New Parents Group Fights Public Schools’ ‘Bad Rap’ : Education: A national organization forms a Valley chapter to restore faith, halt flow to private campuses.

A local movement to promote public schools and lure middle-class families back from private academies is gaining momentum as a handful of San Fernando Valley parents forms the first California chapter of a national group with the same goals.

“Public schools are getting a really bad rap, and it’s just untrue,” said Kande Grabiner of Tarzana, who last week was elected the first acting president of the new chapter of Parents for Public Schools.

The Mississippi-based organization is working to counter two decades of mostly white flight that began with busing and other mandatory integration programs. That trend has eroded enrollment of white, non-Latino students in the Los Angeles Unified School District to 12% from 33.5% just before the beginning of busing for integration purposes in 1978.

“Our main goal is to educate the community to the value of public schools, with the public schools as the cornerstone of the community,” said Grabiner, whose 4-year-old daughter, Taylor, will start kindergarten in September at Wilbur Avenue Elementary School.

She said there is a widespread misconception among middle-income parents that public schools offer a lower quality of education, are not safe and have discipline problems.

“Basically, the community is ill-educated,” she said. “One person hears about a problem at one school, and the masses assume that it is true for every school. Then they figure it is even worse than they assume.”

Grabiner and 12 other parents who voted last week to form the chapter said the grass-roots movement is not motivated by the expense of private schools but by a desire to restore faith in the value of neighborhood public schools and their role in the community. Indeed, the first chapter has emerged in one of the wealthiest enclaves of the Valley, south of Ventura Boulevard, where the price of tuition to many families is regarded as a normal cost of living.

Randi Swindel, co-president of the Parent-Teacher Assn. at Wilbur and a charter member of the new group, said she purposely wanted to avoid the elitist atmosphere of private schools patronized by neighbors and her husband’s associates in the recorded-music business.

“I didn’t want my children to think that that is what the world is all about,” Swindel said. For instance, she said that while her family typically hires a limousine for a trip to the airport, “I decided there’s no way I’m sending my kids to a kindergarten where they have to have a pair of $80 high-top black tennis shoes.”

Now, Swindel said, when she tells people her children attend public school she frequently encounters a look that says: “Don’t you care about your children?”

It is this attitude that the national organization is determined to change. Founded in Jackson, Miss., in 1989, Parents for Public Schools has 40 chapters in 10 states, said Ann Duffy, a representative of the national organization who helps to launch new branches.

Like the one in Tarzana, the groups reflect “a growing spirit in communities throughout the nation that parents have a right, a responsibility and a duty to play an active role in supporting and promoting public education,” Duffy said. “So often parents feel isolated in their support of public schools, but there are many soul mates across the country.”

Parents are also considering forming chapters in the Santa Clarita Valley, Fresno and several small towns in California, Duffy said.

Parental support and promotion of neighborhood schools is an idea whose time has come, said Dan Isaacs, assistant superintendent of school operations for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Educators all over the district “are working very hard to bring parents back into the school system,” Isaacs said. Evidence is the mushrooming number of schools adopting a still experimental LEARN format, in which parents, teachers and staff members work together to develop programs and curricula independent of the district.

Los Angeles school officials say that they cannot put a number on the grass-roots recruiting efforts but that signs of the countertrend are beginning to emerge. One national poll, for instance, indicates that parent contact with public schools has nearly doubled within the last decade. During the same period, enrollment in private schools has leveled off at about 10.5% nationally.

An estimated 30,000 white, non-Latino children were taken by their parents from the Los Angeles district in the first year of mandatory busing in 1978. White enrollment dropped another 40,000 before busing was halted in 1981. Today, enrollment in Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest school district, is nearly 640,000--with 77,451 of those students non-Latino whites.

Members of Parents for Public Schools say they are now determined to end the misconceptions and fears formulated years ago.

The key to overcoming obstacles, Duffy said, will lie in restoring the faith of local leaders in public schools.

“If 100% of the leaders in a community are sending their children to private schools, then the public schools are not going to receive the investment [in parental and business support] that they need,” she said.