Model for Mini-Schools Found at Zoo

Four years spent cleaning the pen of a South American tapir helped Stephanie Perales decide she’d rather pursue a career working with criminals than animals.

But that doesn’t mean her close daily contact with the hairy, pig-like beast--or any other aspect of her career at North Hollywood High School’s Animal Studies/Biological Sciences Zoo Magnet--has been without value. Far from it, she said.

“It wasn’t a waste of time, because everybody takes science in college,” said Stephanie, who plans to study criminal psychology. “And the teachers expect more because they teach you more.”

The 10-teacher, 285-student satellite school, housed in bungalows at the Los Angeles Zoo parking lot, is a model for a three-year plan put forward last week by North Hollywood High Principal John Hyland for as many as a dozen mini-schools, both on and off the campus.

Unlike magnet schools, which have entrance requirements and draw students from throughout the district, a mini-school or “academy” enrolls students from within a particular high school and offers a specialized curriculum in a specific study area.

Hyland said the plan could mean a relatively quick end to year-round scheduling that the district voted last month to impose at the school--over vehement objections from parents and students--to ease overcrowding.

North Hollywood, with 3,500 students, is among a dozen Los Angeles high schools that will have to give up the traditional schedule in the next three years, the district said. A rise in student population could force all of the district’s high schools to go year-round by 2006. Already, 17 of the 49 operate year-round.

Under Hyland’s plan, all North Hollywood students would list their top three choices among such majors as social justice and urban transportation. Teachers and parents would make the final decision on which students would go where.

If the success of the zoo magnet can be replicated, Hyland said, students would be spread out on satellite campuses and year-round scheduling would be unnecessary.

So far, parents and school district officials have embraced the proposal.

“The main thing that people are concerned about is how fast can we do it,” said Caprice Young, a school board member representing North Hollywood, “because they [parents and students at North Hollywood High] want it done yesterday.”

Last month, when Hyland unveiled his plan, Supt. Ramon Cortines praised the proposal as “very realistic” for reducing the number of years that students at the high school would have to attend year-round.

The proposal is moving forward. Cortines has asked an architect to work with Hyland to determine facility needs and costs, Young said.

Personal Attention Is Key to Success

The 20-year-old zoo magnet offers North Hollywood lessons on the advantages and pitfalls of running a mini-campus of select students.

As a group, the zoo magnet students score in the 50th percentile statewide on standardized tests, compared with North Hollywood’s overall scores in the 25th percentile--a result that includes the prestigious Highly Gifted Magnet program.

Unlike the Highly Gifted Magnet, the zoo school’s student body IQ range nearly mirrors that of the main campus, zoo magnet coordinator Linda Gill said.

Also, the zoo magnet has better attendance and graduation rates than its parent school.

The secret to the smaller school’s academic success, Gill said, is an almost familial campus where teachers pay close attention to all the students and the faculty is excited about its mission. Each year, nearly every zoo student has a class taught by Barry Shapiro, an award-winning instructor who has been at the magnet since its inception. Such individual attention would be impossible on the main campus, school officials said.

“All the teachers know all the students,” said Gill, also a founding teacher. “So if a student is having trouble in English, it may be a math teacher who helps the student after talking to the English teacher. It’s proven that students want to perform better when they think a teacher cares.”

Animal cleanup duties aside, zoo magnet students relate all their classes to the zoo or animal science. For instance, instead of basic art, the school offers biological illustration. One of Stephanie’s math classes used geometry formulas to measure the area of the zoo.

Such crossover reinforces science knowledge, students and teachers say. Because the students had to apply to the program, most arrive with at least an interest in science.

Expansion of Concept Poses Challenges

North Hollywood has a wide array of Advanced Placement and science-heavy courses, “but they don’t serve a majority of the students,” Hyland said. “We have a large number of kids just here, not doing well, not doing poorly. Just here, hating high school.”

Hyland said the fragmented school concept he is trying to sell to the district would offer up to 4,500 students the same level of intimacy and depth of course work as the zoo magnet.

“My feeling is it’s quite possible and genuinely feasible to have a high school where there is no failure,” Hyland said. “We can do that on the basis of two principles: the creation of smallness and the creation of choice.”

While developing his proposal, Hyland visited other schools, including one in the East Harlem area of New York City, where the school-within-a-school movement began 25 years ago.

Faculty members at the zoo magnet revere their cozy campus, but some said they do not believe it can be replicated on a grand scale--even with other off-campus sites, such as a proposed entertainment academy based in the offices of one of the Valley’s film studios.

For one thing, said Gill, the zoo magnet coordinator, the high cost of busing kids back and forth between campuses makes it impractical. And, she added, housing teenagers in office buildings with working adults opens the district to liabilities it may not be prepared for.

“Developing small groups at North Hollywood is an interesting proposition,” Gill said. “But only the off-site schools are going to cut your numbers. Our campus had to be here at the zoo for obvious reasons. But it’s going to be a great challenge integrating other off-school sites with offices that are not meant to be schools.”

There’s also a question of who would attend the proposed mini-schools.

Right now, North Hollywood’s two magnets and two mini-schools are fairly exclusive because of their size limitations, if not their academic requirements.

Under Hyland’s plan of 100% participation, however, all students would enroll in major courses of study.

Zoo magnet counselor Maxine Drapkin said test scores would drop at the mini-schools when the general student population joins.

“Right now, we don’t deal with many students who have a problem with the language or special education requirements,” Drapkin said. “On the main campus, they have to deal with all that. There’s no way we could have the success we’ve had if we had to deal with the same range of students the main campus does.”

Hyland’s proposal has already garnered widespread support among people whose primary motive is returning the high school to a traditional fall-to-summer schedule.

School board member Young supports the plan, she said, because it demonstrates the community’s dedication to solving the space crisis.

“This is an example of a principal and school community really working on what do we want for our kids and how do we get there,” she said.