Delayed Magnet School Forms Raise Anxieties : Education: Applications for the prized programs are overdue because of changes affecting grade levels.

A rite of spring in the Los Angeles Unified School District--receiving and returning applications for the highly prized magnet schools--will be delayed a month, prolonging the tension for parents and students and complicating plans for next fall.

The delay is due to a snafu over a district plan to regroup grade levels at many schools. The Board of Education, which already approved a plan in principle to make grade-level changes, needs to vote on specific schools--including many magnets. The vote is scheduled for next week.

The school district typically issues its magnet application brochure--called Choices--to parents no later than Valentine’s Day. Parents would have a month to apply and would be notified of acceptance by mid- to late May. This year, however, parents probably will receive the brochure by March 18, the application deadline will be mid-April, and acceptance notices won’t be out until mid- to late June.

Magnet school principals say they are getting calls from parents who are nervous about not having received the applications and about the late notification.

“The birds come, the leaves come out and the Choices brochure comes,” said Bob Reimann, the principal at Sepulveda Middle School, which has a magnet for gifted and high-ability students on its campus. “Everyone’s anxious because the time has been delayed. We’re getting eight or 10 calls a day about it.”

The district has 108 magnet schools, many of which offer specialized educational programs and racially integrated settings. About 37,000 of the district’s 640,000 students attend magnet schools.

This year, the district expects to receive about 38,000 applications for 10,000 openings in magnet schools. But students already in the program get priority, as well as students who have been on the waiting list.

Parents say they are worried about the late notification.

“We’re all feeling anxious because it may be into summer before we know,” said Diane Siegel, a Northridge parent who has two children in Balboa Elementary’s Gifted/High Ability Magnet. Siegel’s son will be in seventh grade next year, and she is looking for a middle school magnet program.

For parents who are considering other opportunities for their children, the June notification will conflict with private school deadlines.

“The longer things drag out, the longer other deadlines will intrude on this,” said Steve Schneider, a parent with a child at the Sepulveda magnet.

Ray Michaud, headmaster at the John Thomas Dye School in Bel-Air, said the elementary school typically receives about 250 applications for 50 openings. About half of those applicants are parents in the Los Angeles Unified School District. And John Thomas Dye, along with about a dozen other private schools in the area, have April deadlines for parents to formally enroll their children in the school.

Other private schools have later deadlines--but most require parents to commit before June.

District officials say they needed to iron out the details of the grade level changes before they could put out the application brochure.

“There is such volatility around this that we don’t dare make any mistakes,” said Richard Battaglia, the district’s magnet school coordinator. “It’s not ideal, but there was no way we could put out something incorrect.”

All district schools will eventually be reconfigured so elementary schools serve kindergarten to fifth grades and middle schools serve sixth to eighth grades.