CAMPUS BUILT WITH GRIT CHARTER SCHOOL DOES A LOT WITH A LITTLE.

Byline: Sherry Joe Crosby Staff Writer

SAN FERNANDO - A photo-studded bulletin board in the front hallway of Community Charter Middle School says it all: ``Building our school - Starting from scratch.''

For the school's 100 sixth-graders, four full-time teachers and principal, starting from scratch has meant the basketball coach made team uniforms by hand. It has meant that students, parents and the principal have had to scrub toilets and wash classroom windows because there is no custodian. And it has meant a campus so small that the playground doubles as a parking lot and students eat lunch, perform calisthenics and practice after-school sports at a nearby public park.

``It's very exciting, challenging and very thrilling,'' said Jacqueline Elliot, the school's executive director, principal and its No. 1 booster. ``To now watch it all play out is a joy.''

Community Charter is one of 34 such schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Charter schools are run under contract by parents, teachers or others who promise to boost student performance and achieve other goals in return for independence from most state educational laws.

One of six start-up charter schools in the district, Community Charter's first and most difficult task was simply finding a location.

In May, a potential school site in Lake View Terrace was eliminated after district officials learned the building also housed an outpatient clinic for the mentally ill. The charter school then found a temporary home in four classrooms at California State University, Northridge, before moving in October to its present location.

But the hard work hasn't stopped with the school's opening. With an operating budget of about $600,000, parents, teachers and staff at the school have had to perform the extraordinary to accomplish the ordinary.

Teacher Richard Parra, for instance, made uniforms for the boys' and girls' basketball team with the help of his stepmother.

Parra, who worked summers during high school in his uncle's San Fernando sewing factory, bought the material in Los Angeles' garment district and made the pattern for the uniforms himself. His stepmother then sewed the blue-and-white uniforms, churning out three jerseys an hour.

``You have to have this certain drive and guts'' to be successful at start-up schools such as Community Charter, said Parra, a former teacher's assistant at Stonehurst Avenue School in Sun Valley. ``That's what Jackie Elliot had and I felt like I was at home. This school is where I want to be.''

That's exactly how Pauline Gaitan feels. Her youngest son, 11-year-old Edward, attends Community Charter. Like many parents, the San Fernando mother was attracted to the school for what it was not - a large urban campus of several thousand students where drugs and gangs are sometimes more easily available than books and paper.

``I was afraid my child, going to sixth grade, would fall in the cracks and they would forget about him,'' said Gaitan, whose son would have attended San Fernando Middle School, a campus of nearly 2,100 students.

Under Elliot's plan, Community Charter will remain small. Next year, it will enroll 100 students, followed by 100 more in 2002 for a total of 300 students in sixth through eighth grades.

The school's small size has been its hottest selling point. Because it now has only 100 pupils, class sizes are limited to 25 students or fewer. One class for struggling readers has only eight students.

``We know every child,'' said Elliot, who greets students each morning before class. ``I know who's not feeling well, who's smiling. To spend three years with the same group of children, we're going to be able to really read them like books.''

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Photo: Sixth-grader Edward Rodriguez, 11, listens to a math lesson with his classmates at Community Charter Middle School.

Gus Ruelas/Staff Photographer