic laboratory school, contending it would not be able to continue to function as an independent research facility under the supervision of a public school district.

“It’s crucial to keep the school (at UCLA), not just for our children, but for the benefit of kids all over the country” who benefit from research conducted at the school, said Kathy Seal, mother of a University Elementary School student and one of the leaders of the protest.

UCLA and Santa Monica school officials have contended that aligning the school with a public school district would better allow it to test the relevance of its research outside of the rarefied atmosphere of a college campus.

Under the plan, the school--which tests new teaching techniques on its 450 students--would have been built on parkland in Santa Monica’s ethnically diverse Ocean Park section. It would have operated under the aegis of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, but be staffed and supervised by UCLA’s School of Education.

“We’re disappointed because we really felt we were doing something both to assure (the school) of long-term security and to benefit students in our district,” said Dan Ross, president of the Santa Monica-Malibu School Board.

“We thought we had a good chance of getting there, and we’ve been short-circuited by politics rather than a good educational study and analysis” of the implications of the move, he said.

The difficulty of persuading legislators to support the plan--coupled with the likelihood that parents would sue to block the move--prompted the district to abandon the proposal, Ross said.

The elementary school has operated on the UCLA campus for more than 100 years, drawing students of every ethnic group and income level from across Southern California. In its ungraded classrooms, where teachers develop their own curricula, children of movie stars, politicians and poor families have served as guinea pigs to test innovative teaching theories and techniques.

Negotiations to move the school began after UCLA announced plans to use a record $15-million endowment to build a new Graduate School of Management on part of the nine acres used by the school.

Melon said plans to build the new graduate school will go forward, while the university considers the future of the prestigious lab school.

Elementary school faculty and parents are proposing the university build a facility alongside the school to house the Graduate School of Education and coordinate lab school research. That would allow the lab school to share its findings with schools around the state. Melon said that is only one of several options under consideration.

The defeat of the proposal comes only a few weeks after UCLA was forced by community opposition to retreat from some aspects of its plans for a major campus expansion.

The university had to scale back a massive, long-range development plan earlier this month after Westwood residents and community leaders complained about the increased traffic congestion and air pollution the project would generate.