150 Parents Urge District to Keep School at UCLA : Education: Relocating the state’s only remaining laboratory elementary school to Santa Monica would destroy ‘an education success story,’ school board members are told.

Moving UCLA’s experimental elementary school from the university campus to Santa Monica and placing it under the jurisdiction of a public school board would kill it, parents told members of the Santa Monica-Malibu board Tuesday night.

“The goals of the school board just don’t mesh” with those of the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School, said parent Frieda Fivelson, one of more than 150 parents who showed up to urge the school board to reject UCLA’s relocation proposal. “You’re attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole,” she said, adding that moving the 108-year-old school away from the UCLA campus would destroy “an education success story.”

UCLA officials, who say they need the land that the elementary school occupies to build a graduate school of management, have been negotiating with the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District about moving the internationally renowned school. If it moves to Santa Monica, it would be situated in the city’s Ocean Park section, and would be staffed and run by the university under a 25-year contract.

The school, California’s only remaining laboratory school, tries out new teaching techniques and philosophies on its 450 students, ages 4 through 12. Free of state education requirements and a local school board, the school has evaluations and parent conferences instead of grades, as well as team-teaching and multi-age grade groupings of children. Teachers are given time to write their own curricula.

The school, usually referred to by the acronym UES, was founded in 1882 and moved onto the UCLA campus in 1947. It is housed amid a grove of redwoods in several buildings designed by architect Richard Neutra.

The parents contend that the school would be impossible to transplant.

“What you’d like to have is a magnet school, and UES is a laboratory school,” said parent David Levine.

But school board members said Santa Monica teachers have observed at UES, and the district has adopted some of the UES-tested teaching methods. The board is acting “not from ignorance,” board President Dan Ross said.

Board member Peggy Lyons suggested to the parents and teachers that their protests were aimed in the wrong direction. It was UCLA that offered the school to Santa Monica in the first place, she noted.

“We didn’t ask for it,” Lyons said. “I’m a little distressed that perhaps you don’t have access to people at UCLA, and you’re taking it out on us.”

The decision whether to move UES is up to UCLA, said Supt. Eugene Tucker, whose children attended UES.

UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young said Wednesday that he would decide on the move within two to five months. He said that he was discussing with state education officials the feasibility of getting waivers from curriculum, testing, classroom time, teacher credentials and other regulations that UES would legally be subject to if it became part of a public school system.

“I think (getting the exceptions is) possible, because we would not pursue it further otherwise. Whether it’s likely, I don’t know,” Young said. He said that state schools Supt. Bill Honig was “positive in principle.”

Parents, along with most of the faculty at UES and at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education, favor keeping UES on campus but adding research or other education school facilities to the site. In a letter sent this month to UCLA officials, UES teachers state that “many of us philosophically oppose the move to Santa Monica so strongly” that they said they would quit. “What would be moved to Santa Monica could be a shell of the school.”

The parents’ and teachers’ biggest worry is autonomy, despite proposed stipulations that UCLA would continue to control teacher training, research, curriculum, instructional organization, testing and administration. “The school board is willing to turn over control. . . . It takes a lot of courage to explore this,” Tucker said after the meeting.

The school board, however, said it wanted some say in UCLA’s planning and construction of the school, and it would insist that the facilities be accessible for community use.

The site tentatively chosen for the school in Santa Monica is a portion of Los Amigos Park at 6th Street and Ocean Park Boulevard. Neighbors of the park and other park users at Tuesday night’s meeting objected to any reduction of park space.

“We don’t have enough open space in the city. We can’t afford to lose one inch of that space,” said Susan Wilson, co-chairwoman of the Santa Monica Youth Athletic League.

The school district also is seeking a guarantee that at least 80% of the enrolled students would come from the Ocean Park neighborhood. Both the board and parents noted potential conflicts between such an admission policy and research that might demand a different and particular student mix.

UES students now are chosen to reflect the racial and socioeconomic makeup of the U.S. school-age population. John Muir School, which serves the Ocean Park area, has 310 students, 62% of whom are black, Latino, Asian or American Indian. But school board member Connie Jenkins predicted that minority percentages in the area would decline soon.

“Fifteen years hence, it’s my prediction that it will be an extremely white neighborhood,” she said. “That neighborhood’s becoming very gentrified.”

It remained unresolved Tuesday just how much authority over UES the school board was willing or legally able to cede to UCLA. UES parents questioned whether the board should even try.

“Why would you, as a publicly elected school board, want to have a school for which the public would hold you accountable, but over which you have no control?” Levine asked.

The district wants the school because “it offers the opportunity for excellent education. . . . It offers an alternative to students in the district,” school board President Ross said later. It would also enhance the chances for Santa Monica teachers to observe the teaching at UES, he said.