Changing Schools--Any Way They Can : Education: L.A. parents are going to great lengths, including falsifying records, to get their children into Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Culver City districts.

Spurred by the Los Angeles Unified School District’s highly publicized problems, growing numbers of Westside parents are exploring legal and illegal ways of enrolling their children in the area’s three smaller--and well-regarded--school districts.

Phone lines at the Los Angeles district’s permits and transfers office downtown have been jammed all week, and schools in Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Culver City, which don’t start until next month, report a steady stream of parents seeking admission.

More than 5,000 children received permits to leave Los Angeles schools last year, the first year of the districtwide year-round school calendar, and even more are expected this year. About 350 “outsiders” transferred into Beverly Hills; 846 switched to Santa Monica; about 100 enrolled in Culver City. Most, but not all, live within the L.A. district’s boundaries.

“To the degree that there is chaos in Los Angeles, we become an option,” said Beverly Hills Unified School District consultant Carol Katzman. Permits to leave Los Angeles city schools more than doubled during the past seven years, from 2,203 in 1985-86 to 4,568 in 1990-91, the latest year for which official numbers are available.

And for every family that gets in with a permit, countless others enroll by simply falsifying their addresses.

The basic rule governing most transfers is simple. Children in kindergarten through eighth grade living inside the Los Angeles Unified School District may transfer to other school districts legitimately on one-year, renewable permits if they are enrolled in child care in the other district, or if a parent is employed there.

The transfer concept, incorporated into the state Education Code in 1987, is a “permissive” law; school districts that allow transfers do so voluntarily. (Permits for children whose parents work for another school district, by contrast, are almost automatic.)

Some parents go to amazing lengths to switch districts.

* One Brentwood mother uses a friend’s Santa Monica address and had the friend’s utilities transferred into her name so that she could produce the necessary proof of residence.

“If you tell the truth,” she recently warned her 8-year-old, “Mommy will have to go to jail.”

* A Bel-Air family rented a small apartment in Beverly Hills for their teen-age daughter and maid.

* Still others buy standard lease forms to fake rentals, claim their children live with friends or relatives in the desired district, or simply rent a mailbox in an apartment building with a cooperative owner.

At a time when classrooms in Los Angeles city schools are overcrowded and underfunded, sometimes tinged with gang violence, and filled with large numbers of students not fluent in English, many Westside parents say they have given up on public education, yet cannot afford or get into private schools.

They see a solution in transferring to a district perceived as better, and will go to almost any lengths in the search for a good education for their offspring.

“The city schools have gotten to be so bad,” one Palisades mother said in trying to explain why she sought a transfer.

The woman, who asked for anonymity, said she had few qualms about lying and teaching her children to lie.

“You see other people’s kids going to these good schools, so you think, ‘Well, why not?’ The other day I asked a neighbor how come his kids go to Lincoln (in Santa Monica) when he lives here, and he said, ‘We lie.’ Everybody does. It seems like half my daughter’s school lives outside the district, and mostly they’re lying.”

Santa Monica school officials say they turn their heads to all but the most blatant offenses; Culver City embraces the concept of “choice” and blurred district lines. But Beverly Hills vigorously investigates those suspected of lying and expels their children.

“When we investigate, people get hysterical,” said Lillian Raffel, a member of the Beverly Hills School Board. She told how an elementary school vice principal tracked down one suspicious family.

“She knew the student didn’t live there (in Beverly Hills), but the parents were upset at being doubted. So she said, ‘OK, I want to see the child’s room and am coming right over.’ The mother agreed, but said, ‘I’m in the shower, give me 15 minutes.’ The vice principal immediately sped to the address, where a maid who answered the door had never heard of the family.

“About five seconds later, the mother drove up--in her bathrobe. ‘You caught us,’ she said.” The family actually lived in Encino.

Beverly Hills Supt. Sol Levine said that 54 students were expelled last year after investigators discovered they were attending local schools illegally.

And further south, in Torrance, district officials last year uncovered about 300 non-residents attending school without permits.

The problem has reached epidemic proportions nationally, with thousands of children being quietly uncovered and expelled despite the sometimes-convoluted measures parents take to get them out of troubled urban systems and into affluent suburban schools.

“Most of our permits are for child care,” said Jeff Crain, deputy to Westside school board member Mark Slavkin. “Under state law in K through eight, the district where a parent works has to accept a child if there is room in a local school. But we don’t let everyone go.”

Gov. Pete Wilson recently signed legislation that will extend the parent employment-related provision of the Education Code through the 12th grade, beginning next January, according to David Bice, coordinating counselor for the Los Angeles district’s permits and transfers office.

Students may also transfer for other reasons: a young cancer patient might be undergoing treatment at St. John’s Medical Center, for example, making Santa Monica schooling more convenient; a teen-ager from Mar Vista may be able to learn better in the Culver City system removed from gang rivalries with Venice. There also is a little-publicized agreement between districts to allow students who are having trouble in one to attend another for six months or a year in hopes that a change in environment will be helpful.

Under Los Angeles district policy, permits can be denied “if their issuance would negatively impact the district’s ethnic integration goals” or cost the district extra money. This means that, in some cases, the district could deny Anglo students permission to transfer while allowing minority students to leave.

In fact, however, the Los Angeles district rarely stands in the way.

“The way we actually practice, we have not ever actually said no to anyone legitimately eligible on the basis of ethnicity alone,” Bice said.

Securing a permit is a two-part process that involves a release from Los Angeles Unified and acceptance by the other school district.

Parents and officials in other districts complain that the Los Angeles district makes the process unnecessarily difficult. Applications must be picked up from the home school, filled out and sent to the district office. Parents must usually supply the district they are applying to with a lease or rental agreement or mortgage and a utility bill, a letter from their employer or child care provider.

“There are Catch-22s all over the place,” said a West Los Angeles mother who has gone through the process every year since her child, now 10, entered kindergarten. “It can take months of paperwork.”

‘I get mildly irritated when I hear complaints like that,” said Bice, insisting that the district doesn’t try to make it difficult. “We honestly grant permits to everyone we think meets the eligibility requirements.”

Still, he said, the district is reluctant to part with students, despite its problems, because “students bring money to the district, provide teaching positions and allow programs to be developed.

“We make a serious effort to screen out people who don’t belong,” he said.

An appeals process is available to parents who believe they have been denied permits wrongly.

The smaller districts on the Westside have experienced declining enrollments during the past 15 years, as the price of housing exceeded the reach of most young families, but the number of school-age youngsters now appears to be gradually rising and officials predict that spaces will become scarcer in coming years.

Permits are issued for one year only and must be renewed. However, most districts say that once a student is in, the permit is seldom revoked.

In Santa Monica, spokeswoman Catherine Habel said students are accepted on a space-available basis, with a certain number of permits granted for each school. Some permits are earmarked for minority students. She said the district considers whether a child will help a school’s racial or ethnic balance, needs subsidized child care, has a documented hardship, is the son or daughter of a district employee, or a sibling of a current student.

Acknowledging that fakery has happened, she said the district is trying to close the gaps by encouraging individual schools to investigate suspicious situations.

In Beverly Hills, board member Raffel said that elementary and middle schoolchildren gain entry through the city’s parks and recreation or local Y child care programs or because the parent works in Beverly Hills. At the high school level, transfers are largely limited to participants in a multicultural program that draws about 100 students from outside Beverly Hills and to children of school district employees.

The number of permits varies each year and is not determined until three days after the start of school, when regular residents are in place. Historically, there are quite a few kindergarten slots and far fewer in each succeeding grade. Of 30 kindergartners at El Rodeo elementary last year, 13 were there on permits, she said. All applicants were accepted at the K-1 level; no new outside students were admitted to the fifth or seventh grades.

Levine said lying among outsider parents is widespread, most commonly by using a friend’s or relative’s address as their own. Although reluctant to divulge the methods of its two investigators, district officials say they look for such clues as returned mail, anonymous lists, and no addresses or telephone numbers listed in school directories.

One family got caught when their correct address was accidentally printed in the PTA directory. Raffel said: “We are already onto several Valley families who’ve applied this year as Beverly Hills residents.”

The uncertainty of continued space in Beverly Hills has led some parents to withdraw their children rather than spend each fall on pins and needles. When there was no room at El Rodeo for outsider seventh-graders, one child who had attended the school since kindergarten was forced to transfer but allowed to remain within the Beverly Hills system.

“That is a risk people take when they take the child care permit route,” one district official said. “And now that Los Angeles schools start much earlier, what happens if they don’t get in? It’s a real problem.”

In Culver City, Supt. Curtis I. Rethmeyer said elementary school children are commonly accepted for child care reasons; secondary students under special circumstances such as uncomfortable gang environments. And like Beverly Hills, the district accepts some students living in specified border areas under an agreement with the Los Angeles district.

“If you work in the school district and your child is in K through eight, he has the right to enter in that district if there is space available,” Rethmeyer said. “There is a growing liberal attitude . . . if you work here or use child care here or both, once you start we’ll continue the student if there is no problem with his performance or behavior.”

Rethmeyer said that “in this day, with so many split families and working parents, a youngster might have a choice of any of four districts. The lines are becoming more and more blurred, and a concept of choice is evolving.”

Culver City makes little effort to weed out illegal students, he said. “If it comes to our attention, then we’ll check them out of school. But it does not seem to be a problem, it is not coming to our attention.”

Permissive attitudes may soon have to change, however, if financial and social problems worsen in urban districts. Reports from school districts throughout the country suggest that the number of parents seeking entry into more desirable districts, legally or otherwise, is growing.

Sometimes the lie comes to light in bizarre ways. In one poignant case in New Jersey, a second-grader carried off the charade quite well until Christmastime when he and classmates wrote letters to Santa.

The child burst into tears, as his teacher carefully copied out his return address from school records. “No! No!” he cried. “Not that house. I want Santa to come to my real house!”

Criteria for School Transfer Permits

Students may be granted permits to transfer out of the Los Angeles Unified School District and into another district, such as Beverly Hills, Santa Monica or Culver City, if they meet any of 10 criteria:

* Enrollment in a child care program in the desired district

* Special health needs

* Want to complete senior year in same school where attended 11th grade

* Permanent residence change in first or last 10 weeks of school year, or temporary move during house renovation or legal proceedings

* Hazardous traffic conditions between home and school

* Determination that a change in environment might benefit student’s achievement, adjustment, attendance or behavior

* Legal residence falls within specified areas near Beverly Hills or Culver City districts

* Parent works in desired district

* Student is participant in Beverly Hills’ multicultural program

* School of residence is overcrowded