DUAL ENROLLMENT LOTTERY RAISES IRE.

Byline: Beth Barrett Daily News Staff Writer

When several families showed up Wednesday for the admission lottery at Haynes Street Elementary School, they believed each child's name would be drawn out of the same box for 75 coveted open-enrollment seats.

They believed - and had been told - that each child stood the same chance of getting into the school that was closed 15 years ago at the height of white flight and now is scheduled to reopen in the fall because of overcrowding elsewhere.

Instead, Los Angeles Unified School District administrators had instructed Principal Usafi Diamond to fix the lottery so that all the children of the minority families got in, putting 13 white families on a waiting list.

Shocked parents watched as the names were divided into two clear plastic boxes: one box containing the names of the white children, the other holding the names of the minority applicants.

As the lottery unfolded, all of the names in the minority box were pulled. The risk was borne solely by the white children.

When parents - most of them from the West Valley but not the Haynes neighborhood - protested, district officials issued a waiver and let all the children into the school. But they stood behind the practice of creating dual lotteries to give preference to minority students and achieve integration goals.

``We're all friends, and now they're putting this pressure between us,'' said Betty Johnson, who is white. ``What happened wasn't fair.''

Melina Rocha, who is African-American and lives in the same West Hills community as Johnson, added: ``It still bothers me. Everyone should have the same education, not based on ethnic and economic factors.''

The author of the state's 4-year-old open-enrollment law said fixing the lottery violates the spirit of the measure and may be illegal. School district officials insist it is legal and no different from the way they handle other programs that potentially affect integration balances.

``That was not my intention,'' said Sen. Dede Alpert, D-San Diego. ``The purpose was to empower parents to make more choices as to where their kids went to school. The whole point was not to favor one group over another. It was to be first-come, first-served.''

At one of the schools that closed in the 1980s when busing for racial integration triggered an exodus to private schools, the lottery frustrated parents, who said the school district has yet to deal with race and preferences in a fair and upfront manner.

Lotteries fixed since 1994

LAUSD officials said open enrollment has quietly been used since the 1994-95 school year to meet court-ordered integration goals.

Bruce Takeguma, assistant director of school management services, said he did not know how common the practice has become. Still, he said, the district sees open enrollment as a tool available for principals to meet integration guidelines aimed at capping schools' white enrollment at 60 percent.

``This method happens quite often,'' he said.

The state Department of Education, in a legal summary, advised districts to administer the law in a ``random and unbiased'' manner, but added that ``racial and ethnic balance issues also apply.''

The department's lawyers said the open-enrollment law does not eliminate districts' authority to ``maintain the appropriate racial and ethnic balances.''

Some administrators said a dual lottery defies the spirit of open enrollment, which is to give parents a broader menu of public school options.

``That's discriminating. It's open enrollment. It's supposed to be totally fair. All the names are to be put into one pot,'' said Linda Nore, an administrative assistant at El Camino Real High School. The school is 43.3 percent white and buses in 1,000 students but never used open enrollment to help it balance ethnicities, she said.

Gordon Wohlers, an assistant LAUSD superintendent, said district programs have been adjusted over 20 years to ``keep the integration of the schools intact.''

He said attorneys for the district concluded it would be legal to handle open enrollment in the same way, including giving preferences to minorities through the lotteries if necessary.

The district does not warn parents that their children may encounter racial barriers in an open-enrollment lottery. District policy, as published in a manual, suggests the opposite.

``If the number of applicants exceeds the number of available spaces, a random, unbiased selection process shall be used,'' the policy manual states.

``On the designated drawing date, a committee of three persons shall select names from a box by drawing until all applications have been drawn.''

Takeguma said that is overridden by policy in a different section of the manual, which states that the school principal is responsible for ``monitoring the school's integration ratio on an ongoing basis'' and has the authority to use open enrollment to ``enhance the integration status.''

District officials say the flap over the Haynes lottery will trigger a review of the policy, according to Takeguma.

Principal followed policy

Both white and minority parents said Diamond is the chief reason they want to send their kids to Haynes.

Loretta Nathanson, who led the parents' protest, said Diamond is ``a real dynamo,'' and the problem was that the district wasn't honest about policy.

``As long as we're segregated (in open enrollment), as long as it's pointed out, how will we ever get together?''

Diamond, who is African-American, said she assumed that most of the bused-in students, just over a third of the school's total enrollment, would be minority, while most of the neighborhood children are white. Open enrollment at the school, she concluded, should be tilted toward minorities for racial-ethnic balance, as called for by district policy.

``I'm not going to give my personal opinion of the policy, whether I feel it's right or wrong. My job is to abide by the policy of the district,'' she said.

Diamond told parents at three meetings that the lottery would be fair and the names picked out of one box, but later sought district guidance.

``I apologized to the parents on Wednesday if they thought that I'd betrayed them,'' she said.

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Photo

PHOTO Haynes Street School Principal Usafi Diamond, left, listens to a mother shocked about dual drawings in an enrollment lottery.

Tom Mendoza/Daily News