Admissions Policy Under Fire : Education: Mother of 4-year-old sues UC regents, alleging elementary school run by UCLA unfairly reserves spaces for wealthy. Officials defend practice as necessary for diversity.

Illustrating just how far some parents will go to get their children a top-notch education, the mother of a 4-year-old Brentwood girl sued the University of California Board of Regents on Wednesday, alleging that an elementary school run by UCLA excluded her child by unfairly reserving spaces for the wealthy.

The lawsuit claims that these preferences--which allegedly resulted this year in the admission of two children whose fathers are Academy Award winners--violate the basic principle of equality before the law and deceive parents by implying that spaces at Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School will be filled by random selection.

“Affirmative action UCLA-style is reserving slots for the rich and famous,” said Gina F. Brandt, the plaintiff, whose 4-year-old, Keeley Tatsuyo Hunter, was rejected by the elementary school in March. “They do it to raise money or to grant favors to those who have previously given funds. The system stinks.”

UCLA officials acknowledged Wednesday that the on-campus elementary school--commonly known as UES--does reserve a “handful” of spots each year for wealthy children to help subsidize tuition for lower-income students. But they said this is necessary to ensure that UES--one of the nation’s last remaining “laboratory” schools--assembles a student body that reflects the racial and economic diversity of California.

School officials would not confirm the names of their students’ well-known parents, although a source familiar with the school confirmed that the children of movie moguls Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, choreographer Debbie Allen and actresses Ellen Barkin and Sally Field have all attended.

“No one denies . . . that [from] time to time the children or grandchildren of the rich and famous will be included,” said Joseph D. Mandel, UCLA’s vice chancellor for legal affairs. He said that a small number of so-called “special admit” slots were reserved at UES for the children of some faculty and of “people who can particularly address [the school’s] needs either politically or financially.”

But Mandel explained that such a system is necessary to accomplish the school’s primary purpose: developing and assessing educational curricula to be used in California’s public schools.

“This is not an affirmative action matter. It has to do with legitimate research,” he said, adding that he believes Brandt and her husband, attorney James K.T. Hunter, are motivated by self-interest, not protection of principle.

“They’ve made it patently clear that their sole objective was to get their kid in--that they’d drop the lawsuit if they could get their kid in,” he said, noting that hundreds of children apply to the elementary school each year to fill about 50 spots. “To the extent that they present this as a principled lawsuit, that is called into question.”

Brandt, herself a graduate of UES, acknowledged that the rejection of her younger daughter was the “catalyst” for the lawsuit. But she said she had become concerned about the issues raised in the suit years before, when an older daughter was enrolled at UES and Brandt was active in the school’s parent support group.

Particularly as UC’s regents prepare to consider altering how they use race- and gender-based preferences next week, she said, it seems timely to look at what she called “UCLA’s other affirmative action policy.”

Hunter, the girl’s father, filed the lawsuit Wednesday, as well as an earlier parallel suit in federal court. He said that during the discovery process in the earlier lawsuit, he learned that the school reserves as many as 13 of its approximately 50 first-year slots for special admissions. The school also automatically admits siblings of children who are already enrolled.

Once those students are chosen, Mandel confirmed, their racial and ethnic makeup is assessed and the school determines how many more students of each ethnic group are needed to create a student body that loosely mirrors the California population.

According to Mandel, this policy has only been practiced during the past four years. Before that, he stressed, the student body was predominantly made up of children of white, affluent, Westside parents. But because of a concerted effort to make the school more reflective of California, he said, that is changing.

Of the 46 children who have been admitted to the class of 1995-96, the one Brandt’s daughter hoped to join, six were “special admits,” Mandel said. The class is 39% white, 22% Latino, 17% mixed-race, 13% African American and 9% Asian American, he said.

The school’s director, Deborah J. Stipek, said that roughly one-third of the school’s families have incomes of less than $35,000 a year, one-third make between $35,000 and $120,000 a year and the last third make more than $120,000 a year. She said only a “handful” of parents are very wealthy or recognizable.

“If we accepted every rich and famous person who applied to the school, we’d be a pretty rich and famous school,” she said.

Established 113 years ago as a teacher training institute in Downtown Los Angeles, the Seeds University Elementary School became affiliated with UCLA in 1919 and now occupies a creekside location on the Westwood campus along Sunset Boulevard.

Until recently, the school received about half of its annual budget from discretionary funds controlled by UCLA’s chancellor, who has been gradually withdrawing the support in the wake of deep state budget cuts. Meanwhile, UES charges up to $5,000 a year in tuition--roughly half of what it costs at comparable private schools--and is tooling up a private fund-raising campaign.

The school’s direction, as well as its financial fate, has fueled controversy in recent years.

In 1989, Chancellor Charles E. Young provoked the ire of UES parents with his plan to move the school off campus to become part of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. Among those leading the charge against Young’s plan was Brandt, then the president of the Family School Alliance, the school’s version of the PTA. She and others rallied other alumni, state officials and parents in a successful fight to keep the school at UCLA.

On Wednesday, other parents acknowledged that Brandt’s lawsuit addressed issues head-on that other parents had only wondered about. “I think this is the first time someone has raised that [accusation] very directly,” said John Brice, another former Family School Alliance president and a friend of Brandt.

Although there is no denying that the children of “very prominent people” attend UES, Brice said “we try not to play that up.”

Parents who send their children to UES, he said, “don’t want their children to go to school with kids who are brought to school in Mercedeses. They want the benefits of a public education where you have people from different economic circumstances and the money isn’t emphasized.”