Q & A : Crossroads School’s Founder Sees Triumph in Its Diversity

* Paul F. Cummins, 54, headmaster and co-founder of Crossroads School in Santa Monica.

* Claim to fame: Starting 20 years ago in rented church space, Cummins has built Crossroads into a 900-student private elementary and high school that emphasizes helping youngsters discover their individual passions and offers everything from Japanese and Greek to violin, film and rock-climbing.

* Background: Born in Chicago, Cummins grew up in Los Angeles and earned degrees at Stanford, Harvard and USC. A teacher, poet, musician and writer, he was headmaster at St. Augustine By-The-Sea Episcopal School before co-founding Crossroads.

* Interviewer: Times staff writer Lois Timnick.

Q: What are you the most proud of in the 20 years that Crossroads has been in existence?

A: I’m most proud of the diversity and balance in the school--the diversity of program, the student population, the curriculum offering--and the balance that we manage to keep between the arts, academics and a whole rich variety of programs for students.

When we won the 1984 U.S. Department of Education award as one of 60 exemplary private schools, the two site visitors who came here said that they had never seen such an “educational carnival” that worked so well.

I like the word carnival because it ties into something else that I’m proud of--the fact that students at this school like coming here, are happy to be here. People do their best work when they’re happy. It sounds so simple-minded as to almost warrant not saying, but I think when students look forward to coming to school, you’ve got a far better chance of educating them.

Q: What is it about Crossroads that makes them look forward to coming here when they ditch school elsewhere?

A: I take great care to find teachers who are themselves alive and happy, who have a passion for what they are doing, and who treat students with respect and kindness. I believe kindness is terribly important, and if you’re kind to young people they appreciate you--it feels like you’re in an unkind world sometimes because of the pressures of adolescence.

Then, with our diverse programs, every student theoretically can find something here that he or she can be engaged in. I have found over the years that when students find one activity about which they feel passionate, that passion then spills over into everything else they do. So you try and design an environment with a palette so rich that all students can find some color that they can paint on their canvas.

Q: At the same time not neglecting what is referred to as “the basics?”

A: Right. We’re a college preparatory school, and 100% of our graduates go to college. And they get in excellent colleges. We’ve been sending about 50% of our graduates East, mostly to the Ivies.

But that in a private school is almost a given. The question is, what do they get while they’re here and what do they go off to college wanting to do with their lives? While that’s very hard to measure, we at least set up the best kind of environment we can that will encourage students to do creative things with their lives and to live a life of service to other people. So community service is also an integral part of our curriculum.

Q: How does that work?

A: We have the equivalent of two full-time teachers who do nothing but administer community service programs, and of the private schools in town, I think our program is the Cadillac program. It is a graduation requirement, and I have even held up diplomas of straight-A students if they haven’t finished their hours. They tutor in Head Start centers, day care centers; they visit lonely old people in convaleriums. We have a program called Adopt-A-Family where two Crossroads students and a social worker work with a disadvantaged family providing help for the mother. Typically it’s a single mother with five to seven children and living at the poverty level, and the Crossroads students will come once a week and help them, take all seven children to the park, give her an hour to clean her house without going batty. We try to keep it in West Los Angeles just for transportation reasons, but there’s plenty of poverty in West L.A.

Q: What is this “mysteries” program I keep hearing about?

A: In essence, it’s a human development course in which students can ask the kind of questions that are most deeply felt, where they can explore their “mysteries” in a safe and a non-judgmental environment, where they develop listening skills and human relationship skills.

The fact is that most of us in life flunk out not intellectually but emotionally. If you’re not paying attention to the emotional development of adolescents in school, particularly in the confusing times that we live in, I think you’re shortchanging young people.

Q: During this 20 years, what are the things that you’re not pleased about and would like to change?

A: Well, two things that I’m continually struggling with is how to find more funds for financial aid, and ways to improve faculty salaries. It has been particularly difficult for Crossroads to raise funds because we’re a brand-new school, so we don’t have an alumni that we can go to.

Q: How much is tuition now?

A: Tuition this year is $9,800 for grades 7 to 12; it’s less at the elementary school. I hasten to add that one out of every six kids on this campus is receiving some form of financial aid. I’m proud of the fact that we are not just an elitist school for the white and the wealthy. There is a good racial mix here, and it’s getting better each year.

Q: Well, Crossroads is perceived as an elitist school because it’s filled with movie stars’ kids and the very rich, and I don’t see many minorities. I’m sure you didn’t put Meryl Streep’s kids on the waiting list.

A: Well, without naming names, the fact is that celebrities’ children do go on the waiting list, and some get turned down because we don’t have room. As for elitism, with tuition this high, the school isn’t available to everybody, but we try to compensate for that with an extensive financial aid program.

Q: Who is the Crossroads student? What do you look for?

A: We are willing, on occasion, to bypass the straight-A student for the kid who’s kind of a maverick, who appears to have a creative spark, something unique about him that we think will add something to the diversity of the school. If diversity is one of your values, then you have to have it in your students as well as in your programs. And if you’ve got a wide array of programs ranging from the arts to athletics to community service, you need talented students to keep those programs going. So we look for interesting and talented kids.

Our string orchestra, I think, is probably one of the finest in the world. But to be in that orchestra means that you have to play your instrument almost at a soloist level, and in fact, at the moment, 11 out of 20 kids in the orchestra have soloed with symphony orchestras.

Q: Perhaps it’s a misperception, but when I think of Crossroads, I think of the music program. You seem to have a disproportionate number of gifted musicians.

A: Our orchestra is so extraordinary that we’ve gotten a disproportionate amount of publicity for it. But the fact is that kids who major in music here are 35 or 40 out of 700. The other 660 kids are not musicians.

We have arts majors here, and besides the music majors, usually about 30 are drama majors, and about 30 are visual arts majors. Those kids all take a full academic load. They have a focus on their particular art. But the other 600 kids don’t.

We have had strong athletic programs as well. Our basketball team won the state championship in 1987 in its division. And our girls basketball team won 77 consecutive league games. Our boys baseball team won the CIF (California Interscholastic Federation) championship twice in the 1980s. So I’m proud of that too.

Q: What sets Crossroads apart from other private schools?

A: Both the population and the programs are more diverse than your typical private school. But that really doesn’t capture it; there’s a spirit here, an ambience that outsiders say is almost palpable when they walk onto campus. And the ambience is of students who are challenged but at the same time not pressured. There’s a relaxed, happy atmosphere here that I think is unusual in schools in general, be they private or public. Students who transfer in say you work as hard here as at any good school, but it doesn’t feel like it.

You feel like the teachers are your friends. They are called by their first names. Students walk in this office and feel free to come in and sit down and say “Paul, I got a problem.” And we can talk about it. Now, to outsiders this seems disrespectful, but to insiders, there’s no confusion as to who’s the teacher and who’s the student. It sends out a subtle message that this is not someone who’s above you, this is someone who’s working with you to help you develop who you are. We don’t wear uniforms or have a dress code.

Q: How large is the school?

A: On this campus (1714 21st St.) in grades six through 12, there are about 700. And we have another 224 in the lower school (1229 4th St.) grades K through six. (There are sixth grades at both campuses this year.)

Q: What is Crossroads’ mission, and is it being fulfilled?

A: Part of the mission is not only to enable students to discover who they are, to feel positive about it, and to be prepared for college. Beyond that we want to somehow heal the planet and build community out there where it’s disintegrating.

So the reason for the community service program and the environmental education program--we have a very strong outdoor ed program which takes kids all over the state backpacking and canoeing and hiking--is I feel that our world is in serious trouble, and this generation has to be far more attentive to the problem of the planet and our inner cities than their parents’ generation, or we’re all going to be dragged down.

One of the obligations of independent schools is to train future leaders and to instill in them the notion that they are the fortunate and that they have an obligation to try and help the less fortunate. And if we don’t do that and are simply graduating glib, well-trained, intellectually facile young people so that they can go on and get good jobs and continue the disparities of wealth that exist in this world, then I don’t think we’ve done much to serve humanity.

Q: So the selfish and conservative young people the sociologists write about are not at Crossroads?

A: I don’t see it in our graduates. Not untypical is a girl who graduated two years ago who is a sophomore at UCLA, who is single-handedly organizing a fund-raising campaign for a South American tribe that is becoming endangered. I see a lot of our graduates going off to college and getting immediately involved in community action. Then I see many of them after graduation going into service occupations. I like to believe that what we’re doing here is having an impact on their lives. I think it’s very hard for a 16- or 17-year-old to have a 40-hour experience in their senior year of visiting the home of a truly poor person and seeing innocent children who have nothing, compared to everything that they have in their lives, and not being affected by it and not wanting to do something.

Q: Why do you stay in the private school setting? You have written about problems in the public schools and argued against tax credits because they would only encourage further flight from the public schools. But it appears that you have abandoned them too, although you were never really in them.

A: Well, I went into private education initially because that was a natural thing to do for me, because that had been my own background. I also began with the desire of teaching subject matter at a fairly difficult intellectual level and felt I could do that best in a private school where I had small classes and selective students.

Q: Have you given up on public schools?

A: No, on the contrary, I find that I’m spending more and more time now working with friends in the public schools to cooperatively develop programs. Recently, for example, through the Herb Alpert Foundation, Crossroads secured a grant to put in a comprehensive arts program at Broadway Elementary School. And, in fact, we’ve now secured four grants to put arts programs into public schools where they’ve been cut out. We provide teachers, materials and (musical) instruments.

One of the local junior high schools didn’t have a choral program, again because of budget cuts, so we simply have sent them our choral person. She has now launched two different choral groups at this local junior high school, and we’re paying her salary.

Q: How do your teacher salaries compare with public schools’?

A: We’re competitive with public schools. But the reason teachers often prefer to teach here to other schools, be they public or private, is because of the unique atmosphere here and the teaching conditions, where you have four classes a day with a maximum total of 80 students.

Q: What do you say to parents who can’t get their kids into private schools or don’t have the money to send them? They’re condemned to the system.

A: What I would say is you need to step forward as a citizen and let your local elected officials know that you’re very unhappy, and that if they don’t do something about it, you’re going to vote for somebody else. I mean, it’s the old democratic process. Pretty soon the President of the United States is going to wake up to the fact that there are serious problems in this country, and he can’t keep running around the world trying to solve problems elsewhere if he’s got serious problems at home that he has to pay attention to. Education 2000 is a step toward designing some model schools, but the problem is taking care of the schools that exist that have serious problems, disastrous problems.

Q: But you have said that designing better things in the schools is no solution because of the problems students and teachers bring to the classroom.

A: Yes, one of the things that I’ve been saying lately that’s almost become my own cliche now is that the public schools are the repository of all of our social and economic ills, and that until we address those, the schools ultimately can’t solve the problems. Schools can’t solve the problems of poverty, homelessness, drugs, violence, crime, et cetera. That can only be solved when we as a nation recognize we’ve got an emergency on our hands, and it’s going to require emergency action. When we perceived an emergency in the Gulf, we managed to mount a massive army to go over and attack; well, we need to amass the same kind of energy to solving the problems of our cities. And our schools are problems of our cities.

Q: Given that we’re not going to solve the ills of society overnight and we’re not going to suddenly see a great influx of money into public schools, do you think the best thing a parent can do is to just get his kid out of public school any way he can, honestly?

A: It depends on the school, because there are many public schools that are in fact doing a fine job.

Q. Westside schools.

A: Well, I haven’t done a thorough study of University High School, Palisades High School, Venice, Santa Monica High School. I do know that all of them have good programs, and many kids go there, do well, go to good colleges and have happy, successful lives.

Q: People seem to feel the government wastes their money. And why should voters who don’t have school-age children in public schools--their children are grown or they are in private schools like Crossroads or they aren’t going to have any--or older people who are living on fixed incomes support tax increases for schools?

A: When we vote against education bonds and when we vote for bills to lower property taxes, the vote is selfish but shortsighted, because in the long run failure of our cities’ infrastructure is going to drag everyone down. The notion that you can live, the notion that people for years thought that they could live on the Westside of Los Angeles and escape the social ills of Greater Los Angeles has now been proven to be false. It’s coming back and biting us on the behind, and public schools, even on the Westside, now are getting dragged down, and crime is up on the Westside, and people are afraid to walk on the beach at night.

Q: Your two children are now in high school and college. If they were younger, would you consider sending them to public school?

A: That might very well be my only choice. But parents have options. There’s a slight increase in the number of people who are educating their children at home, in home-study programs. There are people who supplement what the public schools are able to provide with private lessons, going to the local art center, going to Saturday programs at the museum, supplementing their child’s education. There are parents who form fund-raising groups within public schools to raise funds to expand programs at their own school where the program has been cut out. There are things that one can do, but I think mainly the thing to do is that every citizen has to start screaming loud enough so that the local state and national politicians hear it.