THE SUNDAY PROFILE : The Middle Man : Paul Scibetta could retire a happy man. But he can’t seem to shake his passion: Giving L.A.’s gifted minority students the chance to experience life in rural East Coast boarding schools.

More than a few Los Angeles high schools sit in gritty neighborhoods where students fear violence. The average class size districtwide is 38, and the kids frequently outnumber the textbooks.

A continent away, the Berkshire School rests amid 500 acres of rolling hills in rural western Massachusetts. In a typical class of 11 students, books are plentiful, weapons unheard of.

Transporting gifted minority students from here to there is Paul Scibetta’s passion.

Since 1983 he has arranged for 50 young people to attend Eastern boarding schools, brokering scholarships often worth more than $80,000 each over four years. Even in his off hours as assistant principal at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood--a job he loves but doesn’t need because of a lucrative sideline as a home builder--Scibetta works the system to his students’ advantage.

“Besides the education and the colleges they’ve gone on to, they’ve had incredible experiences,” Scibetta says. “They’ve had opportunities above and beyond the classroom that they’ll be able to use forever.

“At Berkshire School, one of our students was head of the campus radio station,” he says. “One student went to his roommate’s house in New Jersey over Thanksgiving. His roommate’s father took him up in a private airplane and they did a tour of New York and New Jersey.”

On a recent weekday afternoon, Scibetta sits in his office with two recruiters from Governor Dummer Academy in Byfield, Mass., which last year provided five scholarships to his students. The men present Scibetta, a marathon runner, with a gift of a lightweight running jacket in a lightweight traveling bag.

In the lobby, 13 fidgety, pre-screened eighth- and ninth-graders have gathered in hopes of impressing the “bigwigs,” who arrived wearing blue blazers, slacks and striped ties.

A less preppy Scibetta escorts the group to the school library, a churchlike sanctuary with an arched ceiling. For the next 90 minutes, he walks the room, passing information back-and-forth to recruiters and kids, while the one-on-one interviews take place.

That evening, he speaks to parents of the prospects at a reception in a Brentwood home.

Standing in front of a large fireplace of volcanic rock, he assures them that their children will be safe 3,000 miles away and that, despite the distance, families often emerge stronger from the separation.

Scibetta comes home to a 4,500-square-foot house that he shares with his wife, Aileen, and two sons. It’s in Pacific Palisades, well above Sunset Boulevard at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. Deer sometimes wander into the yard.

Before the recent real estate slump, houses in the neighborhood sold for $1.6 million, hardly the affordable zone for an assistant principal. But Scibetta has long banked on other income: He began investing in stocks at 18 and in real estate in his mid 20s. And for the last decade he has been a partner in a custom-home building business.

Five years ago, Scibetta took a sabbatical from a 20-year career in the Los Angeles Unified School District and became the general contractor on a small apartment building. He was thinking about leaving education for home building.

The new career never had a chance.

“I love children,” he says. “I love helping them in any way I can. . . . I come to work (at the school) and really enjoy what I do. I have a lot of lawyer friends who make a lot more money and aren’t satisfied.”

Scibetta says he learned that he belongs in education: “I missed it dearly.”

The decision doesn’t surprise Richard Kirschner, a Westwood attorney who is Scibetta’s neighbor and one of his two business partners.

“He made a lot more money than he ever made teaching but decided it wasn’t satisfying,” Kirschner says. “I kind of regard it as his pro bono work to the community.”

Scibetta was an administrative dean at Mt. Vernon Junior High in Los Angeles in the early 1980s when he found scholarships for six minority students to private high schools Brentwood, Harvard and Westlake.

He heard through a cousin who had sought hockey scholarships for youngsters to Eastern boarding schools that the campuses were eager to expand minority enrollment.

“I realized this was a win-win situation,” Scibetta says. “This was something the schools needed, and the kids needed these kinds of opportunities.”

He developed relationships over the next decade with Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire and Berkshire, Governor Dummer, Phillips Andover and Middlesex, all in Massachusetts.

Each fall, Scibetta begins the application process by asking eighth- and ninth-grade teachers for recommendations, then pulls the students’ complete records.

“It’s amazing if you look at comments of elementary school teachers,” he says. “They’re the same comments junior high teachers will make. Kids that are leaders in first grade or athletes in second grade or artists in third grade--those traits continue.”

On top of academic skills, he looks for maturity and leadership potential. “The students will have a lot of responsibility they’ve never had,” he says. “They’ll be minorities in a non-minority world and (competing) with students who have been pulled from the top of their classes.”

Finally, he guides the kids and their parents through the application process.

“He counseled my mother and I about the fact that I was 13 and would be flying across the country and leaving home. And he set up my admissions interview,” says Charisse Charley, who left Mt. Vernon Junior High for Governor Dummer Academy and is now a junior at Columbia University.

“He was fatherly. He was very open-minded. He was caring. He was more of a friend than anything. I could talk to him about apprehensions I had. My mom could talk to him about her fears.”

Scibetta invites concerned parents to meet with boarding school students when they’re home during vacations, or to talk with their parents.

“It’s a big adjustment sending a 14- or 15-year-old away,” he says. “I think the biggest thing is, ‘How will my life change? How will we deal with the chemistry of the household changing?’

“I start by saying that if you didn’t feel uncomfortable about this, there would be something wrong. I let them feel comfortable with the discomfort.”

Some parents, though, just can’t bear to let their kids leave home at such a vulnerable age.

But Charley’s mother, Adelaide, says Scibetta earned her trust.

“I was hearing things from other parents and people at Governor Dummer,” says Adelaide Charley, a single parent and part-time nanny, “but when I heard it from him, I trusted it because . . . I had had a lot of contact with him before. He always talked to me about Charisse. When I went to meetings he would tell me how she was doing and how great she was.”

Scibetta also singled out Valerie Mercier, now a senior at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, who attended the Berkshire School and Pomona College.

“I can recall him talking about what it would be like,” Mercier says. “Our parents really had to rely on him. None of us had the money to go out and visit first. . . . I believed in him because I knew he believed in me. I trusted he wouldn’t send me someplace I couldn’t handle. . . .

“He told me it was something you can’t pass up. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. And it was.”

In some cases, the scholarships have represented more than an educational windfall.

“I wasn’t getting involved (in gangs), but I had family members and friends that were,” says Imani Butler, a USC sophomore who graduated from Governor Dummer and attended Mt. Vernon Junior High. “Going back East gave me a good way out.”

Only two of Scibetta’s 50 scholarship winners have left boarding school before graduation. One returned home at the urging of her father, and the other because she developed what turned out to be a benign stomach tumor.

Matching students to the right schools, which vary in ambience and academic difficulty, is part of the challenge.

“Paul comes East every year to see kids he has in the schools,” says Michael A. Moonves, director of alumni-parent relations at Governor Dummer. “He spends time to get to know our program, meet faculty and meet the headmaster. He sees kids in action in the classroom and extracurricular activities.”

With such a success ratio, the five hours a week Scibetta spends on his program are well spent, says Walter Reed Junior High Principal Larry Tash.

“I’m sure all over the district we have hundreds of kids who have the abilities those (boarding) schools would want,” Tash says, “but we don’t have people like Paul who are making the contacts.”

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Scibetta, 51, attended public schools on the Lower East Side of New York City and in New Jersey. His father, a Canada Dry executive, and his mother, a homemaker, divorced when he was 2.

At 15, he began working as a part-time waiter in his stepfather’s restaurant and in eight years earned enough money to put himself through college. He graduated from Rutgers University and married Aileen Liddy, who later graduated from UCLA and now works as a student adviser at Palisades High School.

Scibetta taught for two years in Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant. In 1970, the couple moved to Los Angeles. Scibetta, then 26, went to work as a math teacher at Mark Twain Junior High in Mar Vista. A year later, they bought a duplex on the beach and soon invested in other properties. When the Scibettas had their second child, Colin, now 12, they decided to build their current home.

Pictures of Scibetta the marathon runner hang on its walls, along with signed lithographs of marathon scenes. The driveway is the starting line for a favorite 13-mile run down the hill to Sunset Boulevard, west toward the Pacific, south toward Santa Monica Pier and back.

“I learned a lot about design and construction,” Scibetta says of the home-building project. “I became so fascinated with the process that my builder and I went into partnership and purchased several lots.”

They built 10 homes, selling one for $2.3 million and several in the $1 million to $1.6 million range. “They were sold when the real estate market in Los Angeles was really soaring between about 1986-’90,” Scibetta says.

The partners have no homes under construction now, but Scibetta owns apartment buildings.

“I’m on hiatus,” he says. “I’m primarily an investor and don’t get involved day-to-day.”

Meanwhile, Scibetta’s scholarship program is sending some of the best LAUSD students to private schools. His oldest son, 15-year-old Evan, is a football player and straight-A student at a local private school.

“I’m sure a few people think (the program creates) a brain drain on the district,” Scibetta says. “But I think most people think (it’s) the right thing to do.

“A child can get a great eduction in the LAUSD, but boarding schools are different. The extracurricular and out-of-class experiences are really enriched, and they get to meet kids from all over the world. We can’t compete with the experience of 12 kids in a class.”

Another group with goals similar to Scibetta’s, A Better Chance, placed 310 minority students last year. It searches for candidates and submits their names to 178 private and selected public schools nationwide; the private schools award scholarships to those who need them. Michael W. Anderson, local program officer for the 32-year-old USC-based organization, criticizes Scibetta for concentrating on less than half a dozen boarding schools.

“Mr. Scibetta does many students a disservice because he only has a handful of schools he refers to,” Anderson says. “Consequently, if a student doesn’t get into one of those schools, the student may not be able to get into an independent secondary school.

“If he’s able to get students into schools, that’s great. But I hate to see other kids not get the same opportunities.”

Scibetta says he doesn’t have enough scholarship candidates to satisfy more than a handful of schools. “There’s a wide range in size and academic rigor in the schools that I work with,” he says. “Everyone who is qualified and wants a boarding school can be placed.”

Anderson also suspects that Scibetta mixes business with pleasure.

“He uses these kids to get trips back East because he’s a runner,” Anderson says. “He runs in the Boston Marathon. He runs in the New York Marathon. I guess they have familiarization trips back to the schools. That’s really his ticket.”

“That’s bizarre,” counters Scibetta, who has taken about 15 trips to the Eastern campuses since starting his program. “It’s absolutely untrue.” The schools have paid his air fare for about half of those visits, he says.

“I’ve run the Boston Marathon three times and the New York Marathon once. Only in three (of 15) instances was I able to tie them together (with a trip to a school), but I have nothing to hide with that.”

Scibetta says he plans to stay the course indefinitely. “I think people come to believe you reach a certain age and you’re not useful,” he says. But not him. He enjoys the scholarship program so much that he’d like to run it after retiring.

Scholarship winners hope he will.

“I just wish there was a Paul Scibetta in every junior high,” Imani Butler says, “because there are so many students like me who have what it takes to do well.

“He’s kind of like the good angel who sits on your shoulder.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Paul Scibetta

Age: 51.

Native?: No. Reared in New York City’s Lower East Side; lives in Pacific Palisades.

Family: He and wife Aileen have two sons--Evan, 15, and Colin, 12.

Passions: Working with students, running.

On students’ behavior: “I try not to put a value judgment on it. . . . I respect a range of their behavior, as long as it’s respectful.”

On working with students with myriad problems during almost 30 years as an educator: “I’ve been affected by it, but it gives me strength and energy to want to . . . help the next ones.”

On motivating bright children: “It’s as much of a challenge to get a bright child motivated and listening as it is slow learners. The bright children need to be challenged more, and what you say has to be meaningful.”