Move of UCLA Lab School to Proceed

UCLA will proceed with a controversial plan to move its prestigious laboratory elementary school to a nearby public school district, university officials announced Thursday.

Going ahead with the move of the 108-year-old Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School to the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District is contingent on its independence being assured, said UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor Murray L. Schwartz. Chancellor Charles E. Young, who made the decision, was out of the country this week and could not be reached for comment.

“It’s not a done deal,” Schwartz said, “but we believe this is an exciting and important experiment--taking an excellent school and seeing whether the techniques developed there can be successful in a more urban setting.”

The decision was denounced by leaders of the Family School Alliance, a group of laboratory school parents and others who charge that the primary motivation for the move is to free up the nine-acre site for other uses on the increasingly crowded Westwood campus. UCLA officials, while conceding that space is a problem, deny that it is the reason for the move.

“It’s really disturbing that UCLA seems bent on (the move) without regard to what faculty of the Graduate School of Education, UES staff, parents and alumni have had to say about it,” said Kathy Seal, one of the parents opposing the move. “We really question their assertion that the autonomy of the school can be preserved in a public school setting.”

Noting that the state, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District and others must give permission before the relocation can take place, Seal said the alliance plans to “redouble our efforts.

“We will fight this through the courts, the Legislature and every other avenue that is open to us,” Seal said.

Tentative plans call for UCLA to construct an elementary school for the Santa Monica school district. The school and an adjacent university research center, to be built on a park in the economically and ethnically diverse Ocean Park neighborhood, would be staffed and run by UCLA for at least 25 years. State funds to the Santa Monica district would be used to operate the new school, according to district Supt. Eugene Tucker.

Tucker said Thursday that school board members, who will not vote on the proposal until a contract has been worked out, have assured UCLA that it would continue to have “complete autonomy” over the experimental school. The students would be drawn from the surrounding neighborhood, but any parent who disapproved of the non-graded, highly experimental nature of the lab facility could choose another school in the district, he said.

Heidi Brandt, Family School Alliance president, said the school’s independence is a key issue, and added she has long been concerned about lack of detailed assurances that it can indeed be maintained. “Words are cheap . . . but we have not been shown how autonomy can be guaranteed in a public school setting,” she said.

Consideration of the move, which has been vigorously opposed by staff, parents and alumni of the lab school and others, began more than a year ago when UCLA made plans to build a new graduate business school on part of the elementary school’s site along Sunset Boulevard.

“This is not surprising but it is disappointing, especially since another option (to allow the lab school to share the site with the management school and build an educational research center there) has the support of most of the (graduate school) faculty and others,” said Richard Williams, lab school director and professor of education.

“It does indeed put them one step further down the road, but there are so many problems that they haven’t yet even begun to deal with,” said Williams, who, like the rest of the faculty, received a memo Thursday telling of the chancellor’s decision. Lab school parents were sent letters the same day, UCLA officials said.

“This is really going to heat up now. . . . It will be a major, major test” of whether the move is feasible, Williams added.

But Lewis C. Solmon, dean of the Graduate School of Education, which runs the laboratory school, hailed the decision as an “exciting, interesting challenge . . . and an opportunity to do some innovative things in the public schools.”

“This could really be a benchmark collaboration between the university and a school district. We could do some very important applied research on the relevant education issues in our society today.”

Solmon said he and others met with education officials in Sacramento last week about the possibility of getting certain waivers from the state to enable the school to continue its innovations and got a “very enthusiastic” response.

The lab school’s 450 students, ages 4 to 12, are drawn from throughout Los Angeles County and are chosen to reflect the nation’s population distribution ethnically and economically.

Students are studied by UCLA researchers and others, and the staff has long been free to experiment with techniques. The students are taught by teams of teachers who have generous blocks of time for preparation, and no grades or tests are given.