Keeping Them Closer to Home

By D.L Coutu

In California, parents start a community school and like it

Pacific Palisades was anything but pacific that night. Parents on the advisory council for the local public schools were angrily debating plans for a court-mandated busing program. When Dave Thomsen, 36, a management consultant, objected to shipping small children 20 miles away to school, someone shouted, "Thomsen, if you don't like the way Los Angeles schools are run, why don't you just leave?" Thomsen walked out, followed by half a dozen parents. "If this were 200 years ago," he said, "we'd be starting our own school." So they did, a mile away from Ronald Reagan's house.

That was April 1977. By fall 1978 the Palisades Village School was opening its doors to 104 students in three grades. Today, though it is still housed partly in a former men's club, and a second-grade classroom still sports a brick barbecue in one corner, the school is thriving. It has 486 students in grades one through eight (none of whom lives more than four miles away), and 24 teachers, as well as a large number of happy parents. Says Susie De Wesse, who has a son in second grade and a daughter in fifth: "They've hired some of the greatest, most dedicated teachers around."

Six other community schools now operate in Los Angeles, all founded since 1978, when busing was first required in the 710-sq.-mi. school district, and the average busing distance turned out to be 40 miles a day. The new schools are for the most part makeshift: no frills, no gyms, no scholarships. The Palisades Village School has no library and no cafeteria: students use the public library and eat bag lunches in the park. Teachers scrimp too, earning from $9,000 to $13,500 a year, compared with the $10,000 to $25,000 offered by the public schools. But there are few complaints. "The curriculum here is much more difficult," says Third-Grade Teacher Barbara Urban, 27. "Nobody is allowed to slack or goof off." Boasts Teacher Stephanie Love: "I have parent volunteers to help me grade papers and to tutor the children who need special work."

As an added attraction there is homework every night. Says De Wesse: "My children didn't have that when they went to public school." At Palisades Village School, students write work contracts with their teachers. Parents have much greater control over what is learned and taught. Old-fashioned or newfashioned, neighborhood schools offer the possibility of increased parental involvement. "Like many other mothers, I work," Carol Ducy explained. "It would be impractical to drive many miles across town to the school where my child has been bused." Even though places like Palisades Village tend to drain bright students from the public school system, Roberta Weintraub, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education concedes: "When you create an untenable situation for financially able parents, they are going to find a solution. Busing is the second great American social experiment that failed. The first was Prohibition."

With the cost of tuition at the new community schools running as high as $2,200 a year, poor parents can hardly afford to send their children. Explains Shirley Brown, the black principal of the North Valley Community School, which has 40 students in grades seven through nine: "We're open to all creeds and colors -- if they've got the money."

Though Palisades Village School has 14 Orientals and six Hispanics, there are currently no black students. "The school has never refused anybody admittance," Dave Thomsen insists, defending the school's first-come, first-served policy of admission. The Internal Revenue Service seems to see things Thomsen's way. According to IRS standards in use at that time, any private school starting up or expanding in an area undergoing mandatory integration would normally have been denied tax-exempt status. Satisfied that the Palisades Village School was operating "in a bona fide racially nondiscriminatory manner," the IRS granted the new school a nonprofit, tax-exempt status. "I don't think they're racist," says Walter Young, principal of two of the three public elementary schools in the local school district.

Fred Okrand, American Civil Liberties Union legal director for Southern California, is not impressed: "The tragedy is the conscious abandonment of the minority kids." But defenders of the community schools point out that they continue to support the public schools through local taxes: a typical Palisades family pays about $900 to $1,000 annually in taxes earmarked for the public school system.

Even with that money, enrollment in local public elementary schools is falling. At the Canyon School, for example, enrollment fell from a prebusing total of 300 students to 272; all but 66 are bused in. The Marquez School's rolls are down from 732 to 349. Wilson Riles, state superintendent of schools and a black, is gloomy about those figures. "If community schools expand very much, the public schools will become schools of paupers. I don't think these schools were meant to be an elitist thing, but it could develop into that." And, in fact, Dave Thomsen has already contacted the local school district, hoping to rent one of the nearly vacated public schools if it closes down. Chuckles School Board President Wein traub: "Now, is that Catch-22 or isn't it?"

With reporting by Joseph Pilcher

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