Parents May Find Snags in Going Private

Orange County’s private schools say a lot of parents may be surprised if the upcoming school voucher initiative passes, because it won’t be an easy ticket out of the public school system.

A recent Times Orange County Poll found that more than half of the parents with children in public schools said they would prefer a private institution if they had the $2,500 voucher called for in the initiative.

But a review of Orange County’s private schools--there are hundreds--found the market has a wide variety of options. Some of the best schools are costly and have limited availability, while others expected a boon in their enrollments if the initiative passed.

Most of the elite schools with tuitions approaching $6,000 don’t need a state-supported voucher system, officials said. Instead, schools more apt to grow should the initiative pass are the smaller, church-supported schools, where tuition costs are closer to the $2,500 a voucher might provide.

“I think there’s a misperception that is being supported by the proponents of the initiative,” said Mimi Baer, executive director of the California Assn. of Independent Schools in Los Angeles. “And that is parents are left saying ‘Well, you get this voucher and you get the school you want.’ But the reality is different. There are long waiting lists, and the tuition, although some schools help based on need, (limits) the access to private schools.”

High tuition, limited classroom sizes, and expensive construction for added buildings or new schools would make it difficult to accommodate a wave of new students, private school officials said.

While nearly 400,000 school-aged children attend public school in Orange County, another 46,170 students, or roughly 12%, are enrolled on one of the more than 280 private schools in the county.

At Harbor Day School in Corona del Mar, a $6,200 yearly tuition and a waiting list for enrollment are two major hurdles facing parents even before such an initiative can be approved by California voters.

“It varies from grade to grade. But for first grade, the (waiting) list is 17 to 18 pretested and qualified youngsters,” said Harbor Day Headmaster John Marder. “The class is limited to 22 students.”

At schools where tuitions aren’t as costly, most administrators who supported the initiative said they favored taking advantage of the marketing opportunity to increase enrollment.

These administrators said the demand for private education is strong in Orange County, where a large variety of religious and non-religious schools exists. Motivated students, a level of quality and nurturing, smaller class sizes and religion are just a few of the reasons parents seek private schools.

“I think there are people who would like more options and I think they’re concerned that public schools have been mandated or required or prohibited from dealing with religious issues,” said Mark Campaigne, headmaster of St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano.

A voucher system could be a financial boon for Carden Heights of Orange, said its director, Olive Gillmore. The 8-year-old school is one of more than 100 members of the New Jersey-based Carden Education Foundation.

Gillmore said her school, which has 40 students and an annual tuition of $3,500, could handle a student body twice the size without difficulty. Classes at the school, which shares its facilities with a Baptist church, average eight students, and Gillmore said that intimate environment would be a powerful draw for parents armed with the voucher flexibility.

Donna Connelly, founder and director of the Claremont High School in Huntington Beach, said a voucher-induced surge in enrollment could help her school with improvement projects, such as building an auditorium and a $200,000 science labs upgrading.

For her own nonprofit campus, which has grown from five students in 1975 to 150 students and a year-round program that costs $5,400 in tuition, another 50 students could be added should the voucher program increase the number of interested parents.

“We’re small and we want to stay that way,” she said, citing her school’s average class size of 10 to 15 students.

Marder of Harbor Day said he recently voiced his opposition to the initiative to his board of trustees and parents, noting that he didn’t want to compete with funding for public schools and fear of state intervention.

“I did that just to have them understand there are other issues than dollars,” Marder said.

Connelly of Claremont cautioned against expectations of any new schools springing up overnight.

“I’ve heard people saying there’s going to be all these private schools popping up just to cash in on people leaving public schools, but parents aren’t stupid,” Connelly said. “They’re not going to be out looking for a school unless they know enough to pick a good one.”