Parents Reassured on School Plan : Chatsworth: Speakers extol new class groupings and curriculum changes to be instituted at Lawrence and Nobel junior highs.

Teachers, school administrators and district officials teamed up Thursday night to reassure scores of Chatsworth parents worried over the prospect of sending their children to junior and senior high schools a year earlier than expected under a plan recently adopted by the Los Angeles Unified School District board.

Addressing about 100 parents in the auditorium of Lawrence Junior High School in Chatsworth, several speakers from throughout the San Fernando Valley extolled the new age-grouping and curriculum changes to be instituted at Lawrence and Nobel junior high schools in the fall of next year. The two campuses will add sixth-graders to their rolls and send ninth-graders to expanded high schools.

Principals from local junior highs that are already organized according to the new “middle school” model told the audience that their campuses now provide an education superior to that offered previously.

Taking a novel approach that clusters teachers in teams to knit together disparate subjects, the schools have watched their attendance rates improve and their students become more tapped into their education, the principals and other district officials said.

“That’s why we’re so emphatic” about reorganizing the schools, said John Liechty, head of the district’s middle school unit. “The difference between a seven-nine and six-eight campus is phenomenal.”

The meeting was convened by school board member Julie Korenstein, who represents the West Valley, to dispel anxieties and answer questions sparked by the school board’s unanimous decision to reconfigure four Valley high school “complexes”--that is, the senior high and its feeder junior high and elementary schools--by the 1993-94 school year.

Under the district plan adopted Monday, the Granada Hills, John F. Kennedy and James Monroe high school complexes will switch to the new model this fall. The Chatsworth High complex, which includes Lawrence and Nobel, is scheduled to convert the following year.

Some Lawrence parents Thursday questioned whether an 11-year-old would fit in at a middle school. But administrators at Hale Middle School in Woodland Hills, which converted several years ago, responded that the sixth-graders on their campus adapted well.

District officials added that the move to reconfigure follows studies showing students in middle schools and four-year high schools to be more suitably grouped according to their mental and emotional maturity.

Other parents expressed concern that elective classes offered at Lawrence may be eliminated if ninth-grade teachers--who teach them--follow their students to the high schools. But Richard Cord, principal at Portola Middle School in Tarzana, said his curriculum remains intact.

“Portola has wood shop, metal shop, computers, electric keyboard, typing, five periods of choral music, five periods of instrumental music” and other courses, he said. “Losing the ninth grade, gaining the sixth grade does not cost you electives.”