Saving the School Down the Street

It began as the classic soiree: chardonnay, chic hors d’oeuvres and light conversation among about 20 smartly dressed couples.

Then the host asked her guests for something in return. She unveiled a poster board divided into columns for the next five years. The pitch was for each couple to write their children’s names under the years they will enter kindergarten.

The list was a kind of parlor game, says Nicole Gorak, whose own daughter, Hayley, is first in line under 2000.

“It’s a tool to make new relationships,” she said.

Yet it was also part of a clever marketing campaign dreamed up by Gorak and three friends who call themselves the Beverlywood Moms, after their upscale Westside neighborhood.

With the personal touch of the Avon lady and the persistence of union organizers, they are recruiting children to attend Canfield Avenue School, the public elementary school just down the street from their homes.

Not so long ago, no one would have thought to draw up a list of their children’s prospective classmates.

But a generation of desegregation, decaying finances and falling test scores has left Canfield, like thousands of other schools across America, abandoned by many middle-class families who live within walking distance.

Now, as school reformers across the country agonize over how to reclaim the loyalty of white parents who have come to think of private school as a given, a scattering of enterprising people such as Gorak are coming up with answers of their own.

Yearning for a sense of community, put off by the high cost of private education and cognizant of the boost that a highly regarded public school can add to home values, they are putting brains, sweat and their children on the line to rescue neighborhood schools.

The Beverlywood Moms began their crusade timidly two years ago, approaching Principal Sylvia Rogers to ask what they could do to help turn around the school’s battered reputation.

Since then, they have become full-blown boosters. They study curriculum, scour the corporate world for money, till the school garden and, wherever they go, trumpet the virtues of Canfield.

“I didn’t realize how passionately I was going to feel about it,” Gorak said. “The more we learned, the more passionate we got and the more angry we got about the shape of our schools. It was sort of an evolution.”

None of the Beverlywood Moms has a child in Canfield yet. Their oldest was only a toddler when the women met two years ago. At the time, they made only a limited pledge: They would do their best to turn Canfield into the kind of school they would want their children to attend. When the time came, they would decide between public or private school. Many a time they felt like giving up. But they kept one another going.

This spring, they finally had something to celebrate. More than half of those who signed up for kindergarten next year are from the neighborhood. If even most of them show up, next fall will mark the first time in more than a decade that Canfield’s resident enrollment grew.

Community Support Growing

The Beverlywood Moms have become part of a tiny but quietly growing national movement to restore local support for public education.

The National Assn. of Parents for Public Schools in Jackson, Miss., has offered advice to about 400 groups organizing community support for schools, said Executive Director Kelly Butler.

The association was founded in 1991 by a group of parents who were trying to improve their neighborhood school in Jackson. Eventually they got foundation backing to spread the message across the nation that parents can make their public school competitive with private institutions by getting involved.

“The schools belong to us,” Butler said. “We have a responsibility to make them better. . . . My hope is that we’re looking at the beginning of what is a revolution of sorts.”

Currently, the association has 54 chapters, one in Los Angeles.

That one was founded by Tarzana resident Kande Grabiner, whose determined recruiting of neighborhood students for Wilbur Avenue School has paid off. In four years, the school has enjoyed a 40% growth in the number of students who come from within its attendance area.

Several Pasadena civic leaders launched a broader effort only two months ago by forming the Community Alliance for Public Education to promote all neighborhood schools in a district where white enrollment has shrunk to 18%.

“There are a lot of middle-class members of the community that have opted out,” said one of the founders, Ed Honowitz. “But a lot of those haven’t really taken a close look at what the public schools have to offer.”

Although such organized efforts remain the exception, officials in several school districts across Los Angeles County said they are seeing promising signs of a shift back to public schools.

In Glendale, for example, one in 14 new enrollees last year reported transferring from a private school, a spokeswoman said.

Long Beach officials are interpreting a decline in the number of children qualifying for free and reduced-cost lunch programs at 27 schools as evidence of the return of resident children in middle-class neighborhoods.

“We’ve seen a surge of families coming back from private and parochial school as a result of class size reduction,” said spokesman Dick Van Der Laan, referring to a state program to limit classes to 20 students in the primary grades.

After decades of sweeping demographic change in the 681,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District, the effects of any incipient back to public school movement are difficult to measure against the backdrop of larger enrollment flux.

Still, there are clear indications that Los Angeles schools are recapturing neighborhood children.

Nearly two-thirds of the 13,881 new students who entered Los Angeles schools last fall transferred from private schools, mostly in the San Fernando Valley, the Westside and South Bay. And 124 schools reported an increase in resident enrollment that outpaced overall growth.

Plainview Elementary in Tujunga, for example, gained 70 local students while its total enrollment was up only 16. And Warner Elementary in Holmby Hills gained 53 local students while its overall enrollment actually dropped.

District officials see this as a sign that parents are beginning to view public schools as competitive with more costly private options.

“There is a definite back to public school movement in neighborhoods that have a relatively high percentage of white families,” said Gordon Wohlers, assistant superintendent for policy research and development.

The Impact of Integration

Canfield’s story, like those of other schools across Los Angeles County, is intricately tied up with the traumatic attempts begun in the late 1970s to integrate public schools.

As mandatory busing was dividing the city in 1977, Beverlywood parents came up with a plan to spare their children a cross-town bus ride. They paired Canfield with Crescent Heights Elementary in an ethnically mixed middle-class neighborhood just blocks away.

The children from both schools would attend Canfield in kindergarten through third grade, then switch to Crescent Heights for their last three years.

Although it endured for 17 years, the arrangement never really integrated the campuses. Canfield parents often turned to private schools when their children reached the fourth grade and faced transfer to Crescent Heights. Other Beverlywood parents abandoned public schools altogether--particularly the newcomers, many of them Orthodox Jewish families who preferred religious schools. Others enrolled their children in the district’s magnet schools.

When parents involved with both schools petitioned the Board of Education to end the experiment in 1994, neither school had more than a few white students despite substantial white populations within their boundaries.

At the time, Canfield Principal Rogers saw the dissolution as an opportunity to “bring back the concept of a community-based school and . . . attract some of the neighborhood families back.”

But a line did not immediately form at her door. The school continued to suffer from a bad reputation reinforced by test scores below the 40th percentile.

“It got around the community: ‘You don’t have to come to Canfield, and it’s a bad school,’ ” Rogers said.

Mothers Visit School Principal

As a newlywed returning to raise a family in the neighborhood where she grew up, Nicole Gorak, 31, found the condition of Canfield distressing.

The school she had happily attended as a child looked weary, with rust streaking down its fences, weeds sprouting beside its sidewalks and cracks opening up in its asphalt field.

The buzz from neighbors was that any alternative was better than Canfield. Besides private school and magnets, many parents were applying for open enrollment permits to other Westside public schools such as Overland, where parents had rallied to restore the neighborhood tradition.

When her daughter Hayley was born, Gorak considered those choices, and rejected them.

“I want her to walk to school,” Gorak said. “I want her to be able to walk down the street and pick up her friend Danny and they can walk two blocks together.”

But neither was she willing to entrust Hayley to a school that her friends and neighbors shunned, rightly or wrongly.

Gorak started asking every young couple she met if they planned to send their children to Canfield. Her interest soon drew her into a friendship with Teresa Grossman, Robyn Simon and Denise Neumann, three Beverlywood mothers who shared her yearning to belong to a community centered on a neighborhood school.

The four decided to drop in on Canfield’s principal.

Rogers, wary of the well-meaning parent who doesn’t follow through, asked them, “What do you want to do?”

She was impressed by their eagerness for work. Although their children were still two to four years too young for school, the women joined Friends of Canfield.

The Beverlywood Moms rustled up donations from local businesses to build a garden, erect a shade shelter and paint the school facade, all before school district funds became available for such projects through a $2.4-billion bond measure.

They canvassed the neighborhood with fliers urging parents to consider sending their children to Canfield. They started a summer Saturday in the park gathering with bagels and doughnuts.

They called on the preschools and real estate offices that serve the neighborhood to plead with them not to offer parents and home buyers negative reviews of Canfield.

“We have heard they don’t give Canfield as an option,” Grossman said. “We’re out to change that.”

They started tracking every toddler and urging their parents to consider public schools. To sweeten the attraction, Grossman negotiated with a commercial day-care firm to start an after-school program on the campus.

Recently they have begun writing grant applications, seeking funds for everything from new library books and computer training for teachers to a sponsor for their henhouse.

With the news that 29 neighborhood children signed up for kindergarten at Canfield next fall, they finally were ready to commit.

Denise Neumann will be the first in the fall. The others will follow the next two years.

As Residents Return, Others Leave

There is a flip side to the Beverlywood Moms’ success: For every student they recruit from the neighborhood, a student from another neighborhood can’t attend.

On the increasingly complicated and competitive playing field of open enrollment, Canfield had earned a good reputation outside of Beverlywood and kept its classrooms full by granting permits. Rogers said the large crop of neighborhood kindergartners will mean far fewer students will be able to transfer from other schools.

The same has happened at other sought-after Westside schools such as Overland, where open enrollment permits are no longer offered.

The trend affects both the district’s efforts to integrate and to relieve overcrowding. Canfield will become more white. Students who would have transferred to it from overcrowded schools nearby, such as Crescent Heights, will have to find somewhere else to go, possibly farther away.

Principal Rogers and the Beverlywood Moms think it is inconceivable that Canfield, now 54% black, could become all-white again, partly because of the growing percentage of Orthodox Jews in the neighborhood who are committed to religious education.

“I believe Canfield will continue to provide a quality integrated education for this neighborhood,” Rogers said. “The people I speak to don’t want a white school. They want an integrated school.”

In extreme cases, the racial balance has tipped. Marquez Elementary in Pacific Palisades has increased its resident enrollment by 50% over the last four years and is now 75% white.

After painfully witnessing the gradual decline of the district’s white enrollment from 38% in 1975 to less than 11% this year, Los Angeles school officials do not yet find such cases alarming.

Many schools have minority enrollments of as much as 70%, despite being in predominantly white neighborhoods, said Wohlers, the assistant superintendent.

“The return of white families in those cases is providing a more integrated environment,” Wohlers said. “We’re encouraged by that.”