Right to Pick Campus Hastens School Reform : Sylmar Experiment Can Be a Model for Other Communities

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s decision to give parents at seven Sylmar schools the chance to choose between campuses speaks volumes about two matters of importance. One is the issue of just how difficult it can be--in a time of widespread discouragement--to interest individual schools in the need for change. The second involves the difficulty parents in the district have traditionally faced in gaining some control over their children’s education.

When the district’s Office of School Utilization was considering clusters of neighboring schools for the choice program, for example, it picked elementary schools in four parts of the district as likely sites. But Sara A. Coughlin, the district’s assistant superintendent for the San Fernando Valley’s elementary schools, informed all 131 campuses in her charge to see how many might want to get involved. Care to guess how many were interested? The correct answer is zero.

A similar result had already occurred when the district unveiled the first segment of its long-awaited reform plan, LEARN, which stands for the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now. That called for site-based management at complexes of high schools and the elementary and middle schools that feed into them. Again, there were no clusters that applied. But interest by neighboring schools was even more important to the trial choice plan. Simply put, it would never get off the ground if school officials did not want to get involved.

Coughlin is to be commended for pressing her point with the seven Sylmar elementary schools. Those campuses, in turn, have done the right thing by climbing on board and students figure to be better served.

Each of those schools will determine how many choice slots will be available at their schools--as many as 50 each--and will inform parents by newsletter by June 14. A week later, parents at those schools will be able to transfer their children on a first-come, first-served basis. The hope is that parents will feel more involved and in control, and will be prompted to learn more about what these schools have to offer. A side effect could be to encourage these schools toward a friendly competition that might ultimately improve the educational product. If particular schools are losing students, and gaining few if any, it could also serve to alert district officials to problems at those campuses.

That brings us to our second point, which is the difficulty parents have faced in gaining such control over the schools their children attend.

Until now, parents could try to enroll their children in various magnet programs around the district, or they could go through a permit process in trying to transfer to particular schools. But some of those permits were based solely on desegregation goals and the racial and ethnic makeup of the schools and the students in question. If your child would “enhance the integration status” of a school, for example, he or she could transfer there.

Informed parents were able to work around the system by using another kind of permit that allows parents to choose particular schools if both of them work and the school is close to their employer or their child-care provider. The new choice plan eliminates many such requirements and also allows students to stay in the schools they currently attend, even if they move out of its attendance area.

Public school choice is an integral part of the LEARN reform program, and one that will hopefully evolve into a systemwide effort. Coughlin says that other elementary schools are still welcome to join the program. That means that parents and officials at other schools around the Valley--and the district as a whole--would do well to examine the Sylmar experiment with an eye toward how it might work in their communities.