Venice School Named One of America’s Best : Education: Coeur d’Alene Elementary is among 142 to win the Redbook honor.

Some regularly dozed through class. Others suffered minor health problems made serious by neglect. Still others simply vanished--maybe to another school, maybe not.

For years the problems of homeless students threatened to overwhelm the Coeur d’Alene Avenue Elementary School in Venice, which has among the highest rates of transient students in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

But nine years ago, the school started taking steps to address the problem. And this week the success of those efforts was recognized by Redbook, a national women’s magazine, which named Coeur d’Alene one of “America’s Best Schools.”

Only one other L.A. Unified school, Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in San Fernando, and three other schools in California made the Redbook list, which named 142 schools nationwide.

Coeur d’Alene “has become a national model for serving the needs of all students,” Los Angeles school board President Mark Slavkin said Tuesday, during a ceremony at the school.

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Coeur d’Alene was one of 481 schools to submit nomination packets to Redbook last May for the magazine’s fourth annual school list. After the field was winnowed down to 300 finalists, a panel of 10 education experts picked the 142 “best” schools.

Coeur d’Alene was acknowledged for developing “outstanding programs (that) succeed in meeting the specific needs of students with physical, emotional or behavioral disabilities.”

The school, where 17% of the 250 students are homeless, has not always been so successful. Principal Beth Ojena, said that when she joined Coeur d’Alene nearly a decade ago, schoolyard fights were common. The turnover rate was so bad, she said, that one teacher finished a school year with an entirely different group of children than the one she started out with in September.

Later, however, the school secured corporate and foundation support to hire a part-time school nurse and psychiatrist, and a full-time tutor.

It also hired an instructional aide and a part-time social worker to attend to the needs of homeless students.

Crossroads School in Santa Monica, meanwhile, came to the school’s aid with a music and arts program.

Within a short time, school officials say, fights in the yard were replaced by weekly “Academy Award” ceremonies in which children who were well-behaved or helpful on campus received McDonald’s gift certificates or knapsacks. These prizes were later replaced by academic awards as students’ grades began showing significant improvement.

On the most recent California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) test, Coeur d’Alene scored above the districtwide average in math; 22% of fourth-graders ranked in the top three math levels compared with 15% districtwide. Too few students were able to take the reading and writing tests to produce reliable scores in those categories.

Teachers and administrators say Ojena’s aggressive fund raising was crucial to the school’s turnaround.

“Rather than become complacent, she yelled and screamed for help,” said Melinda Stingley, who coordinates the program for homeless students.

Ojena says that when she takes people on tours of Coeur d’Alene, some visitors are pleasantly surprised to see computers in every classroom, a diverse student body and dedicated teachers.

Loren Grossman, an attorney who lives in Venice, said she spent nearly two years investigating 30 Westside private and public schools before she decided to enroll her son in the kindergarten class at Coeur d’Alene. The small class sizes (about 25 per room), the quality of the teachers, the computer labs and the arts program impressed her.

Ojena is quick to praise teachers, corporate sponsors, private foundations and community organizations for helping the school--and downplays her own efforts.

Said Ojena: “It was a survival instinct.”