Parental Guidance : The Ones Who Fork Over the Tuition Dive In to Keep Troubled Los Feliz Hills School Afloat

When Glenn Silber was told in December that the small, private school his preschooler had been attending for six months was in danger of going under, his first thought was to pull his son out.

Then Silber and other parents like him thought again. Instead of walking away from Los Feliz Hills School, a nonprofit school that had been without a director for months, they decided to try to save it.

Silber’s wife, Claudia, took over the business office. Another parent, Mary Louise Grady, became the receptionist. Last week, Glenn Silber joined the school’s board of directors, and four more parents have applied. If they are accepted, the board will expand to 11 members. And parents have spent the last few Sundays refurbishing school buildings.

The parents say the school of 181 children, ages 2 to 18, is worth saving. The classes are small, the teachers are bright and committed, and the campus, whose futuristic buildings were designed by Los Angeles architect John Lautner in 1960, is an oasis of greenery on 6.4 acres in the midst of the urban landscape, the parents say.

But as the parents sift through piles of poorly organized bank statements and enrollment statistics, they are encountering obstacles that might give even experienced administrators pause. There are enormous debts to be paid and basic classroom equipment to be bought, they say. And while the school is staffed with experienced teachers, the absence of a director for a short but crucial four-month period left it lacking direction.

“There has been no center, no lightning rod for the school in recent years,” said Christopher Geissmann, who took over as director of the school a few weeks ago. “Teachers had a vague idea that they wanted a caring, friendly atmosphere with a minimum of rules, no uniforms, that sort of thing. But what was missing was a sense of clarity, of how all this related to some larger goal.”

The Los Feliz Hills School has had four names and five directors since its founding in 1960. It has been variously an alternative school that taught the children of liberal-minded celebrities, a short-lived cooperative, a school closely affiliated with the nearby Church of Scientology and most recently a school with a dynamic director who built a strong teaching staff but ignored the school’s worsening financial problems.

Today the school owes more than $117,000 in mortgage payments and is running a deficit of $14,000 to $20,000 a month. Enrollment, once at 335, has dropped 40 students lower than what is needed to break even. The heating does not work, some of the buildings are in disrepair and the school on a bluff at the end of Russell Avenue is so low-profile that most people do not know it is there.

Still, parents of children at the school--for the most part young couples successful enough to afford tuition payments ranging from $2,600 to $4,410 a year--say there is something special about the place.

“This is a community, and there’s this love that people have for the school and for one another that makes us want to keep the school going,” said Christie Davis, who heads the school’s newly formed Parents Advisory Council.

Chance to Survive

Because they believe in the school, parents say, they are working hard to give it a chance to survive.

In December, they raised more than $70,000 among themselves in the school’s first-ever fund drive. Last month, they formed a committee to recruit students, and a group of parents met with some of the creditors who have been demanding for months to be paid.

They worked out a plan with the creditors to gain more time to pay off the school’s loans. A parent who works as a graphic artist is designing a new logo for the school. Another is writing a new brochure. Next week, the school will hold an open house.

“It’s a disaster, but we’re going to survive,” Silber said. “I feel that with all the energy I would expend trying to find an adequate preschool, I might as well expend it making sure this one is running correctly. I mean, what the hell, I’m not the type to roll over, and where else is my kid going to go?”

The school is one of the few in the country catering to such a wide age range, Geissmann said. Its campus consists of 14 buildings and several playing fields framed by Los Feliz’s graceful Shakespeare Bridge. It has about 52 students in its preschool classes, 72 in its elementary school and 57 in grades nine through 12. Every student in last year’s graduating class went on to college, Geissmann said--some to Stanford University, Cornell University, Occidental College and UC Santa Cruz.

“The place is refreshingly reminiscent of a mission because there is a sense of missionary zeal and fervor among the teachers and the students,” said Thomas C. Hudnut, headmaster of the prestigious Harvard School in North Hollywood. “People were really excited about working together. I think that although there are things that require attention, the future is generally bright for Los Feliz Hills.”

Experiential Education

In its various incarnations, the school has had a reputation for practicing what is called experiential education--the philosophy that children of all ages learn best by doing.

Experiential classes are less structured than traditional class settings, with children learning geometry, for example, by measuring buildings and working out theorems from what they have observed.

Founded in the 1960s as the Midtown School, the nonprofit school was a small but thriving alternative institution known as a place where Hollywood celebrities sent their children. Jane Fonda sent her children there, so did Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas.

Bonnie Bishop took over the school in 1974 and, under her tenure, it became affiliated with the Church of Scientology. The association afforded Bishop a ready pool of students--the children of people affiliated with Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s movement. But when Bishop and the church parted company 10 years later, enrollment sank from 335 students to 74 as Scientologists pulled their children out.

Bishop, a Scientologist, had changed the school’s name to the Apple School, hired teachers who were also Scientologists and used educational principles developed by Hubbard and codified in a manual he wrote called the “Basic Study Manual.”

In an interview with two Times reporters several years ago, Bishop said she paid the church for the use of Hubbard’s teaching methods, eventually handing over 15% of the school’s revenues to the Church of Scientology.

Bishop told The Times that she began in 1979 to believe that the fees she was paying to the church were exorbitant. She stopped paying the fees but continued to use Hubbard’s techniques. In 1983, according to Bishop and to an internal church memorandum, church officials began to demand money from the school again, threatening to charge Bishop with copyright infringement.

Stigma Noted

In 1985, Bishop left the school, and the teachers she hired left with her. Parents and teachers say the school has been stigmatized with the Scientology image ever since.

“The unfairness is that if we had stayed a Scientology school, we wouldn’t be having all these troubles,” said teacher Stevie Gere. “We ran off the Scientologists. We stood up to them and still people think we’re closet Scientologists or something. It makes my blood boil.”

In 1987, with enrollment down to 132 students, the school’s board of directors hired as headmaster Mike D’Ornellas, a veteran educator who had worked as a teacher and administrator at schools and colleges throughout Southern California. D’Ornellas said in a recent interview that he was tired of the public school bureaucracy and excited about the chance to make his mark at a small, private school.

Working 12-hour days, D’Ornellas began to turn the place around. He fired 18 of the school’s 19 teachers and hired a staff of 26 new ones. To attract quality educators, he raised salaries and added full medical benefits. He hired an educational consultant to revamp the curriculum, ridding it of its last vestiges of Scientology teachings. He worked nights and weekends, gaining the trust and affection of students and parents alike.

Early last year, D’Ornellas won for the school a measure of legitimacy that it never had before--accreditation from the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges, one of six regional accrediting bodies in the nation recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

D’Ornellas’ efforts seemed to be paying off. The school’s teacher-student ratio dropped from one teacher for every 13 students to one for every eight. Enrollment climbed to 220 students.

‘On the Right Track’

“Mike’s presence seemed to verify that everything was on the right track,” said Bill Taylor, president of the school’s board of directors. “He was very popular with the staff, and he was able to develop confidence among the students. His strong personality calmed the troubled waters that we had among our parents.”

But the new school D’Ornellas was creating cost money, and debts mounted fast. Last spring, D’Ornellas was diagnosed with bladder cancer and began slowing down and taking time off.

“I manage more by personality than by policy, and as long as I was there, we had a positive program,” D’Ornellas said. “When I wasn’t there, the things that needed to be done didn’t get done. I feel like I failed there, like I bailed out on the school.’

In October, when D’Ornellas’ cancer spread to his lymphatic system, he took a leave of absence. The board of directors was left to sort through its financial obligations.

“We’re not professional educators or professional businessmen. We just got involved because we wanted to,” Taylor said. “We knew that we had to go out and hire professional consultants or something, but none of us knew how to do that because we’re mostly just concerned parents.”

The school operated without a director from October through the end of January, with the board confronting administrative problems it had always left to the director. To cut costs, the board trimmed faculty and limited school supplies. Board members also interviewed applicants to take D’Ornellas’ place.

At the end of last month, Geissmann took over. A graduate of Harvard and Yale, Phillips Academy and the Trinity School in New York, Geissmann is in the habit of quoting Nietzsche and Socrates in the same sentence and prefers the title headmaster to that of director. He said he wants to make the school more intellectually rigorous, a place where children can read and discuss books together in a tranquil, unpressured environment.

‘Critical Thinking’

“I want to see the children here develop a kind of critical thinking, in the sense of questioning, so they’re not thrown by controversy or conflict,” Geissmann said. “For that I think, you have to be intellectually exciting and intense, but at the same time create a sense of tradition. We’re still in the embryonic stage now.”

Geissmann, however, is an educator, not a businessman. And it is unclear who will take full-time responsibility to get the school out of financial jeopardy. But parents say they are not ready to give up.

“There’s a certain element of dream involved. There’s a dream that the school can survive, can become healthy, can become known for a very strong academic program that can serve this community,” Taylor said. “It’s a chance to build something, so you seize it, and you just refuse to let go.”