Private Education With a Conscience : Schools: Pasadena’s Polytechnic offers students academic excellence and appreciation for the arts. Pupils are required to perform community service.

From its eclectic, slightly timeworn campus off California Boulevard, Polytechnic School in Pasadena has for decades practiced a style of private education that mixes academic rigor with a strong social conscience, prizes the arts as much as athletics and makes room for the poor alongside the rich.

“The youngsters here have an ability to care for and respect one another, to care about society and, for the most part, to really care about their studies,” said David Murphy, a Poly parent for 14 years and president of the 21-member board of trustees that governs the independent, college preparatory school.

One of the Los Angeles area’s most highly regarded private schools, Polytechnic turns out well-rounded scholars, requires its students to participate in community service projects and shares its resources and innovations with surrounding public schools.

Poly’s many efforts to share its wealth have won admiration within the tightknit circle of other non-sectarian private schools.

There is a free after-school math program open to public school students, as well as a no-charge, five-week summer program for talented students from Pasadena Unified School District campuses, staffed by Poly and Pasadena faculty. The regular summer session is open to all. The school also conducts workshops for public school teachers. And it opens its facilities for a range of public activities, such as Pasadena Youth Symphony rehearsals.

From the day it opened in 1907, the school has offered scholarships to children whose families could not afford the tuition. About $730,000--almost 9% of this year’s $8.4-million operating budget--goes for financial aid. School officials also are trying to boost minority enrollment, now 6% African-American, 5% Latino and 15% to 20% Asian-American.

For all this, Poly bears an inescapable element of exclusivity.

Like most of the area’s top private schools, Poly is expensive and tough to get into. Tuitions range from $6,055 for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten to $8,730 for grades nine through 12, plus other costs such as books, uniforms, lab fees and field trips.

Murphy said a recent study commissioned by the school projected that tuition could approach $20,000 a year by the end of the decade--an alarming prospect given the school’s commitment to socioeconomic diversity.

The 820-student school has space for about 100 new students each year but usually draws more than 1,000 applicants.

“About 70% of those who apply would have a successful experience at the school,” Murphy said. “That means we have to turn away a lot of really good kids, and that is very painful for us.”

Those who survive the anxiety-ridden rounds of interviews and entrance tests are admitted to a world of small classes (student to faculty ratio is 10.5 to 1), inspired teachers and an enriched curriculum that has all third-graders studying the violin and sixth-graders conjugating verbs in French, Latin or Spanish.

Lower School students--pre-kindergarten through fifth grade--are introduced to science, mathematical concepts and reading by cooperative learning techniques that foster attitudes of helping one another. In the Middle School, sixth- through eighth-graders begin the transition from self-contained classrooms to the departmentalized courses of high school. Each student is assigned a faculty member who monitors their academic progress.

Upper School students often spend as much time each day on homework as they do in class. They study one foreign language for at least three years, and some take on more. In keeping with the school’s goal of turning out well-rounded individuals, everyone who goes out for an athletic team is accepted.

To add to classroom instruction and foster the atmosphere of “caring and camaraderie,” the school tries hard to nurture. Middle School and Upper School students go off together with staff for several days to such places as Catalina Island, the Green River in Utah or a ranch near San Luis Obispo. In October, six exchange students from some of the republics that once made up the Soviet Union spent a month on campus. This month, six Poly students are making a reciprocal visit.

The 15-acre site near the California Institute of Technology (which, like Poly, evolved from the Throop Polytechnic Institute) contains two libraries, a computer room, media center, fully equipped science laboratories, gymnasium and a theater and fine arts center. The Upper School’s main building is a graceful mansion, set among fine old trees, which was built in the 1920s for a prominent Pasadena family and later donated to the school.

Teachers’ salaries average $40,700, still less than the average $44,500 earned in the Los Angeles Unified School District, despite strong efforts by Poly officials to improve faculty pay. But teachers say they have more academic freedom and more time to plan their lessons, can devote more attention to each student and consistently get support from parents and administrators.

“The intensity is very great, and the expectations are very high,” said Stanley Sheinkopf, an English teacher who spent more than 20 years as a teacher and administrator in Pasadena’s public schools before coming to Poly in 1984. “Everyone is striving, and I’ve had a chance to do some of the things that I’ve dreamed of doing.”

With a strong endowment and a series of annual fund-raising activities to bolster its budget, Poly is able to spend just more than $10,000 per student--double the $5,000 per child available to California’s public schools. About 59% of Poly’s budget goes to the classroom, including teachers’ salaries and benefits, and about 15% goes for administration, said business manager Robert V. Orr.

Academically, Poly students are standouts. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a widely used college entrance examination, the class of 1991 scored an average of 615 out of a possible 800 in the verbal part of the test and 675 in math. The national averages for public high school students were 419 and 473, respectively, according to the College Board, which sponsors the exam. Seniors in religiously affiliated schools earned average scores of 437 and 472, while the average for seniors at independent, college prep schools--generally the most academically elite--was 470 and 524.

Last year, 38 students, or 51% of the class of 1991, were National Merit or National Achievement honorees. Not surprisingly, virtually all Poly graduates move on immediately to four-year colleges, helped by an intensive counseling program that begins in the middle of their junior year.

But it is the school’s strong tradition of community service that makes Headmaster Alexander B. (Mike) Babcock proudest.

The community outreach program begins with class projects in pre-kindergarten, and by middle school, students are encouraged to tutor at public schools, make decorations for the Pasadena Senior Citizen Center, collect food and clothing for the needy, make sandwiches for the homeless or volunteer at an orphanage in Mexico. For several years, Upper School students have been required to do volunteer work in order to graduate, and Babcock said many exceed the requirement.

“I think kids who graduate from here have a social consciousness, feel a need to give back to the community. . . . I think that is a much stronger testimonial than test scores and (the number of) National Merit Scholars,” he said.

Like many parents, Hannah and Mark Farbstein of San Marino were attracted to Poly by its small classes and enriched curriculum but quickly came to appreciate the “good values they are teaching” as well.

“Our kids have had some really good opportunities to be friends with kids of different races, religions, backgrounds,” said Hannah Farbstein, head of one of the parent groups that work closely with the school.

“You think about private schools as being ‘clubbish,’ ” Farbstein added, “but I would never use that word with Poly. It’s much more like family.”

Polytechnic School’s Budget at a Glance

1991-92 operating budget: $8,437,731

Average spent per child: $10,289

INCOME

Tuition and fees: $6,494,697

Annual Fund, gifts, grants: $1,161,392

Endowment: $514,000

Other: $267,642

EXPENDITURES

Salaries and benefits: $6,049,200

Materials, maintenance: $1,179,003

Tuition assistance: $730,000

Other: $479,528

Source: Polytechnic School Business Manager Robert Orr