I think this interesting and illuminating article from the Wall Street Journal provides much to wonder about.
Two things occurred to me while reading: "separate but equal" has not disappeared but the proponents have changed, and (for those not familiar with the area) I doubt there are 10 registered Republicans within 10 miles of this school and none of them are quoted here.
[Note to future thread researchers: second observation was meant to be humorous]
August 23, 2001
Page One Feature
What Happened When Well-to-Do Parents
Tried to Prep a Public School for Their Kids
By LISA BANNON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
LOS ANGELES -- One morning in November 1999, Ted Henning bounded up the stairs of Cheremoya Avenue School to join other neighborhood parents on a mission. Inside the elementary school's cramped library, two dozen teachers sat waiting to receive them.
After filing in and exchanging polite hellos, Mr. Henning and the handful of other parents offered some suggestions for improving the school. Among them: setting up a computer lab, renovating the playground and perhaps adding music and art teachers. "No one thinks the school is a bad school," Mr. Henning, a now-35-year-old Hollywood screenwriter, told the faculty. But "all we have to go on is test scores. We would like to help improve things."
The offer wasn't what the teachers wanted to hear. "We hope you aren't viewing this school as something that needs a lot of fixing," one of them said, according to minutes of the meeting. "We haven't got all the fancy resources of some private schools, but we think we are doing a pretty good job of teaching the children."
1Have your local public schools improved over the past five years? Participate in the Question of the Day.
Not the children of these parents, though.
Across the country, well-to-do parents have become increasingly aggressive about trying to improve the public schools their children attend. But in this affluent Los Angeles neighborhood, parents have taken the audacious step of attempting to upgrade their underperforming local school before even committing to sending their children.
"Nobody is brave enough to send their kid there by themselves," says Kenneth Robins, the father of a toddler and president of Friends of Cheremoya Avenue School, or Focas, the group the parents formed just weeks before their fall 1999 meeting with the teachers. "I think we need this thing of having people hold each other's hands." The neighbors envision, in Mr. Robins's words, turning the school "into one of the top performers in the district" in just four years -- by first getting to know Cheremoya, then working on projects they think will improve the school, and eventually recruiting enough families to form a first kindergarten class.
Nestled on leafy Franklin Avenue, the Spanish-style stucco schoolhouse straddles the divided worlds of rich and poor, white and Latino, in one of this city's many segregated neighborhoods.
To the north, where Mr. Henning and the other Focas parents live, are spectacular Hollywood Hills homes with lush landscapes, swimming pools and movie stars such as Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock. In the late 1970s, residents of the hills joined the nationwide white flight from public schools, moving their sons and daughters out of Cheremoya to the city's far-flung private schools after the start of busing and other desegregation efforts.
Since then, the vast majority of the school's students have come from the area south of Franklin: a narrow enclave of apartment buildings occupied by a growing population of Latino and Armenian families. Once in the minority, the Latinos now constitute more than 60% of Cheremoya's 500 or so students. Most families are recent immigrants who don't speak English fluently, and many qualify for Title I federal funding for the poor. If these two worlds come in contact with each other, it's usually through employment: Many residents from the south work as gardeners, nannies and housekeepers for residents in the north.
2Join the Discussion: Do you agree or disagree with the efforts and tactics of the parents seeking to enroll their children in Cheremoya Avenue Elementary School? What are your thoughts on the issues raised in this article?
Mr. Henning doesn't know any of the families south of Franklin whose children attend Cheremoya. Yet on the day of his first visit, the orderly ocher schoolhouse reminded him of where he went as a boy in Princeton, N.J. Inside, the hallways had the same clean, clinical smell. Artwork hung on the same stark white walls. "The bell rang, and I had a flashback to when I was nine," he says.
Mr. Henning and his wife, Stefanie, a Hollywood music executive, live comfortably in a hillside home with views of the Hollywood sign from their balcony. They send their four-year-old daughter, Jessie, to one of the area's best private preschools, a Montessori school that charges $8,400 a year in tuition. They always assumed that they would send her to one of the city's many private elementary schools, despite the hefty tuition.
Yet Mr. Henning, whose mother taught public school for 24 years in New Jersey, thinks Focas can make a difference. "The thing I don't understand," he says, "is people just conceding to paying $10,000 a year for private school, and they don't put any effort into something like this." He also feels entitled to make changes at the school -- even without having his daughter there. "I pay $4,000 a year in property taxes," he says.
As the meeting with Focas ended, Principal Sellena Carter thanked the group for its interest and advised the neighbors to work closely with teachers, the existing student body and their families. She suggested organizing a "nonthreatening" event involving parents and teachers and introducing themselves as friends rather than prospective Cheremoya families. That way, they "don't see you as trying to fix the school for your kids before they get here," another teacher said.
Mr. Henning left the meeting with mixed feelings. He sympathized with the tough job the teachers face. Still, he said, "if they can't understand why people with the means to send their kids to private schools would [hesitate to] send their kids to a school with test scores like that, with a broken playground. If they can't wrap their heads around that..." He trailed off into silence.
Moises Escobar and his son, Daniel, grabbed the city bus near their small $350-a-month apartment south of Franklin and rode through the gritty streets of Hollywood to Cheremoya. It was a warm Saturday in April 2000, Mr. Escobar recalls, when they made a special trip to help plant flowers at the school as part of a beautification project organized by Focas.
Mr. Escobar, a stocky Guatemalan, came to Los Angeles in 1979 and has been helping out at the school since Daniel was in kindergarten. Mr. Escobar's wife died of cancer in 1995, and he took on the responsibilities of a full-time dad. He works sporadically, sometimes as a handyman in his apartment building. But with a flexible schedule, he's able to drop off and pick up his son every day and participate in school activities. Unlike many of the other Latino parents, Mr. Escobar, now 48, speaks some English and makes an effort to mix with the Anglo mothers and fathers.
Across the schoolyard, Juliette Bridges, a 39-year-old Barnard-educated Focas mother of two, was directing parents where to plant flowers, shrubs and palms according to a rough design sketched out by a community landscape expert who volunteered her time. Already deeply active in her daughter's private preschool, Ms. Bridges volunteered to head up the party as a way to reach out to parents at Cheremoya.
When she saw Mr. Escobar planting delicate impatiens in direct sunlight, Ms. Bridges says, she called out: "No, those can't go there!" Quickly, she assigned him another planting task.
Too late. Mr. Escobar set the flowers down and walked away.
"You know how you say to children, 'Don't touch!'" Mr. Escobar grumbled. "They treated us like children."
"I thought all the parents would come with their kids and do the planting," he said later. But the Focas parents "wanted to do everything themselves."
Mr. Escobar also gripes about the free hamburgers the hillside neighbors were grilling and passing out. In past years, he says, the Latino families each brought different dishes to gatherings like this. Some of the 70 or so Latino families who came were offended when they arrived and someone told them what to do. "People like to bring their own food -- Guatemalan food, Mexican food, tamales," Mr. Escobar says. "They like to talk about what they are going to bring."
The party drew more than 200 people, and photos of all the parents and children planting flowers hung in the school lobby for months afterward. But in some ways, it made Mr. Escobar leery of the Friends of Cheremoya. The hillside residents talked quickly, asked many questions and offered endless suggestions on improving things. He wondered why, when they had no children at the school, they were suddenly so involved.
A few weeks before the beautification party, he accepted Focas's invitation to attend a different gathering. The group had begun monthly "Saturdays in the Park" to encourage parents to get to know one another. When Mr. Escobar arrived, he and Daniel, then a third-grader in a class with Spanish-language support, were the only Latinos there. He noticed big easels marking the names of children from the hills eligible to attend Cheremoya. There were 12 names written under 2000, 22 under 2001 and 34 under 2002. For Focas, the easels demonstrated that the hills housed enough children to give the neighborhood a formidable presence in the school.
Mr. Escobar left the park perplexed: If all those children come to the school, what will happen to the children who are there now? "Why don't they count our children, too?" he wondered.
Sitting on a cold metal chair in the Cheremoya auditorium a month after the planting party, Ms. Bridges fidgeted as she watched school administrators, district officials and teachers march up to the podium.
Over the past few months, Focas had been organizing a series of high-profile events: the planting party, a booth at the school's multicultural fair, the monthly Saturdays in the park. More and more neighbors were calling Ms. Bridges, excited about getting involved. Even her friends Lisa and Chip Clements, who have long planned on sending their four-year-old son, Willy, to the exclusive Oaks School, were getting more serious about Cheremoya.
Ms. Bridges spent a long time thinking about whether to send her own two children to Cheremoya or a private school. "It can be destructive to be in an isolated, rich-kid environment," she says.
She and her husband, David, a British-born director of photography for Hollywood movies, live high above the canyons in a home they built themselves: a sprawling three-story house cut directly into the bedrock. Despite the Bridges's prosperity, private-school tuition would be a financial strain now that she had given up her job as a camera assistant to stay at home with the kids.
Yet the decision was more than financial. As the daughter of a doctor growing up in Albany, N.Y., Ms. Bridges considers her own public education and exposure to peers of many backgrounds to be big assets in her life. "This is where our daughter lives: with people who don't speak English, from different countries, whose parents do other things," she says. "It's OK not to separate her out of that."
On this night, she and David were the only parents in Focas committed to sending their child to kindergarten at Cheremoya, though their daughter, Sophie, wouldn't be old enough to start until the fall 2001 schoolyear. (Their son, Gabriel, would start in 2003.) Unlike her neighbors, Ms. Bridges felt obligated to commit to enrolling Sophie before becoming active at the school. "How do you get really involved if you're not really interested in sending your child there?" she said.
This could be the turning point for more families, Ms. Bridges hoped. With the goal of formally introducing the neighborhood to the school, Focas invited neighbors, parents, district officials and teachers to the forum. Nearly 200 people packed the auditorium; the hillside parents sitting on one side, and the Hispanic and Armenian parents, listening to simultaneous translations through earphones, on the other.
After an hour of speeches, Vice Principal Wing Leung used an overhead projector to display the school's most recent test scores on a screen. Whispers coursed through the audience. The numbers showed Cheremoya scored 493 out of 1000 in 1999. It had a target of 508 in 2000. Overall, it was ranked a two out of 10 on the latest state performance index.
"Why are the scores so low?" a man called out.
"They're really not that low, considering the student body we have," Mr. Leung replied. Some 350 of the school's 500 or so students were being taught in Spanish or Armenian until the 1998-99 schoolyear. Following passage of a California ballot initiative banning bilingual education, students began an English-language immersion program. But many students hadn't learned enough English in time to fully understand the test.
"You may think they're low, but we think they're pretty good," Mr. Leung added cheerfully.
Ms. Bridges cringed.
At the back of the auditorium, several hillside parents, including Stefanie Henning, walked out early.
After the meeting, Ms. Bridges realized that, with the school refusing to acknowledge it needs major improvement, Focas had lost many prospective families. "It was not a healthy thing for our group," she said.
Even some of her closest allies were now dubious. "They discussed reading by age nine," Ms. Clements, a Princeton-educated marketing consultant, said later. "I thought, really? We're trying to get them to read by the time they're four."
At the start of the schoolyear in August 2000, none of the 12 hillside families eligible to enroll their children had done so.
The group now faced the uncomfortable fact that if it didn't recruit a class for the schoolyear starting in 2001, Focas would wither to nothing. But beyond Ms. Bridges and her husband, no one else would commit.
Over lunch at a popular neighborhood deli, Mr. Henning discussed how, despite his involvement with Focas, he still hadn't decided whether to send his own daughter to Cheremoya; she will be eligible to start in 2002. "The bones of the school are great, a lot of teachers are great," he said. "But I want to see change, movement in the test scores, more parents involved," before he would commit.
The group had many projects lined up to bring about that movement. Mr. Henning favored plans to renovate the playground. Other projects included training teachers in instructing gifted students and launching an after-school program for families unable to pick up their children by 2:30 p.m. One Focas member, Claire Joseph, was anxious to set up an organic salad bar in the lunchroom.
Many of the projects would be funded through grants already available from the city, county and district. Focas also hoped to underwrite some initiatives using money it will raise at a Halloween party and a rummage sale, among other fund-raisers.
But the group's main condition for sending its children to Cheremoya hadn't yet been broached with the school: The Focas students must be together in one of the four classes per grade at Cheremoya.
It may seem like an elitist request, some neighbors admitted. But the Focas parents believed that their involvement would have a greater impact if all their children were concentrated in one class.
It's a point that made sense to Dara Brown, one of the very few hillside parents who already sent her son, Max, to Cheremoya. Ms. Brown, a stay-at-home mother of two, initially resented her neighbors' efforts to upgrade the school before sending their own children. "I don't need a committee to tell me where to send my kid," she said upon first meeting the group. But after more than a year as one of the only active parents at Cheremoya -- serving on several parent committees and acting as parent liaison with the district -- she changed her mind. "I am so looking forward to them being there so I don't have to do it all myself," she said.
Most important, Focas parents feared that the hillside children wouldn't be sufficiently challenged if mixed with non-English speakers who need to spend classroom time learning the basics of the language.
There were social reasons, too. Ms. Joseph, a fashion designer and founding member of Focas, liked the neighborhood feeling created by friends sending their children to school together. "You could say, 'Well, shouldn't they be friends with the Latino boy sitting next to them?'" Ms. Joseph remarked. Yet "we want that school to service our neighborhood, too."
Keeping the children together had become so crucial that it was now a potential deal breaker for many Focas parents. "Is it elitist? Yeah," Mr. Henning said. But "are we taking a chance? Yeah. And they should understand that."
The afternoon light cast a long shadow across the teachers' lounge as Ms. Bridges pulled up a chair and prepared for a showdown with Ms. Carter, the principal.
It was February, and after more than a year of activity by Focas, the faculty had turned down nearly every major proposal the group made. Ms. Carter shrugged off the after-school program idea, saying the school would handle it. Teachers expressed little interest in the training program for gifted students. The organic salad bar was shelved, too. "I need the kids to be educated in eating vegetables first," Ms. Carter said.
To Ms. Bridges, the cool reception was not about the projects themselves, but was a symptom of a mounting power struggle between the faculty and the hillside parents over who had influence at the school.
(Continued in next post) |
