L.A. Expands Magnet School Recruiting

For the first time, Los Angeles school officials have mailed application brochures describing magnet school classes to the parents of all 650,000 students, perhaps creating even stiffer competition for the limited slots in the much-praised programs, administrators said Friday.

After the $218,000 direct mail advertising campaign, applications are pouring into Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters, a month before the Jan. 17 application deadline, officials said.

Assistant Supt. Theodore Alexander, who oversees the student integration program, said competition for the spots will be “as hard or harder” than in previous years. The district, the nation’s second-largest, typically has a waiting list of more than 20,000 students for the 45,000 places in 135 programs.

In the past, brochures explaining the magnet programs--which give students intensive grounding in selected fields from medicine to show business--were sent home with students or given to parents who came to schools to get a copy.

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“In many instances in the past, many parents may not have gotten it,” Alexander said of the booklet. “It may have been used as a shield against the rain or dropped or who knows what.”

Some school administrators said parents have complained that they have missed the application deadline because they never received the brochure.

“It was a missed opportunity for some parents,” said Molly Schroeder, the magnet coordinator at Welby Way Gifted/High Ability Magnet School in West Hills.

Reseda High School Principal Bob Kladifko said parents had complained that they were unaware of all the magnet programs offered by the district. He said he has received no such complaints this year.

This year’s brochure is also smaller, 11 pages, with short descriptions of each program. In previous years, it ran about 27 pages, with maps, lists and summaries of each school’s programs.

The brochures are also still available to parents at school offices.

Magnet programs were developed by court order to better integrate city schools during the battle over mandatory busing in the late 1970s, on the theory that they would cut across geographical lines to draw students of all races with common interests and abilities.