Mr. X Picks Up Tuition Tab

The phone calls were mysterious but exciting: A man wants to send you to private school, the foster children were told. Who is he? they asked. He doesn’t want you to know his name--for now.

In the imaginations of the teenagers who got those calls, this Mr. X took shape. He was old. He was bald. He was some fat cat throwing money at them--kids who had been in and out of foster homes and cramped schools--to make himself feel better.

“You just don’t picture rich people to be normal,” said Tina, who decided to take the guy up on his offer and enroll at a $15,000-a-year school in Santa Monica.

“I never thought I’d be given a chance like that,” she said.

A second girl was reluctant. She was attending a Catholic school and had friends there.

“I didn’t want to come, because I didn’t know anybody,” said Sade. (Sade, Tina and other students in this story are wards of the court and their full names could not be used.)

But after Sade played summer basketball with her new school’s team and got through her first week of classes, “I just didn’t want to leave.”

Because of Mr. X’s donation, Sade won’t have to leave. That, said the administrator of this program, is why it was created. Being guaranteed a spot at one school creates stability for children whose lives apart from their birth parents have been unstable.

“It’s not unconditional love when you get placed in” a foster home, said Deanne Shartin, director of the Center for Educational Opportunities. “These kids, their schooling has so suffered.”

Tina, 16, estimates that she has lived in 10 foster homes and missed three years’ worth of school. Now in the 11th grade at New Roads School, the aspiring actress has caught up and is auditioning for a school play.

“I feel so smart, and I feel like the world’s opened up to me,” Tina said. For her foster mother of four years, who teaches at another private school, having Tina among New Roads’ 220 high schoolers has been “like a godsend.”

“She’s excited about learning. She comes home and does her work. She discusses college plans. It’s night and day,” said the woman, who is adopting Tina.

The Center for Educational Opportunities was launched last year with the commitment of Mr. X to fund talented foster children’s’ high school educations. The center is associated with New Visions Foundation, under the direction of Paul Cummins, who started Crossroads School in Santa Monica and later founded New Roads. The foundation aims to open private schools and charter schools for students of diverse backgrounds.

Well connected with foster agencies, Shartin found the students, and the schools willing to take them in. New Roads, which is coed, and two girls’ schools, Archer School in Brentwood and Marlborough School in Hancock Park, admitted the center’s first students last fall.

Shartin is seeking to expand the program to more students through donations from individuals and foundations and from more of the area’s private schools, which would offer scholarships to the center’s students.

“I’ll bring the perfect candidate to them, and it’s a form of diversity that they all really like,” Shartin said.

“These kids were right in line with the sorts of kids that we hope to be able to accept,” said David Bryan, head of New Roads.

“Socially, they’ve just eased right into the situation and they’ve got big smiles on their faces and they’re eager to be at school--as eager as any kid is to be at school,” he said.

Jonathan, in 10th grade at New Roads, said moving from a public school took some adjustment. His new campus, which was once a hot-tub motel, seemed so small, so funky. The classrooms had names, not numbers. Students called the teachers by their first names. At lunchtime, no one was surprised if someone played bongos.

“The school is not normal at all,” Jonathan said. “You never get bored at this place.”

Classes at his old school had 36 students, and he could chitchat with impunity. Now in a room with 13 students, Jonathan is more conspicuous.

“The teacher--without even turning around--knows who it is,” he marveled.

Mr. X is keeping tabs on Jonathan, and on the others he is sending through school. When they started classes last year, they wrote him letters. Then word came around Christmas that their benefactor wanted to meet them.

Sade was nervous. Would he like her? Would he like the others? Would this lunch be some sort of interview to determine whether he would still pay their tuition?

“I just wanted to see him in person, get it out of the way,” she said.

When they all met for pizza, Mr. X was nothing like the students expected. He was in his 50s. He was hip. And he had hair.

So who is this masked man?

Peter Morton, founder of the Hard Rock Cafes and owner of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Known more for his support of environmental causes, Morton stumbled into sending foster children to private schools because his usual philanthropy--mailing checks--frustrated him.

“At the end of the day, I always wonder where the money’s going, what’s going to happen to it,” he said. With his current commitment, there is no bureaucracy to dilute his gift, he said.

“Every check I wrote, I knew exactly where the money was going and what was going to happen,” he said.

In this second year, Morton is also funding the education of an 11-year-old girl who tells people to call her Jelly and loves math class at New Roads’ middle school.

“It tests my brain right in the morning--first period,” she said.

Jelly has not met Morton yet.

“I still owe him another thank-you card,” she said. (This polite child has been in school just three weeks.) “If you get to see him or anything,” she asked a reporter to promise, “tell him I’m very thankful for choosing me.”