105 Schools in County to Get Private Grants

More than 100,000 students at 105 Los Angeles County schools will benefit from $3.5 million worth of “challenge” grants to be announced today by the nation’s largest-ever privately funded education reform effort.

Six groups of schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District will get $1.1 million to improve college preparation, make computer technology more widely available, enhance students’ communication skills and bolster vocational training, among other goals.

Across the county, $2.4 million in grants will be divided by schools in Pasadena, Monrovia, Temple City and South Pasadena, Whittier Union High School and the Little Lake City and Hacienda/La Puente school districts, for a variety of projects, many aimed at raising school performance among Latino and non-English-speaking students, involving parents in their children’s schooling and improving computer technology.

The money--which comes from a $53-million donation from Walter H. Annenberg--and the proposals the schools had to put together to get it, are meant to add momentum and depth to educational improvement efforts already underway across the county.

Officials of the reform project were criticized late last year by some for moving too slowly to disburse the money. But the grants to be announced mean that 18 months after coming into existence, the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project, or LAAMP, has now committed nearly two-thirds of its funds.

“The [grants] represent a strategic philanthropic effort to leverage substantial improvements in student learning from a very generous and significant, but limited, investment in public schools,” said Maria Casillas, president of LAAMP.

The local project is part of a $500 million commitment to public schools financed by the Annenberg Foundation. Similar projects are underway in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and elsewhere.

Here the grants are going to groups, or families, of schools, each including a high school and the elementary and middle schools that feed into it--to help campuses work together to track student progress, coordinate teacher training, install computer networks and other projects.

LAAMP officials expressed concern that none of the six Los Angeles Unified grants went to schools in the troubled heart of the sprawling district. Three are in the San Fernando Valley, two in the Harbor area and one on the Eastside.

One additional grant, a $500,000 allocation to the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, was announced in January.

To get the money, school groups had to submit detailed proposals, endure a rigorous evaluation process in which LAAMP evaluators visited campuses and interviewed teachers, administrators and parents to measure the depth of the commitment to reform. In addition, each had to show how they will supply matching funds from public sources or other private donations.

Some proposals were rejected and many other school districts, after expressing interest initially, dropped out.

If the funded schools meet their stated goals, the money will be renewed annually for five years.

Virgil Roberts, a Los Angeles lawyer who is head of LAAMP’s Board of Governors, said the group will now push other schools, especially in the city’s inner city, to apply.

“We want to make sure the next time we don’t get a doughnut with a big hole in the center of Los Angeles,” he said. “Some areas have been resistant to change and we’re really working hard to make sure they are ready for change.”

Rather than approaching school reform as individual campuses, the schools in each family will work as partners to create a seamless trip for students from kindergarten to graduation.

“This is new territory, because we haven’t worked in this way before and it’s exciting,” said Phyllis Gudoski, a lead teacher at Strathern Street School in North Hollywood, who helped write the grant proposal for the John H. Francis Polytechnic High School family.

Carmen Schroeder, the administrator in charge of the 12-school, 16,000-student Polytechnic family, said the $234,000 LAAMP is expected to provide annually will not only boost the school’s ability to improve academic achievement, but will attract other grants.

“Once people know we are a LAAMP complex, they will know we care about reform and are willing to hold ourselves responsible,” she said.

The $376,000 grant for the 25 schools around San Pedro and Narbonne high schools will help pay for installation of a computer network linking the campuses. Planning for the computer project got going more than a year ago but the LAAMP money will hasten it into existence.

“It takes a very large coordinated effort to get ramped up quickly to establish momentum and the LAAMP grant is going to give us that jump start we need,” said John Lenhardt, a lead teacher at Dana Middle School.

The money for Los Angeles Unified schools comes out of a $5-million allocation the district received earlier this year to train teachers, parents and administrators at schools that are already part of the district’s existing reform program, LEARN.

Roberts said that despite the project’s slow start, this round of grants means that LAAMP’s promise to support school reform countywide is coming to fruition.

“It took a lot of effort to get to this point and everyone on the board is excited that we are going to start to see some real reform designs start to blossom,” he said. “We believe the wait was worth it.”