A School That Works: Palms Junior High : Education: A visit this week by gubernatorial candidate Dianne Feinstein adds another gold star to the school’s list of accomplishments.

The parents come to school meetings, ask questions about their children’s education and routinely pull out their checkbooks.

The students don’t seem to belong to gangs, they seldom fight among themselves and last year they raised more money through magazine subscription sales than any other junior high in Los Angeles.

Palms Junior High seems to work.

Recognized with state and national honors in recent years, the school in Palms was again pushed into the spotlight this week when it was visited by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dianne Feinstein. At the recommendation of state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who accompanied her on the visit, Feinstein chose Palms as the backdrop to plug her commitment to education.

She toured a class of basic-level reading students and a science class of gifted seventh-graders, invited student government representatives to her hoped-for inauguration and chatted with parent leaders. Palms, she said, exudes an “education ethic.”

The school has about 1,300 students, 400 of them in a magnet program for gifted students. Another 200 take honors classes. About half of the students live outside the neighborhood and are bused in--for the magnet program, for integration purposes or because their local school has no room.

The campus is calm, and the students of various races and ethnicities blend well, students and parents said. “When boys and girls go together, there’s a lot of mixed couples,” said ninth-grader Jennifer McMillan, who rides a bus to the school from Windsor Hills.

The student body is made up of about even proportions of Anglos, Latinos and blacks, with Asians composing about 5%.

“A lot of the teachers treat you like their children,” and students “aren’t afraid to go up and ask (the administrators) questions,” McMillan added.

Parents, teachers and administrators seem to have a contagious admiration for each other. “I like the feeling of community, family, belonging,” said Carol Turley, a PTSA leader.

This climate, along with the students’ academic achievements, helped the school win a U.S. Department of Education award in 1987: Palms was named one of 271 outstanding junior high, middle and high schools. The year before, it was named a California Distinguished School by state officials.

One of its strongest points is parent activism, the staff says. Principal Minnie Floyd, who has worked in three other schools in the district, said she’s never seen as high a level of parent commitment.

Most of the parents “are professionals, so they are very concerned about their children’s education,” said parent Linda Rosen. “They could afford to send their children to private schools.”

Their children are told that “(school) is their job,” parent Marcy Frerichs explained to Feinstein. On top of that, the parents flock to school and PTSA-sponsored seminars about teen-age sexuality, the college application process and other topics.

Three years ago, parents solicited Westside Pavilion to “adopt” Palms, and the mall has given money to paint the school.

In January, a nonprofit booster club was formed to raise money “because the state has been so lax in funding the school system,” said Rosen, a club founder. So far, it has raised $10,000, all from parents. The money has been earmarked for school beautification.

When principal and vice principal slots needed to be filled, parents lobbied L.A. Unified School District officials for non-autocratic types, Turley said. “With a big bureaucracy like LAUSD . . . you’ve got to keep digging, nagging,” she said.

“I don’t know of too many excellent schools that do not have active parent involvement. I think they sort of go together,” said Mark Slavkin, the Westside’s representative to the Los Angeles school board. He also was a 1976 graduate of Palms.

The parent involvement at the school started in the early 1980s. Throughout the Westside, many parents had become afraid that busing would ruin their neighborhood schools, and they began sending their children to private schools.

“It was white flight,” Rosen said.

In the neighborhoods around Palms, a few parents decided to buck that trend. Turley said that her eldest son, then entering seventh grade, had an athletic scholarship at a private school where many of his buddies were headed. But, she said, “there were things my child (would receive) at Palms that I couldn’t buy for him--the opportunity to socialize with children of all backgrounds.”

Turley added, “I had six children I knew would be coming through the system. If I didn’t do something, perhaps nothing would be done.”

Parents--those with children at Palms as well as the local elementary schools that feed to it--began their various fund-raising efforts. And they touted to friends and neighbors the pluses of no-cost schools that their children could walk to.

The sales pitch has evidently been working. Enrollment at Palms is 1,300, up from 1,100 in 1985, Principal Floyd said. Much of the increase is due to “people coming back to public school,” she said.

Not all is perfect, of course. Bill Jordan, whose son transferred from Palms to a private school a year ago, said the boy wasn’t being challenged enough, even in the gifted magnet program.

On state tests, the non-magnet students score above the district average, but the marks are low when compared to other schools where the students are of similar socioeconomic backgrounds and English abilities.

School officials also complain about shortages of money, staff, equipment. When the school year started this month, administrators scrambled to place an emergency order for more seventh-grade textbooks.

The acclaimed parent involvement needs to be broadened, Floyd and the parent leaders acknowledge. The activist core is composed of parents who live in the neighborhood. Parents who don’t, and whose English is limited, often come to a few meetings, but not much more.

“Distance makes it a problem . . . (and) it takes them a while to get to know the people who’ve been in leadership positions,” Turley said. “Some of us have been together a long time--our children have been in elementary school together--so the bonding is easier.”