Inglewood Trustees Hold Off on Pilot Middle Schools

Backing down to angry parents, the Inglewood School Board has rescinded its decision to create two middle schools and put several more of its schools onto a year-round schedule by July.

At a special meeting Wednesday, the board also unanimously voted to review the issue again at a meeting this Wednesday night. The district is facing severe overcrowding at the elementary school level and is trying to upgrade its curriculum for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders.

Steve Hines, a parent representative with children in overcrowded central city schools, complained bitterly that, in reversing itself, the board was playing politics and catering to one parent group after another.

“Does the board realize that at every meeting you have another divergence of opinion?” Hines said.

“My decisions are never political,” responded board member Lois Hill Hale. “I am an educator.”

The upcoming effort will be the third attempt at creating a middle school plan that appeases various parent groups and solves the crowding problem. The district expects to have more than 20,000 students by the 1996-97 school year, up from the current enrollment of 16,427.

Administrators first proposed a districtwide middle school program featuring four middle schools by 1993. Under that idea, all sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders would have gone to middle schools, and all elementary schools would have kindergarten through the fifth grade.

Currently, some elementary schools are kindergarten through sixth grade, and some are kindergarten to eighth grade.

Also under the Administration plan, those schools not now on the year-round schedule would be moved onto it.

But on Jan. 22, the board rejected the Administration plan, which had been some six years in the making. In its place, the board voted to create two middle schools that would open on July 1.

They were to be at Warren Lane Elementary School, which now has kindergarten through eighth grade, and George W. Crozier Junior High School, which currently serves only the seventh and eighth grades.

That meant some sixth-graders in the district would be moved out of their neighborhood elementary schools, whereas others would not.

Parents from Frank D. Parent Elementary School, which serves Ladera Heights, one of the district’s few upper-income areas, were angry about the districtwide middle school program. Parent school has a kindergarten through eighth-grade program, and some parents in the area wanted their upper-grade children to stay in their own neighborhoods. The board’s middle school plan would have left Parent School unchanged.

However, parents from Warren Lane school told the board this week that they were angry that their kindergarten through fifth-grade youngsters would be moved to other schools around the city so that Warren Lane could become a middle school.

At the same time, the Inglewood Teachers Assn., along with a few parents, complained that the district did not meet the state Education Code requirement to publish legal notices by Nov. 1 saying that more schools were going on year-round schedules.

The district’s position is that it first published such notices in 1986 and that there have been numerous other publications and meetings since then about the transfer to a districtwide, year-round schedule.