VALLEY BUSINESS : For-Profit School Cashes In on Career Parents’ Need for Help : Chain: Pinecrest’s 11 campuses cater to those who seek a combination of quality teaching, good child care and personal attention to students.
Some things never seem to change--like the special needs of working parents.
Fifty years ago, when film director Arch Obeler went to Africa to shoot “Bwana Devil,” the first 3-D movie, he needed a school that would look after his children during that time. The new Pinecrest School, just starting up on six acres in Van Nuys formerly owned by actor Robert Cummings, fit the bill. It offered Obeler and other film-industry parents a godsend of education and short-term boarding.
Jack Webb was another early Pinecrest parent, said the school’s co-owner Donald Dye. Another was songwriter Bobby Troup, of “Route 66” fame, who penned the school’s official song.
The for-profit Pinecrest Schools chain has changed a lot from that Hollywood beginning. It now has 11 campuses in and beyond its San Fernando Valley base. It enrolls some 6,000 students, ranging from toddlers to eighth-graders. The boarding school was phased out by the end of the ‘50s. But service to working parents is still a key selling point.
“I’d like us to be known as the ‘reading school’ rather than a baby-sitter,” said Philip H. Dye, who with his brother Donald runs the school system founded by their mother, Edna Mae Dye, in 1949. Philip Dye said, though, that Pinecrest has long stressed child care with education: “We started catering to the working parent” early on.
Today, Pinecrest campuses are open about 12 hours a day, typically from 6:30 a.m. to around 6 p.m. (later on bad traffic days). In Lancaster, where parents face long commutes to workplaces in the San Fernando Valley and beyond, the doors open even earlier--at 5:30 a.m. Schools also run day-camp programs for the whole summer as well as a six-week summer school session.
Pinecrest also caters to the parent who wants private-school values, such as small classes (20 is the norm) and personal attention to the students. Alan Skobin, a parent of two former Pinecrest students, praised the schools’ “involvement with the students at all levels, whether it be the principal, the teachers or the custodial staff. You have people who are interested in the welfare of the children and spend time with them.”
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The cost is about $5,500 for a regular school year, said administrator Robert King. That includes the before- and after-school programs, and it’s half--or less--of what parents can expect to pay at such high-end institutions as the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks.
As for educational philosophy, Philip Dye says Pinecrest sets a goal of having all children read at grade level or above by the time they reach fourth grade. He said the school’s average scores on statewide tests are generally one to two grade levels above state averages. And where other schools are getting back to such basics as phonics, Dye said, Pinecrest has never left. Betty Monello, director of Pinecrest’s Woodland Hills campus, says parents “like the idea that we’re very traditional, that we demand respect.”
Dye said that Pinecrest, a nonsectarian school, does not discriminate by religion, race or other factors, but that it doesn’t make special provisions for non-English speaking students.
“We expect the child to be able to understand English,” he said.
He added that kids who start Pinecrest early--in the pre-kindergarten years--meet that challenge easily. English-speaking children, on the other hand, are exposed to other languages early.
Dye and other Pinecrest officials say the schools have no trouble these days filling their classes. Monello says her school has waiting lists at several grade levels, including middle school, and a long waiting list at the toddler center.
Public school teachers are among those with children on the waiting lists, she said.
Donald Dye said that four years ago, about 470 public school teachers had kids at campuses in the Pinecrest system. “I think it’s higher now,” he said.
But if teachers are happy to send their children to Pinecrest, economic considerations compel those teachers to look at competing schools when it comes to deciding where they’ll work. The challenge of hiring and retaining talented teachers has grown in recent years as public schools scramble to hire new teachers to reduce class sizes.
“In the last couple of years, we have had a lot of competition from the public schools for our teachers,” Philip Dye said.
The lures of public school include signing bonuses and higher starting salaries. Pinecrest teachers start at $27,000, Dye said, and salaries top out at about $45,000 (Pinecrest teachers are not unionized, and the schools do not have a formal, public salary schedule).
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, teachers start at more than $32,500 and can earn more than $60,000 depending on experience, education and certification for bilingual teaching or other specialties.
Elite not-for-profit schools also can offer an attractive package. At Harvard-Westlake School, which combines a middle school in Bel-Air with a high school in Studio City, headmaster Thomas Hudnut said the median salary is “just a tick under $50,000,” with some teachers making more than $80,000. Paul Horovitz, head of the Buckley School, said salaries there range from $31,000 to $75,300.
Monello said Pinecrest has lost young teachers to public schools, but “most of my teachers stay with me because they like the comfortable feeling of the private school, the family feeling which we hope to have forever.”
She also said some teachers have tried public school and have come back.
Financial pressures have also forced Pinecrest to raise its tuition in recent years--sharply in some cases. “We held our line [on tuition] so long that it really got us in trouble,” Donald Dye said. Some campuses have seen 9% hikes in successive years, he added.
The schools do not reveal their overall revenue or profit, but Dye said, “If we didn’t have a reputation, it would be a poor time to start a private school.”
At most Pinecrest campuses, instruction doesn’t go past sixth grade, though it is expanding its middle school programs--a new middle school is due to open next September in Lancaster, for instance. As a result, it’s not on the radar of colleges or of students shopping for college-prep schools.
It’s also separated from “independent” (not-for-profit) schools by the fact that it’s a for-profit business, and from church schools by its lack of religious affiliation. It is accredited not with the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges, for instance, but with a national organization of for-profit schools, the Florida-based National Independent Private Schools Assn. Though some private elementary schools have WASC accreditation, Philip Dye said “we see no need for it.”
The Buckley School’s Horovitz, a lawyer who has worked with both nonprofit and for-profit schools, thinks that both types can be provide good education, and that both can be prone to the same failings.
He points out that some nonprofit independent schools, such as the Buckley School itself, were started by entrepreneurs as profit-making ventures. And at least early on, such schools can be “a fragile economic model,” Horovitz said.
“If you have a little start-up school that is undercapitalized and barely hanging on, it wouldn’t take a lot of dip in enrollment to put it in the red,” he said.
For 50 years, though, Pinecrest has managed to survive and grow without the boost of nonprofit status or big donors. Part of the credit may go to homing in on a growing market--working middle-class parents--and staying focused on those customers’ needs. It’s also helped itself, in classic San Fernando Valley fashion, with some astute investing in real estate.
“I was always looking for land; I’ve been looking for land all my life,” said Don Dye, who handles the business side of the Pinecrest operation; Philip Dye oversees academic matters.
That quest has led Don Dye to buy parcels, develop some and use others for building new schools. He bought land in Thousand Oaks in the early 1960s just as major development was taking off there. Right now, Pinecrest is planning a new school (its 12th campus) in Moorpark, and it owns 20 acres in Victorville.
Just like the region it serves, Pinecrest looks ready to grow outward--to places where working parents are settling to raise families and cope with long commutes.
