Through Thick and Thin

For most of the nation, “March Madness” connotes championship basketball tournaments. But for families applying to the Los Angeles area’s most sought-after private schools, the term takes on another meaning.

March is the month most schools send out their coveted admissions letters, a time of hectic activity in scores of private school offices and of high anxiety in thousands of homes.

“We’re all sitting here on pins and needles,” said Ray Michaud, headmaster of the John Thomas Dye School in Bel-Air. The 320-student elementary school was putting the final touches last week on letters of acceptance -- or rejection -- to its large pool of applicants for kindergarten and preparing its sixth-graders and their families for word from the schools they were seeking for fall.

Many schools have tried to ease the pressure on families by agreeing to send their letters on the same date.

Most Catholic schools and many Pasadena-area private schools have chosen March 11 to notify applicants. A consortium of independent schools, mainly on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley, agreed to mail letters to high school applicants on March 18 and last Thursday to those seeking elementary or middle school slots.

Many don’t even have to open the letters to know the verdict: A thick envelope typically foretells acceptance -- or at least a spot on a waiting pool. A thin one usually signals the end of the line for a family’s hopes. Admissions decisions, reached after weeks of deliberations by a committee, are rarely reconsidered, most schools say.

“I sincerely believe families, when they get their decision letters, shouldn’t be surprised, though some will be disappointed,” said Jeanette Woo Chitjian, director of admissions for Marlborough School, a seventh-through-12th-grade girls school in Hancock Park.

The school keeps in touch with families throughout the months-long application process, attempting to get to know prospective students and allowing them to spend time on campus during the school day.

Though Marlborough will be on spring break this week, the school office will be open and Chitjian will take calls from disappointed parents.

“We have established a relationship over the last few months, and parents want to get a sense of what happened,” Chitjian said. “They just want to know, and I think it would be heartless not to take their calls.”

Some schools refuse to divulge how many applications they receive or the number of students they accept.

“We can’t give that out,” said Maggie Wright, director of admissions for Turning Point in Culver City.

“We don’t want to cause a panic, and spreading news like that causes all kinds of panic” in families applying for the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade independent school.

But such steps can only go so far toward easing the pressure, especially for the most in-demand schools, which have far more applicants than they can accept.

“This is 10 times more difficult than applying for college,” said a Westside mother whose twin daughters were hoping for Marlborough.

Like many parents interviewed for this article, she asked that she not be identified to protect her children’s privacy. “We’ve not even told a lot of people we’re applying” in case the answer is no, she added.

For families also considering one of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s popular magnet programs, there is an additional complication. The school district sends its notification letters in mid-April, after most private schools’ deadlines have passed for families to make nonrefundable deposits -- as much as $2,000 or $3,000.

Los Angeles School Board President Jose Huizar said he would like to review several aspects of the “challenging and anxiety-provoking” magnet selection process to make it more family-friendly, including “exploring a more timely response to their applications to the extent possible.”

Magnet program advisor LaVerne Patterson said the district has tried to align its notification date with those of private schools, “but what we’ve found is that the private schools keep moving their date.”

And logistics make an earlier notification date nearly impossible, she added.

Each January, L.A. Unified receives more than 65,000 applications for about 16,000 openings in magnet schools, and it must follow court-ordered integration guidelines to select students.

Some families try to hedge their bets by applying to many schools. One Hancock Park family sent in applications at six private campuses for their older daughter, who will enter seventh grade in the fall. And the parents have tried to prepare her for possible rejections.

“We keep telling her, ‘This is so not about you being rejected. It’s the schools looking for the best fit, for the students they think are most appropriate for their school, and that is all it is,’ ” the mother said.

Others stick to one or two schools.

Mary DesForges of Westchester said both of her daughters applied only to Notre Dame Academy, a Catholic girls high school on the Westside. The family knew that the college-prep school receives about three times as many applicants as it has openings.

“It was a little bit more stressful the first time, because this was an unknown [process] for us, but this was the school we all really wanted, and we felt she had the grades, the recommendations and everything else she needed to get in,” DesForges said.

The gamble paid off. Nicole, DesForges’ older daughter, is a junior at Notre Dame, and Jackie recently was accepted for the next freshman class.

The LaRose family had very specific criteria for high school for twins Megan and Tessa.

“I wanted a Catholic school, and they wanted an all-girls school,” said Nancy LaRose. Both girls applied to Notre Dame, Marymount High in Bel-Air and Immaculate Heart High in Hollywood.

“I wouldn’t say we were relaxed about it,” their mother said.

But when both got accepted at all three schools, the tough part began. “I was concerned they wouldn’t want the same school,” and, for a while, she said, they didn’t.

Finally, the girls both chose Marymount.

Many parents worry about the pressures on their children.

“My daughter has said several times she hates the waiting and wishes she could just go on to the next school,” said a Santa Monica mother whose sixth-grade daughter has applied to two private schools.

“In the last two weeks, it’s really heated up. Everybody’s talking about it,” the mother said. “It’s nerve-wracking.”

Sally Jean McKenna, director of admissions at the sought-after Polytechnic School in Pasadena, said parents who are stressed over admissions decisions may inadvertently communicate that anxiety to their children.

“We all try to do our best to reduce that stress, but it’s just the nature of the beast when you’re dealing with a decision that affects your children’s future,” McKenna said. “We know we are dealing with parents at their most vulnerable.”

Many schools that end at sixth or eighth grade spend much of their students’ final year steering families toward suitable middle or high schools.

At John Thomas Dye, for example, the headmaster begins an intensive year of school-searching each spring with parents of the school’s fifth-graders that includes entrance test preparation, discussions of school options and some hand-holding to ease concerns. Most of the students end up at one of about a dozen private schools.

Parents whose children don’t get into the schools they had hoped for might find some consolation in the experience of Carl Botterud and Kari Haugen of Pasadena, who say they went overboard in their school shopping, taking their then-4-year-old to one school after another, applying to six.

“We didn’t get into a single one,” Botterud said.

Then, just a week or so later, came word from Waverly, one of their favorite schools, that it had a place for their son.

“If we had known how it would work out in the end, we probably would not have applied to as many schools,” Botterud said. But he said his son was comfortable from the moment he first stepped on Waverly’s campus.

“It was meant to be.”