Route to the Top

Fifteen-year-old Ashley Atkins moved through the marbled halls of the Great Western Mutual Auditorium south of downtown one night recently with so much grace and cheery confidence that younger girls and boys could not help but stare up at her.

She was serving as an advisor to the newest recruits of a local organization that for years has been quietly linking capable minority students with Southern California’s most expensive and demanding private elementary and college prep schools.

Impressed that Atkins already attends Marlborough School in Los Angeles, a predominantly white private school where competition is fierce, some of the newcomers to the Independent School Alliance for Minority Affairs peppered her with questions.

What’s your homework load like? How’s your social life? What’s it like being in classes full of bright, wealthy white kids?

“It’s going to be hard and intimidating; there’ll be times when you’ll say, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ ” Atkins told Angella Monroe, 11, of Inglewood, who was preparing to enter Marlborough. “When that happens, just say, ‘Self, this is who you are. Brentwood and Bel-Air are who your friends are. You can handle this. Believe in yourself!’ ”

Atkins is among the 759 minority students whom the Alliance and Executive Director Manasa Hekymara have shepherded through 42 local private schools, including Brentwood in Los Angeles, Chadwick on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Flintridge Prep in La Canada and Harvard-Westlake near UCLA.

Now, as the Alliance enters its 15th year of placing students in grades kindergarten through 12, Hekymara has plenty to crow about.

A Program With Increasing Dividends

A record 448 students have been enrolled this year by the organization, which is funded by contributions from its member schools and foundation grants. Last year, 270 of 370 students received financial aid, which totaled almost $2.5 million. Aid figures for this year were unavailable.

Thirty-two Alliance seniors graduated from 11 member schools in June, bringing the organization’s total number of high school graduates to 189. All of them went to universities, including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Dartmouth. Now there is talk of starting an alumni newsletter.

“Those numbers may seem small,” Hekymara said, “but our graduates have a long-term ripple effect in their families and their communities.”

Take Todd Billings, 25, of South-Central Los Angeles, who attended Chadwick School. Today the Stanford graduate is a stock trader with an annual salary well into six figures.

Billings said he will never forget how his grandmother argued against “sending a poor black kid to a rich white school. She predicted disaster because I would be treated as inferior.”

Truth is that although Billings ultimately graduated with a B average, he had a rocky start in private school. His first day at Chadwick was marked by a fistfight. Later, he was marched in front of a student court for plagiarizing a single sentence from a textbook.

“And my school day began at 5:30 a.m. when I caught a bus to the Harbor Freeway,” he recalled. “Then I caught another bus to Carson. From there, I car-pooled to Chadwick. I made the whole trip in reverse each afternoon.

“But Manasa was there for me every step of the way,” he said. “Looking back, there was no way I could have achieved so much without the Alliance.”

The Alliance was established in 1984 by headmasters who wanted to increase the number of minority students at their then all-white campuses.

Ever since, the Alliance, which is the only organization of its kind based in the Western United States, has been arranging enrollments for high achievers seeking an enriched curriculum far more challenging than anything they had tackled in public schools.

About 70% of those students have received financial assistance averaging $9,200.

Nearly all of the member schools have financial aid programs to help families pay for tuition, which ranges from $8,000 to $18,000 a year. Of the $15 million in scholarships handed out by Alliance schools last year, $6 million went to students of color.

“The rest went to poor white kids,” said Hekymara, whose first name is an East African expression for “someone who makes a difference.”

Minority families use the Alliance to match their interests and location with specific schools and to help them complete the maze that is the admission process at top-tier private campuses. Some also receive help in obtaining financial aid.

In return, the Alliance schools require strong test scores, teacher recommendations and the student’s extraordinary motivation and desire to learn.

There is a $50 application fee paid directly to the Alliance; participating schools, in turn, waive their individual application fees. For families applying to grades six through 12, there is an additional $59 fee for a grueling Independent School Entrance Exam.

But the Alliance’s efforts to couple thirsty, questing minds with entrance applications are not going to make the student bodies of elite private schools reflect the diversity of Los Angeles any time soon.

Operating on Small Budget

The Alliance operates on a shoestring annual budget of $210,000. A year ago, it hired its first full-time office clerk. It needs a full-time Latino outreach coordinator but lacks the funds to support such a position.

In the meantime, some member schools have created their own “diversity teams,” reducing their reliance on the Alliance for recruits.

Private school consultant Jim McManus said independent schools have a lot of catching up to do.

“Today’s kindergartners will live in a California that will have no majority racial or ethnic group by the time they are in fourth grade,” he said. “So schools that continue to draw mostly white students will be limiting the bulk of their applicant pools to a small fraction of the population in Los Angeles, and they will fail to benefit from the abundant talents of the vast majority--who are students of color.”

Fran Scoble, who heads the all-girl Westridge School in Pasadena, believes the Alliance will continue to play a critical role, “quietly and behind the scenes changing how local independent schools operate.”

“We are doing a better job than we used to in terms of diversity, but not as good a job as we’d like to,” she said. “But if we value the quality of education at these schools, we have a responsibility to make them as accessible to as many people as possible. The Alliance is an important component of that effort.”

The most recent statistics from the National Assn. of Independent Schools put minority enrollment at its 902 campuses at 17.8% of 421,306 students nationwide. A decade ago, students of color accounted for 13.5%.

Barbara Williams, assistant head of the 263-student Village School in Pacific Palisades, said: “Our school is so predominantly white right now any improvement would be welcomed. We expect the Alliance to help us find minority families that might be interested in us.”

That shouldn’t be hard, according to those who attended the parent orientation last week.

More important to them, however, was how to deal with racial issues their children might encounter.

“Given that these schools are in the United States, they are not immune to racial problems,” Hekymara said. “You will have to be vigilant and brave as you can be. You may even have to call somebody to task.

“But just keep your eye on the outcome, what your child is getting out of the entire experience,” she said. “Make the most of the opportunities that arise and the doors that open.”

Inglewood residents Trudi Monroe, left, and her daughter Angella, 11, attend an orientation by the Independent School Alliance for Minority Affairs. Angella, through the Alliance program, is a seventh-grader at the exclusive Marlborough School in Los Angeles.