A Tough Private Choice for a Public School Advocate

As the head of a reform movement that is seeking to restore confidence in Los Angeles schools, Mike Roos is pledged to an unwritten commandment: Thou shalt enroll your children in public school.

But as the father of two girls, 5 and 4, Roos has found that he is also bound to a higher principle: Thou shalt not serve your job at the expense of your family.

This fall the two imperatives collided in the life of the man who makes $200,000 a year running LEARN, a 4-year-old experiment in which hundreds of Los Angeles Unified School District campuses have been given more autonomy to encourage student achievement and parental involvement.

Roos and his wife, Lorna, enrolled their daughters in private school, falling into that gray zone where personal choice and public values intersect--a dilemma that has caught figures as illustrious as Bill and Hillary Clinton.

“My wife was in the catbird seat on this one,” Roos said a little sheepishly when asked to explain the decision to pull his older daughter, Caroline, out of Ivanhoe Elementary School in Silver Lake--a LEARN school no less--where she went to kindergarten last year. “It’s for her comfort and ease.”

Roos, 52, a onetime Democratic assemblyman, said the move came grudgingly after a year of logistical nightmares coordinating the schedules of Caroline and her younger sister, Catherine, who still isn’t old enough for public kindergarten.

“We needed to put them at a place where they could be together all day,” he said.

But unlike the Clintons, who resolutely weathered the finger-pointing as Chelsea completed five years in a prestigious Washington private school, the Rooses say they are not forsaking their duty as models of commitment to public education.

They’re just deferring it.

Next year, Roos said, the girls will both be at Ivanhoe.

“That’d be good,” said Ivanhoe PTA Co-President Marion Dies, who was a little miffed when she heard through the grapevine that Roos would not be part of the Ivanhoe community this year.

“I would think if he’s spearheading LEARN that he would try to involve himself in the real part of LEARN, being at the school,” Dies said.

Such questions as where Roos’ children are educated are touchy ones that flare up whenever friends of public schools are viewed as having snubbed the system in their private lives.

During the national debate over tax-supported vouchers to help parents pay for private schooling, the Clintons became the lightning rod for the charge by voucher opponents of widespread hypocrisy.

A study by the conservative Heritage Foundation found that 34% of U.S. representatives and 50% of senators responding to a poll had children in private schools, compared to a rate of only 14.1% for all U.S. families. Other studies found that public school teachers also chose private education for their children more often than the public at large.

But Clinton weathered the flap with surprising ease. Voucher advocates could hardly condemn him for opting out of the D.C. public schools, among the nation’s worst.

At the same time, the outrage that might have been expected from the Washington press corps was muted because so many of its stars, such as Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and Mark Shields and Judy Woodruff of what was then the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, had children in Chelsea’s school.

Despite the evident wiggle room, Roos said he accepts the public schooling of his children as a duty that comes with his job running LEARN, which is shorthand for the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, a nonprofit organization started by leaders of the city’s business, political and education communities in 1993 to arrest the slide of public education.

Under Roos, LEARN has signed up more than 300 schools, which receive greater control of their own budgets and considerable decision-making autonomy through a coalition of teachers, parents and staff.

“I strongly believe in public education,” said Roos, whose two children from a previous marriage graduated from Los Angeles Unified high schools.

As his new set of children approached school age, Roos said, he intended for them to continue the tradition.

Caroline completed kindergarten at Ivanhoe last year while Catherine was enrolled in day care at the Jewish Community Center on Sunset Boulevard. After her regular half-day session at school, a bus from the center took the older daughter to the Jewish facility. Either Roos or his wife, who runs an apparel business, picked both up about 5 or 6.

But with Ivanhoe at the end of a convoluted bus route, Caroline often had to wait an extra hour, staying alone at school. She would sometimes call her mother at work and ask her to pick her up--a plea Lorna Roos said she could not resist.

“I had to get her,” she said. “All they want is Mommy. No way out.”

Lorna Roos, meanwhile, was finding it harder to cope as she struggled to start her business manufacturing headbands, an adventure that had its own connection to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Lorna got a thrill, not to mention a potential jolt for sales, when the first lady went out in a headband the firm had sent to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. via a friend who worked there.

Often Lorna Roos would be on the road, making sales calls or buying items in the downtown garment district.

“Now you’re at work, and Caroline is all by herself waiting for a bus” to take her to the Jewish center, Mike Roos said. “It was, frankly, maddening. After a year of this, she [Lorna] says to me, ‘No more.’ ”

They might still have made Ivanhoe work had Catherine been able to start there this fall. But, not turning 5 until February, she was on the wrong side of the cusp.

“These kids, the two sisters, are unusually close,” the former assemblyman said. “You run a danger of hurting little Catherine when she can’t be with her sister.”

Having misgivings about leaving the girls with a nanny, and wanting them to mix with other children their age, the Rooses saw only one other option.

This fall, they enrolled them at the Page School in Larchmont, a longer drive away than Ivanhoe, but a better fit in their lives.

“They had a full day,” Lorna Roos said. “They had times when they got to be together. But they were also separated.”

Mike Roos thinks his story must resonate with many working parents.

Even one of his toughest critics concurs.

“Clearly he has a responsibility that goes beyond the average citizen,” said Manual Arts High School teacher Joshua Pechthalt, who has lambasted LEARN as illusory reform.

“But I think it’s a tough call for parents who have the money to do that,” he said. “I have friends in the same situation, so I wouldn’t want to jump to condemn him.”