Many Find It Hard to Wait for School of Their Choice : Education: Long lists indicate selection system is catching on. Parents will stop at nothing to get their kids into desirable public campuses.

A Thousand Oaks parent offered a school district official a $10,000 bribe. A Simi Valley parent who worked in a candy factory offered a school all the candy it wanted. Another parent simply walked into the school principal’s office, whipped out his checkbook and asked what it would take.

Eastern Ventura County parents, it seems, will stop at nothing to get their children off waiting lists and into a few highly desirable public schools--most of them magnet schools that draw students on a districtwide basis.

School officials said they do not accept bribes, despite the abundance of tempting offers. Recently passed school choice laws dictate that spaces be allocated by an impartial lottery system, officials said.

That leaves lottery losers with anxious, summer-long waits on lists that may contain 100 names. It does not leave parents and students pleased.

“I find this really unfair,” said Cara Sorkin, whose daughter is on a waiting list to attend sixth grade at Colina Middle School in Thousand Oaks. “Being on a waiting list is not good enough,” she complained to the Conejo Valley school board recently.

District officials acknowledge the dissatisfaction the waiting lists bring to parents and students. But they also point to the lists as an encouraging sign that school choice is catching on, fostering educational quality and innovation, and introducing market forces into hidebound public schools.

“I think what the waiting lists indicate is success. There is a supply-and-demand kind of a factor,” said Richard W. Simpson, assistant superintendent of the Conejo Valley Unified School District.

Indeed, many of the schools with the longest waiting lists are those with unusual programs.

In Simi Valley, for instance, Vista Fundamental School and Hollow Hills Fundamental School offer a back-to-basics theme, setting high standards for student performance. “Students are expected to do 100% of the work 100% of the time,” said Jeanne Davis, a sixth-grade teacher at Vista.

At each fundamental school, about 100 students entered lotteries for 1995-96 kindergarten classes that accommodate 30 students. School officials, who refer to the waiting lists of students who lost the lottery by the euphemism “interest lists,” stress that not everyone on the lists would actually attend the schools if they were accepted.

Still, they point to the strong interest as indicators of success. And they argue that the list can become an advantage in its own right.

“Everybody is here by choice. It’s one of the reasons I think we have such an excellent school,” said Hollow Hills Principal Leslie Frank.

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In Thousand Oaks, there are waiting lists for Meadows elementary school and Colina’s sixth grade.

At Meadows, classes combine students in different grades with teachers who work in pairs, using interdisciplinary themes. The school’s report cards rate youngsters by using a skills checklist rather than letter grades. Parent-teacher conferences include students, too.

The 55 waiting-list students from outside Meadows’ neighborhood illustrate that the school’s restructuring, begun in 1992, is working, Simpson said.

At Colina, a sixth-grade class that opened last September has amassed a waiting list of 26 students, who apparently agree with many experts that sixth-graders are better off in a middle school than an elementary school. The program was so popular that the district will add a sixth-grade class to Los Cerritos Intermediate School in September.

Still, district officials said parents take advantage of school choice--or fail to--more out of convenience than educational conviction.

Simpson points out that in the Conejo district, “95% of the folks are not moving.”

The reason?

“It’s a lot more convenient to have your kids in your neighborhood school, in terms of friendships and car pools and everything like that,” he said.

In Simi Valley, where 20% to 25% of students choose to attend someplace other than their neighborhood school, convenience also plays a role, said Susan Parks, assistant superintendent of the Simi Valley Unified School District. Parents choose schools because they are close to work or after-school child-care centers, she said.

Whatever the motivations for making a particular choice, the fact that the opportunity is available may keep educators on their toes, administrators said.

“It always makes you more tuned in to people, to know that they could go somewhere else,” Parks said.

Many of the schools with the longest waiting lists--like Hollow Hills, Vista and Colina--are magnet programs that draw students from throughout their districts. Most neighborhood schools, which give enrollment priority to students who live near the school but offer extra space to students who live farther away, have shorter waiting lists or none at all.

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Among the few neighborhood schools that have a waiting list for students who live in the neighborhood is Westlake Hills elementary school in Thousand Oaks, which has nine neighborhood students on its list, Simpson said. In such cases, new students who move into the neighborhood are sent to another school in the district until there is an opening.

Simpson concedes that “unhappy customers” are a downside of school choice programs.

“It’s not like Home Depot. You can’t give them a rain check,” Simpson said. “It’s their kid you’re talking about, so it can get personal.”

“Nobody likes to be on a waiting list,” Parks acknowledged.

And if school officials are to be believed, there are few limits to what parents will do to get their children off the waiting list and into the right school.

“I’ve been threatened and I’ve been bribed,” Simpson said.

Well, he’s been offered. Simpson said Thousand Oaks parents have threatened to sue him and offered him as much as $10,000 to move their children off the waiting lists and into desirable schools.

Frank of Hollow Hills said one hopeful parent who worked at a candy factory offered her “all the candy you want.”

Parks said other parents offer to volunteer at the school. And one, she said, a U.S. citizen who had emigrated from Eastern Europe, took out his checkbook and said: “In my old country, it was the custom to make a donation to ensure your children’s education. What is the custom in this country?”

Answered Parks: “The custom here is you just wait on the list and take your turn.”

Parks said the immigrant responded: “Well, that’s very American.”

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School officials said parents of wait-listed students have been known to spin wild conspiracy theories about rigged lotteries.

“Nobody’s getting a deal,” Simpson insisted, noting that three witnesses watched the school choice lottery in May and signed affidavits attesting to its impartiality. He even offered to allow a reporter to observe the process next year.

At Hollow Hills, Frank conducts the lottery in February by pulling postcards out of a cardboard box before three witnesses.

After the lottery the waiting begins, as parents and students on the list hope that the winners decide to move out of town or attend another school. When such an event occurs, school staff members notify the next person on the list by phone or letter.

While the process is dormant in July as administrators take vacations, the waiting continues through the summer.

“In August, particularly, we get quite a few phone calls,” Frank said.

For some, the wait continues even into the first week of school, when a lucky few students squeeze into the final openings at their chosen schools.