Growing Private Schools Getting Lesson in Civics

After an electrical fire burned some of Chadwick’s classrooms to the ground, the private school on the Palos Verdes Peninsula quickly moved to rebuild over the summer.

That was three summers ago.

The K-12 school still has no permanent building for its middle students, just a collection of trailers that sit near a pile of crumbled asphalt.

Chadwick is embroiled in a process that often frustrates private schools: the Battle to Build. Throughout California, schools like Chadwick have growing waiting lists of parents eager to enroll their children. But that doesn’t mean the schools are welcomed by neighbors.

It seems that whenever private schools want to improve or expand their campuses, let alone construct new ones, neighbors object because of traffic, noise and other feared nuisances. The result: years-long delays in adding classrooms, enlarging auditoriums or cutting the ribbon on a library.

Because they are government-run enterprises, public schools typically are spared such obstacles. Private schools, on the other hand, operate under zoning laws that apply to businesses. Before they begin pouring concrete, they usually must obtain a conditional-use permit, and doing so can trigger a neighborhood declaration of war.

Yard signs sprout up in protest. Planning commissions are flooded with letters from angry residents. And private schools are pelted with the adjectives that make them cringe most--”arrogant” and “elitist.”

One city planner ranks schools alongside nude bars in terms of their neighborhood desirability.

“Not because they’re bad people, but because as a land use . . . they can be disruptive,” said Los Angeles Senior Planner Gurdon Miller.

California’s 4,200 private schools enroll about 10% of the state’s elementary and secondary students. When they want to build or make improvements to their campuses, they apply to local planning boards. No agency tracks the number of building projects statewide.

Getting approval to grow can require private schools to endure long runs of reports and public hearings that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Much of the money goes to hire attorneys, engineers, land-use consultants and even geologists to plead a school’s case in front of zoning officials.

“It’s an enormously complicated and expensive process,” said Ted Hill, Chadwick’s headmaster.

Affluent neighbors can be particularly unaccommodating, school administrators say.

“When you have any moneyed community with time on its hands, you’re going to have controversy--the whole not-in-my-backyard thing,” said Arlene Hogan, who led a school in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights before becoming head of the Archer School for Girls in Brentwood. Archer’s neighbors are now on good terms with the school, she reports, after a permit process that lasted two years and cost $2 million.

Being thrown into hearings and before planning commissioners can be eye-opening for private schools, which normally go about their business unfettered by government regulation.

“I didn’t really expect the tenacity of the opposition that we faced,” said Magdy Eletreby, chairman of the board of New Horizons School, which will open next month in Irvine. Protests by neighbors in Rancho Santa Margarita stopped the Islamic elementary school from building there.

It irks folks like Eletreby that public schools do not need similar permits to build and operate, no matter how much traffic they bring into the neighborhood, along with the cheering, horns and whistles from athletic fields. Neighbors can picket, but ultimately public districts have the authority to buy out recalcitrant homeowners and bulldoze their properties for schools.

“I don’t think it is fair at all. The law should apply to everybody, private or public,” Eletreby said.

When a private school and its neighbors go to the mat, at least in Southern California, they almost always grapple over traffic. In Chadwick’s case, neighbors estimate the 725-student campus draws about 470 cars each morning. The school has tried to stagger the traffic by offering free day care an hour before classes start and setting up a fancy coffee bar to entice teachers to arrive early. The high school’s principal also clocks students’ cars with a radar gun he borrows from the baseball coach.

Until 66-year-old Chadwick sought to rebuild its middle school, construct a theater and gradually enlarge its enrollment by 255, “we had a very good relationship with the neighborhood--we thought,” Hill said.

The neighbors fear the school’s expansion will add dump trucks and 18-wheelers to the parade of SUVs and minivans that rumbles up and down their streets several times a day. They also contend the excavation and construction will expose their homes to landslides. So the residents--who live on land once owned by Chadwick--are trying to block the school’s plans.

“It is a fine school--we don’t argue that,” said Kitsa Treantafelles, president of the Academy Hill Homeowners Assn., which represents 183 neighbors. She said she wakes up twice a week at 5:45 a.m. when Chadwick’s milk delivery truck rolls by. “It’s just that we’re concerned about the traffic and the safety.”

Chadwick “is not unsympathetic to what they’re saying,” Hill said. “We’re simply trying to come up with a reasonable compromise that meets their concerns and allows the school to go forward.”

To appease its neighbors in Brentwood, Archer threatens to expel girls whose parents violate its carpool and traffic rules. The school wants more parents to take advantage of its buses, which now carry 80% of students.

The conditional-use permit Archer received in 1998 to move into a shuttered retirement home cost the school about $1 million in legal fees and another $1 million for street improvements in the area, which is home to three other private schools.

Archer’s 15-page permit caps enrollment increases to 70 students a year, up to a maximum of 450. It forbids bells that can be heard outdoors. Graffiti must be neatly painted over within 24 hours. Instruction must stop by 6 p.m. And graduation ceremonies cannot include loudspeakers.

“It would have been great not to have those restrictions and to concentrate on other things,” said Hogan, Archer’s head. But “ultimately, it forged an excellent relationship, I believe, between the school and the neighbors.”

Not so fortunate is Maranatha, a private high school in Sierra Madre. It owns land for a new campus, but resistance in the wealthy, no-stoplight town may prevent the Christian school from moving before its lease expires at a public campus nearby.

Signs opposing and supporting Maranatha’s plans dot yards throughout Sierra Madre, and the school has dedicated a large portion of its Web site to updates on the permit process and a calendar of hearings. Parents have formed a prayer group.

Maranatha’s acting head, Ron Grosh, expects Sierra Madre’s City Council to vote on the project in October, but “I’m not sure that even a yes vote from the council would be the end of it for some people in the community.”

In Sherman Oaks, neighborhood opposition forced the Buckley School to give up last year on its pursuit to nearly double its square footage. It had hoped to add 220 students to its campus, situated in a picturesque canyon. During the contentious four-year process to amend the school’s conditional-use permit, science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison, a neighbor, criticized the expansion on a national talk show.

“The reality is, any time you have something in a neighborhood--regardless of what it is--that is different . . . you’re going to have some potential for friction,” said Buckley head Paul Horovitz, who has been credited with smoothing things over with the neighbors. “The goal is to manage the coexistence in a way that minimizes that.”

Mimi Baer, executive director of the California Assn. of Independent Schools, said, “It’s not just schools. People just don’t want anything new.” The group has held workshops for schools going through the permit process.

Baer said she can understand why a neighborhood might oppose a power plant moving in, but “being in opposition to schools’ improving their sites or offering an education to more children--that I don’t understand.”