After-School Scholars

Elementary schools in Lakewood, Ohio, a comfortable suburb of Cleveland, conscientiously teach all basic subjects, even offer "enrichment" work for bright children. But, like most grade schools, they see no obligation to teach foreign languages or give children a fast, Space-Age start in science. Last winter a group of parents with bright children tested this mixture, found it lean for the pupils with high IQs.

School officials turned out to be politely unenthusiastic over suggestions for improvement. Instead of scolding or subsiding, the parents started their own after-hours school. Results by last week: 17 youngsters aged eight to eleven are going to French class after school, in the public library; half a dozen boys aged six to eight are getting a first look at science in a floating class that rotates from home to home on Saturday mornings; ten boys aged nine to eleven are digesting a stiff science course in a day-nursery classroom.

Untitled principal of the out-of-hours school is Mrs. Stephen J. Knerly, 33, onetime bright child in Cleveland elementary schools, where gifted students are fed large helpings of science, foreign languages and math in special classes. She did much of the early tilting with school officials, then, with a neighbor, organized the French course. For a fee of $5 an hour the school hired Louise Burke, a retired Cleveland French teacher. Miss Burke runs her classes without texts and entirely in French, fining youngsters a "sou" (actually 1-c-) when they lapse into English. Says Mrs. Knerly's daughter Margaret, 11: "I love it. We get a lot done. Miss Burke doesn't keep going over and over something, and boring you."

The younger boys' science instructor is Engineer Lucien Lepkowski, who teaches the class for fun. Lepkowski started his class cautiously, soon found that little boys could "go much deeper in the search for facts than anyone would imagine is possible." First areas for the search: the insides of small gasoline and electric motors, which the young scholars can now take apart and explain. The boys ask hard questions, e.g., why do salt and sugar crystals, seen under a borrowed microscope, look different? In the older boys' science class, taught for $5 an hour by Junior High Science Teacher Arthur Olson, the students have gone far beyond their age group in studying the solar system, will next investigate magnetism.

Tuition costs have worked out at about 50-c- a lesson for each student. The parents do not feel they are rebelling against the school system. Instead, they recognize the limits of their project, hope that the public schools will eventually take over the after-school classes.

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