Against the Trend : In Era of Co-Ed Schools, Chrysalis Is for Girls Only

Jessica and Lisa Delmar earned A’s and B’s in public school but were surrounded by halter tops, hip-hop and playmates who swooned over MTV. Their mother worried that they would grow up too fast.

Linda Delmar wanted her 9- and 10-year-old to concentrate on the classics. So she enrolled them in Long Beach’s first private girls’ school, where the director promised that they would read Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and not magazine interviews with Madonna.

At The Chrysalis School for Girls, 5- to 13-year-olds study literature and grammar, math and science. All of the girls, even the little ones, study French, take lessons on the school’s four upright pianos, put out a monthly newspaper and take ballet.

Dressed in navy jumpers and surrounded by world maps, the sisters’ interest in academics has grown.

“Now that they wear uniforms, I’ve noticed they act more like children than teen-ager wanna-bes,” their mother said. “That’s part of the reason we put them there. We wanted them to concentrate.”

Bucking national trends, the Chrysalis School opened in September at a time when many girls’ schools were admitting boys.

The National Assn. of Independent Schools, which represents non-parochial college-preparatory schools, reported that during the 1964-65 school year, 41% of its private institutions were co-ed. By the 1991-92 school year, that proportion had risen to 80% of its 900 institutions.

In Los Angeles County, 22 private schools for girls operated in 1991-92, according to the state’s Department of Education.

Director Julia Margaux knew that opening an all-girls school in the ‘90s would be novel, but with $4,000 in savings, she pressed on.

Margaux and her teachers hold classes in a homey building with bay windows, a playroom, a costume closet and a huge basement that converts into a stage or a dance studio. Margaux rents the property for $575 a month from the adjoining Emmanuel United Presbyterian Church at 6th Street and Termino Avenue in Long Beach.

Margaux, who grew up in England but attended college in the United States, has taught at other private schools, including a Montessori school and the Huntington School in Long Beach. She and four other teachers all have state teaching credentials.

The school feels familial. The younger girls, their braids tied with satin ribbons, run to the older ones to show off their loose teeth. Teachers hold students on their laps to go over lessons. At lunch, the girls skip rope on the sidewalk.

Although the school opened last fall with only 12 students, by the end of the first week it had 16. And this semester, 22 are enrolled.

Chrysalis has 40 girls on a waiting list for next year, Margaux said. She plans to open a second school next year in Orange County and one in Woodland Hills in 1994.

For years Margaux wanted to open her own school because she disagreed with the traditional A to F grading of students and also wanted to work more closely with her students’ parents.

“Getting your child from K to eighth grade is team work,” she said.

At Chrysalis, the girls are evaluated by the essays they write but do not receive letter or number grades. A board of parents decides which computers to buy, when the school should take summer vacation and how it should raise money. Parents pay $3,800 a year, and the school is open from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. with no extra cost for child care. In addition, the school holds fund-raisers and solicits donations from women’s organizations.

“On paper every single month, it doesn’t come out,” Margaux said, “but I have never bounced a check.”

The school places extra emphasis on writing. The third-grade spelling words on the wall recently included literacy , naturalization , disqualification and exempt. And when her students complete a project, even a field trip as simple as a nature walk, the teachers always ask them to write about what they saw, heard, smelled and touched.

During an experiment in science class recently, teacher Lea Barnes helped the girls build a volcano and then asked them to record their observations.

“Red and white bubbles gurgled out of the bottle like a water fountain,” 9-year-old Ashleigh Carter wrote.

An emphasis on writing helps develop their critical thinking skills and builds self-esteem, the school’s literature and grammar teacher Julie Dennis Hlad, said.

“The imagination I see here comes out on paper, said Hlad, who left a position teaching English at a public high school where she had as many as 38 students in a class. At Chrysalis, she never teaches more than seven.

“If they weren’t encouraged to write it down, all that wonderful imagination would be lost.”

The teachers also assign projects the children can experience rather than just hear described. For example, the girls recently learned how immigrants become American citizens. Each girl did a report on a different country and memorized portions of the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. One day they dressed in costumes and were “sworn in” as citizens by a Superior Court judge.

The school’s students include one Filipina and one African-American girl; Margaux said she hopes to launch a concerted effort next year to diversify the school.

She also plans to open a private high school for girls within five years, prepare her students for national scholastic tests and point them toward the finest universities.

Girls who attend school without boys are “much more bold. They’re much more knowledgeable because they’ve got all their self-esteem,” Margaux said.

Some research supports that view. The American Assn. of University Women released a report recently that brought together two decades of research. The report concluded that girls in public schools receive less attention from teachers, are discouraged from taking challenging math and science courses, and are subjected to sexist stereotypes.

Margaux thinks that her school will nurture its students, as the chrysalis nurtures a caterpillar until it becomes a butterfly.

“Those that will be with me for four or five years will be brilliant,” she said.

The girls still fidget in class and complain about the uniforms or having healthy snacks instead of junk food, but the school’s oldest student said they will be better off for it.

Amelia Lancaster, 14, left a public middle school in Long Beach because she thought that she wasn’t getting the individual attention she needed to prepare for her dream of becoming a marine biologist.

Even “if you do or say the wrong thing, everyone learns from you here,” Amelia said. “I love this small school.”