Teaming Up on School Woes : Education: Parents, teachers, administrators and others join forces to battle bureaucracy. The result is a coalition that wields considerable clout.

It seems an unlikely setting for a revolution, this enclave of graceful homes, trendy joggers and outdoor cafes perched on the ocean bluffs known as Pacific Palisades.

But that is just what educators say has been brewing here. The Palisades Complex, a group of local parents, teachers, administrators and community members, have been using the collective clout and cooperative efforts of nine schools and 6,000 students to accomplish what they could not individually.

The Complex also is the collective name for schools served by the group: the Palisades and Temescal Canyon continuation high schools, the Paul Revere Middle School, and the Brentwood Science Magnet, Canyon, Kenter Canyon, Marquez, Palisades and Topanga Elementary Schools.

The group is making big changes in how its children are taught.

School district officials laud the group as a catalyst in a system too often bogged down by bureaucracy.

“It is making extraordinary efforts with the school district to bring about fundamental, positive, structural change,” said Jeff Crain, deputy to Westside school board member Mark Slavkin, who was vacationing last week and could not be reached for comment.

The group was formed three years ago after Pam Bruns, its chairwoman, and another Palisades mother, Karen Stone, compared notes about common problems in the separate schools their children attended and the inadequacy of piecemeal solutions. The two women had long been active as school volunteers, committed to public education in an affluent area where dissatisfied families often find it easier to ship their youngsters off to private schools.

Today, the Palisades Complex boasts a roster of more than 200 members, a newsletter that reaches 2,000 homes and offices, and an impressive list of achievements. It is supported by donations and dues and is operated entirely by volunteers.

This year it has gotten attention for spearheading a reconfiguration of area schools that replaced traditional junior high schools by grouping sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders into a middle school, and shifted ninth-graders into high school.

The restructuring also paved the way for reforms at Revere Middle School aimed at the crucial and difficult pre-adolescent years, such as shorter class periods and core classes that allow a teacher to spend more time with the same students.

The Palisades and Westchester (which reorganized several years ago) complexes are the only reconfigured schools on the Westside so far, but University, Venice and Hamilton high schools and the neighborhood schools they draw from are expected to follow next year.

The shifting of grades in itself is not new: It has long been used throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District to relieve overcrowding at the elementary school level by moving sixth-grades upward.

With increasing attention being focused on the special needs of pre-adolescents and young teen-agers, educational reasons for regrouping the grades became apparent.

“The 10- to 15-year-old, regardless of his culture or language, is vulnerable, unpredictable and often bizarre in behavior,” says John Liechty, director of the middle schools unit of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“They are going through more physical, emotional, social and psychological changes than at any other time except at birth, and it is at this age that every one of them will make decisions that will impact the quality of the rest of their lives.

“For too long we have viewed them as tall elementary kids or short high-schoolers. They are neither.”

Liechty and other experts say that removing sixth-graders from elementary school makes sense in a society where kids mature earlier, and that middle schools for sixth-through-ninth graders can provide a nurturing transition to the academic rigors of high school. Thus many middle schools try to create smallness within bigness, individual attention amid anonymity.

The Palisades Complex and its Revere Middle School didn’t have to look far for inspiration in designing new programs. Excited educators from across the country have worn a path to the San Fernando Valley’s Northridge Middle School, which is viewed as the prototype of what a middle school should be.

Last year, several years after it began receiving sixth-graders and sending on ninth-graders, Northridge plunged into a rich program of team teaching, small advisory groups led by the same teacher or staff member for three years, interdisciplinary humanities classes, electives, special-interest clubs and awards. The result: higher attendance, fewer discipline problems and improved academic performance.

Revere, which lies between Brentwood and Pacific Palisades, has implemented some of those reforms this year. Sixth-graders enter a bigger world where there are lockers, multiple classes and older kids; they also have core teachers, slightly shorter class periods than in high school and a choice of extracurricular activities ranging from baseball card collecting or cheerleading to movie reviewing or the school newspaper.

“We have to become warm and fuzzy for younger kids as opposed to aloof; we need to be down there with the kids, not merely the ‘guest lecturer,’ ” says principal J. D. Gaydowski, who still remembers being near tears, intimidated and overwhelmed during his own junior high days in Venice.

At the same time, at nearby Pali High, ninth-graders now are able to begin college-prep courses in languages, math and science, to participate in high school sports, to explore their interests in a wide variety of electives and to assume more independence.

Pali High Principal Gerald Dodd summed up the merits of reconfiguration in two words: “Everybody wins.”

Crain said the reconfiguration of Palisades-area schools and the revamping of Revere Middle School could not have happened without the Palisades Complex.

“We are not some elite country-club Westside group,” said co-founder Bruns. “Our intent from the beginning has been to serve every child at our schools, whoever comes through those doors.” In fact, the majority of Palisades students are minorities who arrive by school bus.

The Pali Complex has been instrumental in many other innovations as well. It has:

* Won district approval for schools or coalitions of schools to devise their own solutions to problems like school overcrowding, based on their community’s unique needs.

* Supported the decentralization of power over budgets, curriculum and staffing known as “school-based management,” by sharing information and know-how with schools seeking the new designation and providing a research library and a resource person. Four Palisades schools have already been accepted into the new program--the highest concentration in the district.

* Addressed problems created by the new common calendar--such as what to do with children during the long winter break--by meeting with youth organizations and, joining forces with a group called Parents Together, compiled a directory of supervised activities and child care during school vacations that will be published next month.

* Hosted a series of town meetings and forums with elected representatives and school district personnel to make local needs known, to affect pending legislation and to get direct answers to its questions.

* Worked for policy changes in the CAP (for Capacity Adjustment Program) busing program, such as permanent pairings between suburban and inner-city schools, advance planning and local leeway in handling a rapidly growing minority population. “We need to be able to make decisions how best to use funds for the kids sent to us,” said Bruns. “It shouldn’t be imposed from the outside.”

* Developed a grant-writing workshop to aid both individual schools and the Complex, and applied for a grant to fund a grant-writing unit within the Complex.

* Begun evaluating standardized tests and their interpretation and use.

* Negotiated a share of all fees paid by movie-makers who film at school sites, fees that formerly went to the school district.

Emboldened by its successes and relishing the taste of educational independence, Complex members joke that they may soon sport T-shirts emblazoned, “Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Pacific Palisades.”

Some even speak of a visionary Palisades Unified School District, noting that they are bigger than many school districts, such as Beverly Hills.

District officials say they do not fear secession, however. “They cannot exist on their own,” notes Crain, since the bulk of Palisades Complex students come from outside the Palisades-Brentwood area.

Bruns and her team of volunteers, with their answering machines and faxes and endless meetings--sometimes held while jogging--downplay notions of revolt.

“There is nothing revolutionary about the Complex,” she says. “It’s just an extension of the whole restructuring going on in schools across the nation.

“But nothing will mean diddley-squat without the right people and money,” she said. “It’s frustrating. We see what the solutions are. We just need time and money and local control to use limited resources in ways that best meet the needs of the kids.”

She sighed.

“Bush says he wants 1,000 points of light,” she said, referring to the President’s call for volunteer efforts that make a difference.

“But it’s getting harder to twinkle.”