21,000 Openings at L.A. Schools

Almost 21,000 empty classroom seats in the Los Angeles Unified School District are up for grabs in the second annual round robin for open enrollment, a program that lets parents pick their child’s school.

Most of the openings are in schools on the Westside and in the west San Fernando Valley, where the school-age populations have declined in recent years.

The open enrollment period, which ends June 9, allows parents to register their children in any school with openings. If any schools have more applicants than available seats, lotteries will be conducted June 12, district officials said.

The openings include 9,754 seats at 120 schools in the San Fernando Valley, accounting for nearly half of the spots districtwide.

Assemblywoman Dede Alpert (D-Coronado), who authored the open enrollment legislation enacted in 1993, said the program is designed to encourage schools to become more entrepreneurial in attracting students and to give parents more choice in selecting programs that best suit their children. “I am hearing that parents are absolutely delighted,” she said.

The school with the most openings--Taft High School in Woodland Hills, with 800 open seats--is distributing flyers and conducting tours extolling its academic, athletic and extracurricular programs.

School officials said they hope to persuade local movie theaters to flash notices on the screen.

“If people wish to come here, we’re telling them we have room,” said Howard Reisbord, Taft assistant principal of student services. The school last year offered 600 openings and gained 488 new students--the largest group of students out of 9,810 districtwide who switched campuses in the first year of open enrollment.

Marshall High School in Los Feliz has the second-highest number of seats available, with 400. Grant and Birmingham high schools, both in Van Nuys, also have a large number, 384 and 350, respectively.

The most overcrowded schools in the district, where few if any seats are offered for open enrollment, are in South-Central and East Los Angeles, said Joyce Peyton, district director of school utilization. Several elementary schools in densely populated areas of the central and eastern San Fernando Valley also are closed to transfer students. Children living within a school’s immediate boundaries must be accommodated first, as well as siblings of students already enrolled.

One of the most popular Valley schools--Carpenter Avenue Elementary in Studio City--already has a waiting list of 380 names for 25 open seats. Principal Joan Marks said the names were submitted by parents at a series of monthly orientations that began in November. She said she was surprised when about 20 more parents showed up on the first day of open enrollment Monday.

All students whose names are submitted by June 9 will have equal chances of selection in the lotteries June 12. Last year, about 300 names were submitted for the five open seats at Carpenter Avenue, Marks said.