Parent Protest May Stall Plan to Reconfigure Some Schools : Education: A district proposal calls for Chatsworth High to convert to a 4-year program in the fall. Officials are now considering postponing the change.

Parents anxious that their youngsters may not be prepared for the rigors of high school may force a delay in plans to convert Chatsworth High School from a three-year program to four years this fall.

Opposition to the potential change from parents at Nobel and Lawrence junior high schools, whose students mostly go on to Chatsworth High, could throw a wrench in the works as the Los Angeles Unified School District continues phasing in freshmen at its high schools as part of a nationwide movement to reshape secondary education.

Despite opposition at Chatsworth feeder schools, a majority of parents at three other San Fernando Valley high schools--Granada Hills, John F. Kennedy and James Monroe--have expressed support for adding ninth-graders to their attendance rolls.

Under the new model, middle schools incorporating the sixth through eighth grades would replace junior highs, while elementary schools would be capped at the fifth grade. Six of the Valley’s 18 high school “complexes”--that is, the high school and its feeder campuses--have already been reconfigured.

“It’s the direction the district is going in,” said Julie Korenstein, West Valley school board member.

However, Chatsworth threatens to be the odd school out among the four Valley campuses that received the green light in November to begin studying the potential addition of hundreds of freshmen in the fall.

Because of widespread dissent from parents at Chatsworth feeder schools, district officials are now weighing whether to postpone the changeover at Chatsworth for a year or to offer alternatives to immediate changeover in the event that reconfiguration goes forward.

Several parents worry that their 14-year-olds are ill-equipped to cope with the pressures of high school life and the presence of considerably more mature teen-agers.

“A lot of our ninth-graders aren’t ready for high school,” said Yvonne Herthel, co-president of Lawrence’s Parent Teacher Student Assn. “Too many of our ninth-graders need that year at Lawrence.”

At district-mandated meetings held last month to canvass community opinion, Herthel and other parents at Lawrence and Nobel registered their opposition to pushing their ninth-graders into high school and throwing open their gates to sixth-graders.

Several parents at elementary schools also harbored reservations, although many were more concerned over the timing of the plan and thought that the district should defer it another year to give schools time to prepare.

But the question now is more a matter of when than if, district officials say. The trend in the district over the past several years has been toward reconfiguration, mirroring a nationwide drive to group together ninth- through 12th-graders for college admission purposes and sixth- through eighth-graders for social and emotional, as well as academic, reasons.

According to district administrators, studies have shown that students in middle schools and four-year high schools perform better than their counterparts in traditional junior and senior high settings because of more similar interests and needs.

“The sixth-grader in terms of maturity level is more in tune with the seventh- and eighth-grader than the third- or fourth-grader,” said Joe Luskin of the district’s middle school unit. “The ninth-grader is more in tune physically, mentally and emotionally with high school.”

Herthel disagreed, saying her 13-year-old daughter--who would attend Chatsworth High in the fall if the school board approves the changeover next month--is not ready for high school.

Some eighth-graders “think they’re ready,” she acknowledged, but “they’re still like little sixth-graders. They’re sassy.”

Herthel also predicted that Lawrence would lose several instructors to Chatsworth because the high school would need to beef up its staff for an influx of students, most likely by tapping faculty members from its feeder junior high schools.

But Richard Stalder, who teaches Spanish at Chatsworth, said new teachers on his campus could help shore up high school elective programs endangered by budget cuts as well as provide students with a rigorous college-prep education across all four grade levels.

“All the grades that count for college begin in the ninth grade, so you’d have some continuity there,” he said. “We think we can do a better job with ninth-graders in high school.”

“The educational issue is the overriding issue,” agreed Bob Collins, principal of Grant High School in Van Nuys, which added freshmen several years ago. “I don’t think the maturity gap between ninth- and 12th-graders is too great.”

The reluctance, however, at Lawrence, Nobel and other junior high and elementary schools that feed into Chatsworth could also put a clamp on the possible reconfiguration of the three other high schools, whose parents have mostly welcomed the idea.

Because many Nobel students go on to Granada Hills as well as Chatsworth, for example, plans to convert Granada Hills into a four-year campus could also be derailed if the school board accepts the objections of dissenting parents in the Chatsworth complex, despite the fact that a majority of parents throughout the Granada Hills complex favor the change.

Joyce Peyton, school utilization director, said the district is studying a number of alternatives, such as allowing parents to choose whether to send their youngsters on to the higher-level school or to keep them at their present campus for an extra year.

For example, an elementary school could release some of its sixth-graders to middle schools yet maintain a program for those who remain, she said. In other cases, some of the boundaries that determine school enrollment could be redrawn.

Korenstein said she supports giving parents options, although a middle school presents a better grouping of students.

“Within a complex, even if a majority of schools are ready” to reconfigure, she said, “I won’t force the ones who aren’t.”

Also, officials said, elementary and junior high schools could begin now to prepare their fifth- and eighth-graders, who would miss the experience of being “king of the mountain” on their respective campuses if they convert in the fall.

At Holmes Junior High School in Northridge, a Monroe feeder campus, most parents, teachers and students greet reconfiguration with alacrity, Principal Ron Twombly said. Twombly became a firm believer in middle schools after his experiences at Sutter Junior High School in Canoga Park when it changed over several years ago.

“As far as the school itself, it became a much quieter setting,” he said. “When the ninth-graders left and we received the sixth-graders, the three grade levels we then had were much more in tune with each other.”

Discipline problems diminished, and teachers were able to create a more nurturing and intimate learning environment by teaming up and teaching one grade level of students in all subject areas--one of the linchpins of middle school curricula.

“At Holmes, they’ve already implemented some of these middle school programs,” Twombly said. “So if sixth-graders come here, we’ll be ready.”