Drawn to a magnet school

HEY, MIDDLE-CLASS Los Angeles parent of rapidly approaching school-age children! Come down off that ledge. Take my hand. Sit here, on my sagging IKEA futon. You’re getting hysterical, and in L.A., hysteria is expensive.

I can sympathize, because a year ago, I was you. Our eldest was turning 4, it was “T-minus one year to kindergarten,” and my Van Nuys musician husband and my freelance writer self were experiencing that familiar emotion of Los Angeles parents: rising panic.

We were a typical two-career couple -- overscheduled, overburdened, collecting data points about L.A. Unified via a bullet spray of sources. An L.A. Times headline about race riots, a frightening NPR snippet about plunging graduation rates, then the expert weighing in, from the safety of Harvard.

While pundits and the mayor’s office forecast education trends for the year 2010, parents live in the 9-to-5, just trying to get to Monday. We trade rumors and phone numbers for “someone who can help,” like blind men groping the elephant. One preschool mom I know raved about the LAUSD magnet schools. “It’s easy!” she said. “For 2005, you’d probably be wait-listed -- that’s worth four points for next year, so on top of the eight you get for living in Van Nuys, you’ll have 12, so by first grade you’ll be in!”

Without hope, my husband filled out an application, while I was busy devising Plan B, a.k.a. why not make life simple and just move to a better school district? “$1.1 million and it’s on septic” was the best we could come up with on that cherished ritual: the soul-crushing Sunday open house tour of, in our case, La Canada. Hosing down our overheated (due to hills) 1998 Toyota minivan, with its peeling Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker and mystery smells, I grasped a dismal fact: We were one of those L.A. families too poor to be able to send our kids to public school.

Now came frantic visits to private schools, from affordable, parochial ones to hip, progressive ones teaching independent thinking, global citizenship and honoring diversity. At tuitions ranging from $14,000 to $27,000, if your kid skipped sixth grade, you could feed an entire village in Rwanda -- but we were wait-listed anyway, so I suppose I digress.

WITH MY BACK to the wall, it occurred to me that I had never actually visited our local public school. How bad could it be? Yes, it had a combination of statistics many educated parents flee: 93% Latino, 67% English learners, 94% socioeconomically disadvantaged. Our application packet included a migrant-worker questionnaire -- for tracking purposes, did we work in: dairy, forestry, food processing, livestock, agriculture or fishery? At 43, with 10 years of college, living in a too-small but by-now $600,000 house in a major metro area, this wasn’t the paperwork I thought I’d be holding.

And yet, to look at it, our Van Nuys Kindergarten Learning Academy was neat, clean and smartly run by founding Principal Candida Fernandez-Ghoneim. Classes were taught in English -- by year’s end, students read at grade level or better. Watching a familiar scene of kids practicing the alphabet, I felt my panic leave. I just couldn’t sustain it anymore -- I had no more “fight or flight to the good school district” chemicals left in my nervous system. The ABCs are so calming.

The final twist? As soon as we embraced our corner school, that magnet application came through. Half German, one-quarter Norwegian, one-quarter Chinese, it turns out my daughter is a minority in L.A. Unified (where white students now number fewer than one in 10).

Begun in the 1970s, the magnet system originated as a program of voluntary integration. Today, in a complicated algebra few seem to truly understand, my daughter’s ethnicity and our disadvantaged ZIP Code were the magic combo that shot us to the top of our particular list. (Desperate Norwegian parents posing as inhabitants of Van Nuys? That’ll be the next wave.)

So we start this week at a Van Nuys magnet that’s about 40% Latino and 40% Anglo, and where the No. 1 home language of English learners is Armenian. (Other languages include Cantonese, Tagalog, Arabic, Korean, Punjabi, Russian and Japanese. And it’s not a very big school.)

In fact, never mind a little crispy grass on the outside; inside, both schools were so surprisingly pleasant, and our LAUSD experience has ended so -- gasp! -- positively, that it has inspired our new middle-class educational plan: sheer unbridled optimism! The only worldview we can afford.