Vista Arts Magnet School Is a Hit Before It Opens : Education: New school that will combine performing arts with traditional learning had a long waiting list long before the doors were set to open.

Some parents are so determined to get their children into a new Vista school that they’re calling the principal three years before their kids are old enough to enroll.

Others have tried to beat the competition by submitting their children’s resumes.

Meanwhile, parents lucky enough to have had their children accepted are turning out in droves to get involved in their kids’ educations.

“I get calls from parents of 3-year-olds and 2-year-olds, wanting to get their kids on the waiting list,” Rodney Goldenberg said.

Goldenberg is principal of the Vista Academy of Visual and Performing Arts, a public school that has generated enthusiasm long before it’s opened.

The goal of the academy is to integrate the arts into the state-dictated curriculum of physical development, literature, social science, math and technology.

“When you’re teaching a literature lesson,” Goldenberg said, “I want those children singing about that literature and dancing about that literature, and I want those children acting out what that literature means to them.”

The academy, whose first bell rings July 30, is one of two new magnet elementary schools in the Vista Unified School District that will begin classes next month. Casita Elementary will become the Casita Center for Technology, Science and Math. The school, on the city’s west side, opens its new program July 1 with 150 magnet students added to its existing enrollment of about 650.

But, because the academy is starting from scratch, it has commanded center stage.

“There is so much energy and so much excitement for the school,” said Letha McWey, president of the academy’s PTA. “Everybody wants to get in on the ground floor.”

Those are welcome words for school district administrators, who pursued the magnet concept primarily as a means to improve integration.

Bill Loftus, the district’s assistant superintendent for instruction, said officials were at first hesitant about the magnet concept. They weren’t sure parents would be willing to put their children in classrooms across town.

But those concerns dissipated after the district announced last August that it planned to close Santa Fe/California Elementary School and reopen it with a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade curriculum infused with dance, music and drama.

Applications came pouring in. By the Dec. 15 deadline, all 650 of the openings at the new school, the Vista Academy, were filled. Now 250 children are on a waiting list. Just as important, the academy has achieved a racial and ethnic balance in the process.

Although magnet schools have been used since the 1970s to encourage voluntary integration in Los Angeles, San Diego and cities throughout the country, Vista only recently realized the need.

The school district has been building more elementary schools in outlying areas near newer housing developments to keep pace with the city’s growth. As those schools opened, they drew away many of the Anglo children who had been traveling to schools in older neighborhoods.

At Santa Fe/California, the district’s oldest school, in a rundown area of central Vista, minority enrollment had been expected to climb to 80% this year.

Not satisfied with a major reconfiguration of school boundaries or adoption of an expanded busing program to bring the ethnic balance closer to 50% minority and Anglo, trustees latched on to the magnet concept. They took their direction from a survey of parents, and, after studying other magnet programs in San Diego County and around the country, decided to have two schools, one emphasizing the arts, another sciences.

To dispel Santa Fe/California’s inner-city reputation, district trustees also gave the school the more dignified title of an academy. Something worked, because the enrollment is now 43% minority, 57% Anglo.

In the district’s nine non-magnet elementary schools, minority enrollment will be kept within 20 percentage points of the districtwide average of 38%, Loftus said.

Parents say they are excited about the academy because it returns to the classroom the art, music and drama that children love but that schools, with their tighter budgets, have been forced to cut.

“I believe they’re making learning fun, and integrating arts with the curriculum is a much better way to learn,” said McWey, the PTA president, whose son will be in the academy’s fourth grade and whose daughter will be in its kindergarten. “They’re creating an atmosphere that makes the kids want to come to school.”

Chris Carrasco and her 9-year-old son, Ty, are eager to get started. Ty has been attending Bobier Elementary, a short distance from the Carrascos’ home. He’s also been losing interest in school.

“My son’s really shy, and I’m hoping this will help change that,” said Carrasco, who has been working as a bilingual aide at Santa Fe/California. “They say actors and performers are shy until they get on stage. I’m thinking maybe he’ll be like that.”

Ty, who likes to sing and imitate people on TV, wanted to enroll in the academy, she said. Five of his neighborhood friends, who also attended Bobier, are enrolled too.

Since plans for the academy were announced, Goldenberg, the principal, said he has had to deal with misconceptions that he will be running a school like Manhattan’s High School for the Performing Arts, made famous by the movie and TV series “Fame.”

The academy will offer specialty instruction in dance, drama, vocal music and fine arts for all grades, and instrumental music lessons for grades three through five, Goldenberg said, but he has stressed to parents:

“I’m not going to turn out dancers, I’m not going to turn out performers. I (am) going to get your children excited. They’re going to have fun. They’re going to enjoy expressing themselves.”

Apparently, not everyone got the entire message.

A few applications Goldenberg received from parents included resumes, detailing their children’s previous acting jobs in commercials and movies.

“I’m sure I’ll have a few stage moms,” he said. “But what I’m telling people is, ‘We’re an elementary school, and our No. 1 job is to teach.’ ”

That’s where Steve Lankford comes in.

Lankford, one of the academy’s founding faculty members, has a master’s degree in drama production. Since 1986, his fourth-grade class at Bobier Elementary has been sort of a mini-academy.

“I’ve always been excited about the process of using the arts to educate and the process of making the arts central to the curriculum, rather than adding it on as an afterthought,” Lankford said.

To get a lesson across, Lankford often relies on “creative drama,” which allows children to act out or creatively demonstrate what they have learned.

“Every time I say, ‘It’s drama time,’ or, ‘We’re going to do creative drama,’ the whole classroom lights up,” Lankford said.

“One of the things creative drama does for kids is it really kicks them into a higher level of thinking. It coaxes them into synthesizing material,” he said.

No coaxing has been needed to get academy parents involved, however.

When the academy first invited parents to meet the school staff, it quickly became apparent that the room, with 300 chairs, wouldn’t be able to hold the turnout. The academy ended up holding two meetings, each attended by 285 parents. McWey, who has been active for many years at Beaumont Elementary, said she was amazed when 120 people turned out for Vista Academy’s first PTA meeting.

“I’ve never seen that,” she said. “At Beaumont, we can hardly get people to serve on our school-site council. At the academy, we must have had 10 people sign up right away.”

Parents have also worked among themselves to put a co-op day-care center on the campus so their younger children are looked after while the parents spend time assisting teachers in the classrooms. The academy will also have an all-day kindergarten program.

It will also be one of the few magnet school programs in the country to be bilingual, Goldenberg said.

One of the problems magnet schools have had is maintaining minority enrollment. A study of Los Angeles magnet schools, for example, found that some had not achieved the ethnic balance they sought because their programs were all taught in English, effectively excluding minority students who spoke Spanish or other foreign languages.

English-speaking children at the academy will begin learning Spanish in kindergarten.

“In Southern California, it only makes sense,” McWey said.

The process of turning Santa Fe/California Elementary into the Vista Academy has called for a lot of changes to the school’s buildings. A cafeteria has already been made into an auditorium, a former classroom is now a dance studio, and other rooms are being remodeled for drama, art and vocal and instrumental music instruction.

Loftus said the cost of starting up and operating the two magnet programs is about $1.2 million. Those costs are being picked up by the state through a funding program that encourages voluntary integration. Any costs the schools incur over those normally associated with an elementary school will continue to qualify for state funding, he said.

Goldenberg said the district is already talking about expanding the academy’s enrollment, adding a grade in each of the next three years until it becomes a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade program. Given its entirely new program, the district intentionally kept the academy’s enrollment low in its first year. The campus is large enough to hold 200 to 300 more pupils.

Such plans please parents such as McWey, who hopes to see her two children progress through the academy’s eighth grade. If she has any regrets, it’s that the academy wasn’t available for her older son, who enters high school in the fall.

Through his grade school years, McWey said, her eldest didn’t have much opportunity to perform or read before a group other than his classroom peers. Now he is reluctant to do so, she said.

Her younger son, however, happened to have teachers who emphasized the arts, and he is comfortable going in front of a group.

“This is something all kids should have an opportunity to do, because it does nothing but build their self-esteem,” she said.

“It just shows what the arts can do.”